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My biggest complaint about it is in Total Warfare the TBT-5N (you know, the most common variant) has naked ammo in the Left Torso. It's a death sentence.

It may be better than the Dervish, but I'll never admit it on the field. Also, I can't help but admire the TBT-7K, for basically being a diet Banshee.

Thank you for sharing 😊

Oh my. A mech so ugly that it has a natural +1 to hit as Targeting Computers refuse to focus on it. Not your paint job, just the model and artwork.

I've used the T. Bolt a few times but faced it far more, it's a great mech the very definition of a heavy trooper with plenty of flexibility. Although in my experiences it doesn't tend to trade all that well with the opposition. Either it will role over the enemy, or get itself smashed trying to do so

I love playing as DCMS units. And while I love the Jenner, my twelve-year-old seems to have all the luck with them. I watched him run one up into the 20s on the heat scale and then ace every PSR he needed to keep going. Ridiculous. 😂 Also, in the tradition of the Owens (naming it after an athlete famous for a particular event), I built an upgrade of the Jenner called the Joyner, with 7 jump jets and a partial wing for jumps up to 9 hexes in range. Due to the space taken up in the side torsos by the partial wing, all its weapons are in the arms, consosting of paired Small Lasers, Medium Lasers, and MML-3s, which have two tons of ammo in a CASE II bin in one side torso. It's got the standard 10 double heat sinks, only one of which doesn't fit in the engine and takes up the other sode torso. Between the heat sinks and partial wing, it can sink 23 total heat in standard atmosphere, meaning it will never overheat unless you take an engine crit or two, at which point that 9-hex jump is best used to get the hell out of there.

Light strikers are a lot of fun. I have taken out assault mechs with pairs to lances of lights. A lance of four Locusts can take down a very heavy target. I had a lance of Locusts, 1 - LRM, 2 - Energy, 1 - pair of ERML and more armor (merc recon force) disassemble an Atlas to prove a point to a mate of mine that Atlas's are not all they are hyped to be. Assault mechs are slow and still do not have enough armor to protect all of its important bits if done correctly. Keep the LRM Locust off in medium range, but only for crit seeking after some damage is done. so what I did was, soften the rear armor, kept the LRMs coming in to his rear arc and just annoyed the piss out of my mate. ( this was succession wars era, the ERML were star league era salvage (and "mostly" functional - had chance of extra heat due to damaged housing.) was fun.

I suppose Solaris doesn't generally allow you to bring a hovercraft to a mech fight, so I suppose the Locust has a place there.

Pair it with a Grasshopper for more fun.

The T-Bolt is one of those easy picks for any type of mission. You could probably make a merc unit of just T-bolts and have no issues.

It's really hard to go wrong with a Thunderbolt. From the classic TDR-5S to the nearly perfect TDR-7M, to the ludicrously fun -11 and -12 models, it's always a good time.

Still the best light striker ever built. And the WLF-2 could even reliably kill the Kuritan Wolf Trap designed to counter it. That's the problem with designing a 'mech with an XL engine to try and hunt a 'mech without one.

The thing I hate about so many missile platforms in the 3039 to Clan Invasion era is that they always insist on having one variant that puts a NARC launcher on it. _Please keep NARC systems on lighter faster chassis that can get in, tag their rather, and then get out. The Raven? Perfect. Kintaro? Outstanding. Archer? No. Stalker? Gods no! Personally, my favorite Clan Invasion era NARC platform is the Hitman. Particularly since I tend to play Kurita units. The Hitman is very much a support/eWar platform

MW4 Mercs wasn't real good at the canonicity of their variants, but it was still a blast, and fast little lights like the Flea were always fun.

16:25 Oh no! 😂 I've been there. I was in a double blind match, and whioe he was out of line of sight, my opponent deliberately damaged a bridge that would be the easiest place for me to cross to reach my objective. Turns out Devastators don't swim very well.

Welcome to another episode of "Wolf in the Comments Talkin' About Quirks Again." Today, with the Stalker, we have a very special quirk in the advanced rules: Combat Computer - This quirk reduces a unit's total heat buildup by 4 above what its onboard heat sinks will flush, to a minimum of zero. Those twenty single heat sinks on the STK-3F? You'll get 24 heat sinking out of it. It's great.

Remember, MechCommanders, if you're playing with the advanced rules, the Locust has the Compact Mech quirk, meaning you can fit two of them into a singke dropship bay. And since two Locusts are both cheaper and objectively better than one Cicada, take the Locusts. Side note: It also has the Narrow/Low Profile quirk, making it tankier than it looks at first glance. Highly recommend.

my TT merc command that had been run through many campaigns and many many years had the commander of its Feral Company (urban / CQC) in a Thunderbolt the last time it was used it was a 4/6(8)/4 with triple strength myomer, targeting computer, 2-ERML LT/RT, 2-ERML(C) LT/RT, ERLL(C) LA, ECM(C), Active Probe (C), 2 Flamer (C) LT/RT, 14 IS DHS, standard armor and well... Mace RA. It was / is devastating. May swap out the IS ML for some ERSL(C) if I ever get any in salvage. No ammo to cook off, in all honesty, Thunderbolts were one of the first mechs I used. As I started playing in 85 it was one of the only ones available at the time... and I still use them as often as I can. the look of the original (japanese now UNSEEN) design was something that really got me into BattleTech, I moved from japan in 82 and had watched a lot of kids TV whilst there. Then stateside I use to go to a model shop that had these amazing models of the the Fang of the Sun Dougram and robotech mecha ... then I saw the art from the original Battletech book and was like "Wait! i can actually have rules for seriously playing these guys not just freaking pretend... i was ALL in... and 11 years old... still with it and starting to teach my daughter how to play. six years old and cannot wait to throw hands and kick mechs when they are down. she has told me as much... apologies for the ramble

The Thunderbolt TDR-5SS is a massive upgrade from the Thunderbolt TDR-5S. It has a PPC.

Thank you for sharing 😊

19:46 it's a good design, it allows a pilot to familiarize themselves with all of the newer PPC flavors.

Nice to see you are in the 'hatch should be painted like a cockpit' group. It just looks so much better on the table that way.

Starting mech for the kell hounds on mw4. Not a bad choice by any means.

Thank you for sharing 😊

Overrated. Large Lasers are no good bad. Embrace PPC, embrace Panther. Interesting variants tho, never looked at them closely because I dislike the Large Laser. There are some that understand the importance of the PPC, which is nice to see.

Awesome job as always, Iron!! So happy to have you back!! 🧡

I really like the Archer. But I also really hate rear facing weapons, or rather, I really hate not being allowed the option to change the facing of the weapon without a house rule.

Really enjoyed that

The Archer is one of the mechs that I dislike the older artwork of but really like the current design and sculpt.

Thank you for sharing 😊

The Wolfhound was indeed great in MW5 Mercs. I have tried Fire Ant and Urbie only for MC2, I don't remember how far I got. But yeah, sell it and buy some hovercraft. I suppose, if you want mech only forces, the Fire Ant is one of the better anti infantry specialists for its cost. Also thematically some salvaged ones wouldn't be a bad choice to use for training new pilots and maintenance techs. I do think the Urbie has some much more useful variants than the Flea. UM-R90 is a 3/5/3 with a PPC at very similar cost. There's the variant with the RAC/5, the UM-R70. And even the humble and basic UM-60 can pack specialized ammo for that AC/10 allowing for some flexible broomstick usage. Hmmm... All these are Fed Suns options tho, which I found funny looking this up to make sure I had my stuff correct.

With 4 armor and 4 internal on each leg this feels like a liability to me. I've never used it in tabletop, as I'm not inclined to use things that will lose a leg to a PPC, let alone a Large Laser.

I believe this is an accurate account of Star Trek characterization. Humanity is also second to none for destroying AI overlords and destroying Utopias that aren't their own, but both of these stem from the humans having to know what's behind the curtain.

Love me these little things. Small mechs have the greatest potential for what they bring. A good couple of pilots in two small mechs can absolutely overcome a larger, more armored, and armed opponent.

What battlemaps are you using?

I really like the CGL plastic Stalker from the force pack. I haven't gotten it yet, but it's on he priority list.

My favorite MWO mech

Part of the Army Helmet Team: Commando, Firestarter, Trebuchet, Enforcer, Quickdraw, Victor, and Cyclops!

It's not so much that K & F could not practically test their theories at the time. It is more that their theories rejected Einsteinian relativity and institutionalized academia intrenched itself, rejected them, and turned them into pariahs the stigma for which lasted a century until a research team replicated some of their experiments and validated their theories by happenstance. Which is potentially some interesting commentary on academia as an institution. Traveling between jumpships and planetary surfaces can vary quite a lot based on dropships used, solar system layout, and urgency. If it's just a routine flight, dropships will usually burn at 1g straight through accelerating to the half way point then flipping and decelerating the rest of the way. This is a *very* fast form of interplanetary travel which predominantly uses Hohmann transfers were you use orbits and gravity to coast around instead of burning straight through. These "turn and burn" maneuvers are the most common orbital transfers used in BT. Many system/planetary pages on sarna give transit times between jump points and planets and it is this maneuver they assume. Typically the times can range from 5 days to 2 weeks from what I've seen, though I haven't done an extensive survey to find a representative average or range. However, sometimes faster operations are necessary. Important political travel can often bump this up to 1.5 or even 2g. Military operations will frequently preform these transfers using the maximum safe thrust of a dropship. From what I've seen this ranges between 1.5 and 3g. The best and most extensive source on interplanetary travel in Battletech is Strategic Operations. It goes into depth on the functionality of jumpships and gives hard numbers on things like recharge times and orbital transfers.

Hooray new Voice of Iron video

Nice, I painted my locust almost exactly the same.

This is nice, thank you for making it.

The Locust is one of those mechs that gets miscast in a battle game, as you sort of pointed out. (I'd argue that there are plenty of people who'd be perfectly content with largely a recon role in piloting, though.) A lot of mechs were designed with a storyline purpose in mind that puts them in a bad way when thrown into a straight-up fight of the sort that most scenarios are built around. The Locust is a recon speeder, if it's engaging anything it's engaging other Locusts. Another example would be the Hussar, a dedicated skirmishing platform built to zip up, take a quick shot or two in passing with its ER Large and then zoom away before too much return fire shows up. But that kind of hit and run harassment isn't fun to play out on the tabletop, so when you see a Hussar in a game it's often just being used as a suicide charger. The trick for getting the most out of these kind of mechs is to build scenarios that utilize their abilities. For my campaign, I devised a mission where the main purpose was for one force to draw the defense out by appearing to menace an HVT, while the real mission involved slipping an Ostscout through the lines to call artillery down on fixed position targets (a radar array that was the actual objective.) So the main force is running around like crazy puffing up and drawing fire and the Ost is just zooming around designating targets that the artillery is then flattening. The HVT was a secondary target but by the time the main objectives were down things had heated up too much, so the Ost bailed. Artillery switched to tossing smoke rounds and the bulk of the force disengaged, mission accomplished. That's how you can get some utility and fun out of lights and bugs- it's not the damage they do, but by spotting and designating and locating targets, it's the damage that's done with other assets like indirect fire and air strikes.

the original city drift mech. This mech taught me the dangers of city fighting at speed. dump your only real scout into a building and crippling it 1 turn in. ... some lessons are learned in the hardest ways. Nostalgia for when there were not so many speedsters...

The Jenner is indeed a nice mech.

The Clan Invasion mod for MW5 has the Fafnir IIRC.

Your love of this mech really comes through 😊

Ah, yes, the mech you get when you don't want to get a few hovercraft.

I play companies of Panther, and refer to Panthers as “the littlest Heavies”. They are designed to be used as heavy mechs with 2-4 working as team versus one larger opponent, while maintaining the ability to destroy lighter opponents 1:1. My favorite upgrade to the stock Panther is swapping the HS for DHS, the PPC for an ERPPC, and the SRM4 for an LRM5, but not to mini a Griffin. I do this because I also run Dragons with PPCs and the LRM10 swapped out for 3x LRM5’s.

The only way to meaningfully improve the Panther, in my opinion, is to bump it up to a 5/8/5. Thankfully, it's a relatively inexpensive machine to upgrade. The 13 standard heat sinks can be traded out for 10 doubles, almost immediately freeing up all the weight you need for improvement. Sadly, Wakazashi didn't have the support they needed to get DHS in good numbers. Swapping the PPC for a Snub-Nose is a very good upgrade, as is swapping out the SRM-4 for an MML-3 or 5, depending on your other weight saving measures. I even made one with two Light PPCs, one with a capacitor, and an MML-5. It's a ridiculously good set-up, as long as you're comfortable with an XL. I was playing a game with my son, who loves panthers in any form, so I gave him a Kuritan lance including both a Panther and Jenner, and he did some serious work with them. Makes me very proud.