ScrapYard Armory

I found this article while browsing the news. YES! Weekly out of Greensboro North Carolina must of had a slow news day and wrote up a story on StellarCon, a Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Gaming convention in North Carolina. The article is mostly Star Wars musings, but way down in the bottom, there are a few paragraphs on a Classic Battletech game. Here is the quote;

In a room off the main hallway a phalanx of Awesomes maneuver to outflank the Turkina B of Greg Resnik, of Greenville, SC, on a green felt game board as big as a ping-pong table, strewn with plateaus and foliage, and divided into hexagonal spaces.

The Turkina, Resnik assures, “is a much more advanced mechanism than the Awesomes facing it.” He pulls the battle robot back three spaces, out of range, so that only one Awesome has him in his sightline, and then, after the Awesome misses its shot, Resnik proceeds to fire.

He shakes two pair of dice in his hand, looses them onto the green felt playing field. He needs sevens or better. They face up: three and four, six and one. Two hits. To fire his other weapon he needs nines. One pair comes up 11 for a single hit. The next round of rolls determine where on the Awesome his shots hit – left torso, center torso, left leg, marked off as damage on a laminated sheet with the Awesome’s armor and inner machinery diagrammed on it. Resnick’s working the midsection pretty good.

The game they’re playing, BattleTech, is an old-school RPG that came about in the ’80s, and some of the figures on the scale battlefield are more than 20 years old. They represent battle robots piloted by humans, balanced by gyroscopes and powered by fusion engines in the year 3062.

“They average ten to twelve meters in height,” says Chuck Bryant, owner of the trio of Awesomes, from Colombia, SC. “The smallest unit on the field is thirty tons; the largest is ninety tons. And somehow, in the digital future, the range of attack for a weapon is about the length of a football field.”

The Turkina-B is from one of the clans, Resnik says, disciples of the soldiers who left the Inner Circle…something about a civil war and lost colonies… it’s all very confusing.

At his side Resnik has a seven-inch-thick binder filled with diagrams and maps for the game.

“That’s only parts of it,” he says, gesturing to a pile in the corner: rubber tubs, tackle boxes and luggage filled with BattleTech paraphernalia, more than could fit in the trunk of a car.

Good to see Classic Battletech getting some press, even if its buried inside an article so cleverly named The “other” N-word.