Niklas Jansson
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Urbanmech and Ogre
🕑 Added 2024-04-27 19:18:30 +0000 UTCI don't know much about the Battletech universe byound having played few mechwarrior games. Being a fan of pill-bots I decided to have a go at the Urbanmech. I gave it cat ears. It appears there are no height data in the games, just some sort of tonnage. Going by a density of 1.0, then 7-8 meters seems appropriate.
Maybe I should draw a few of the other ones?
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I have posted the Ogre stuff on my Mastodon, but I'll include it here as well. Ogre is a board (war) game from the '70s, with art by Winchell Chung of Atomic Rockets. It's inspired by the Bolo books by Keith Laumer. At its core Ogre is about one player controlling a super tank and the other a bunch of tanks and infantry swarming to wear the Ogre down. I think its set in the 2080s or so. There's a GURPS TTRPG with some lore that I'm not that familiar with.
Recently there was an animé called Heavy Object which featured super tanks, and I think there's one in The Third. Perhaps Space Marine EPIC can be played like Ogre, substituting the Ogre with a Warlord Titan.
In the Ogre universe there's a super-material called BPC – Bi-Phase Carbite. It's very tough and can shrug off nukes. Vehicles are pretty much cast in solid blocks of this as I understand it. So, it made me think of a ludicrous idea: What if Ogres could rocketjump, but with nukes? Now, an Ogre weighs over a thousand ton, which sounds like a lot, but SpaceX's Starship is 5000 tons (mostly fuel) so it's not like it's impossible to put that kind of mass into the air. Additionally, NASA once came up with an interstellar rocket called Orion which was powered by mini nukes detonating against a kick plate at the back.
An Ogre might sink into the soil in real life. I gave mine a lot of tracks but still ended up twice the ground pressure of a modern heavy tank. Still, a super science Ogre might have ways so get unstuck and given its size it would interact different soil depths than cars and such, so who knows.
GEVs are hover crafts. These were popular back then... I remember having a model kit of the Hoverlloyd SR-N4 Swift back in the early '80s. The problem with hovercraft is that they're kind just slide haphazardly around on the air cushion. They can not go through forests, or over stone walls and trenches (for air cushion reasons). Probably best on roads, over fields, rivers, lakes and swamps. Perhaps this is represented in the rules.
I based my vehicles off the old illustrations and counter silhouettes. Also had a go at redesigning the counters so the movement stat is shown as puffs, defence is a shield, etc. I think it's more legible.
*End Transmission*
Comments
Evyn MacDude
heh... I was pondering how to use Ogre/Shockwave to do Traveller Grav vehicle combat this week.
