The Work (In Pogress) Continues

When I got up this morning I decided that I was going to paint ten of the old Grenadier (now Mirliton) trooper figures. Nice simple figures with an almost standard uniform that even if I do give certain aspects of it a camouflage pattern, should be done by the end of the week.

 Then I picked up the two D&D mimic figures I picked up last week. Then I thought what the hell, I'll do these first. So I did. When you have a small number of essentially similar figures, they are quick and easy to do so I just got on with them. I guess each of them took about an hour to an hour and a half to finish. In the round, and certainly on the tabletop, the look pretty good.

When they were done I went back to the troopers. They have progressed a little bit. All the boots, equipment and uniform are finished. To be honest I haven't made up my mind what I am going to do with the armour and helmet yet although I have an idea (does anyone remember Aliens). Given that a lot of what I am doing is vaguely desert, I think I will go for something like MTP/Multicam. I do like the Copplestone vibe.

These figures have all sorts of potential uses for me. Aside from the standard sci-fi, 2300, Stargrunt, Titansgrave Tomorrow's War ad Traveller, I can see a use for them in other genres. The armour would look pretty good for combat armour for Fallout. They have planned uses in some post apocalypse stuff as well. Maybe even as soldiers in a super hero game.

This is more for my benefit so I can go back and remember what colours I used if I decide to do any more

2300: More Trouble On Beowulf

The referee is having a laugh. Did somebody say "Kobayashi Maru"? If I wanted to put myself in situations where no matter what I was going to do, I was going to get screwed, I'd go back to working for the local council.

Seriously, it was a lot of fun.

Who is not going to love dealing with a corporate lawyer who has their own personal ED 209 security droid in tow.  Give them a cheesy corporate vice principle to add on to that. The mass eviction of a load of British locals in the middle of a massive storm. Did I mention that the corporation has a history of genetic slavery? Good solid people right? The kind you trust every day. Well if your American and you vote Republican. Or Democrat.

The locals a great. Really welcoming. The second one we meet is insistent on using a neural whip on one of the workers he employs in his brothel. Luckily for us, we find out after my security tem leaser knocks him out cold and leaves him with a few missing teeth that he is the local leader and everyone in town, well pretty much, is related to him. Said employee is a pleasure bot so  not really human. Except that somehow, she is the first bot to develop true artificial intelligence. This is largely due to her employer using a neural whip on her.

Said neural whip was removed from the local businessman by the head of security. Just for comic effect, he decides to toss it to the engineer. The engineer now knows that attempting to juggle a live neural whip does not always end well and that there is no ice cream or medals afterwards.

So, after finding that there is a fortune "In them there hills" just before the corporates move in, we get some orders (after defeating the corporates attempts to jam our single) from the ESA to ensure that the corporation stay out of the town. I'm not sure if this is the ESA doing the right thing by it's citizens or just wanting to make sure that it secures a vitally important strategic resource.

Anyway, we have a drop ship on it's way with six marines and thirty locals. we may get some guys i battledress too.

Anyway, there will be lots of poop to be in next week. We don't play nice with our friends, I suspect we are not going to play nice with the corporates wither.

2300: Tour The Universe And Kill Things or In Space No One Can Hear You. It's Physics

Another night of 2300 on Monday. This is the first time I've played a space combat in a while. I did some 2300 many years ago and remember that the ship combat was pretty deadly. So obviously this was the day the players with the ship skill set were not going to turn up. Can't blame them, it was Easter Monday after all. So all the more dice rolling for me as the other players were all grunts. One of them had the ability to pilot drones but had stratospherically bad luck and probably managed to melt a little paint.

So the story goes we are taking the new ship on a bit of a shakedown and we pick up a jammed message, well just about. It turns out that it's a distress signal so our attention was peeked. What we find is two, old, surplus Chinese ships chasing down a merchant ship. This is a bad thing. The ref tells us that loads of these were sold as surplus so no one knows who they belong to.

So, mainly due to a lot of luck I draw bead on one of the bad guys. This did not work out well for the enemy. Six hits later and it goes boom.

Then the next one goes boom. this was followed by a boarding action. It seems thta the Kafer had gotten control of the ships. Sadly the boarding party (my character doesn't do vac suits or floating around in zero gravity, yet) didn't manage to take any of the Kafer alive. What's next ref?