Battletech painting: Eridani Light Horse/generic SLDF

The practical wargamer in me is always thinking about force composition and game compatibility. This group of mechs was painted to be usable either as a generic First Star League force, or the Eridani Light Horse mercenary company (which descended from a Star League unit and kept the same paint scheme).

These were all 3D printed miniatures bought off various online stores: there's always a bit of a hit and miss with ordering from various printers, and in this case, the Locust was a fantastic model, with a very squarish, real-world Cold War look to it, while the Catapult is a non-canonical version that I nevertheless found very interesting with its rounded LRM launchers. Instead of building a particular Lance in mind, I'm going to amass a range of mechs from which I can make various Lance compositions as needed: there are 3 Medium mechs that can be skirmishers/strikers, one long-ranged mech for bombardment, and a Light mech to act as a recycle/spotter unit.

First up is the Locust. I used a spare arm from a previous 3D printed miniature as scenery for the base, so the front leg of the Locust is stepping on wreckage. Whenever I see mechs posed in this manner, I like to add something extra to the base to liven things up. 

The Phoenix Hawk serves as the commander for the Lance, with its four antennae telegraphing its added comms ability. As mentioned in the previous post, this 3D printed Phoenix Hawk model is quite spindly and fiddly: having learned from the previous one, I took the time to drill and pin the main connection points, and posed it in as stable a posture as possible.

This Griffin model is quite nice: I've left the large flat pauldrons blank for now for some future decals.

One of the problems with the SLDF scheme is that olive drab, while realistic and practical, is quite dull on the game table. I decided on yellow accents on some of the flat panels, opting for chevrons, stripes, and in this case because the Shadow Hawk's pauldrons allowed for it, chequers.

This Catapult model is an alternative, non-canonical version, but we can easily hand-wave it off as an early Star League or LosTech version. I added the infantry figure to the base for scale and variety. We can imagine it as some solider assigned as an anti-infantry picket/sentry for the Catapult, which is primarily a long-range missile boat mech.