Flames of Orion: Bashing a Pilot

As always, spurred on by my friends, I'm excited about a new project. 

As always, I am trying to dive head first into this idea before I lose any steam.

Steve (@sovthofheaven), has been working on Flames of Orion for a while now. I played it in the early playtest days and I liked the game. Steve has gone on to put together a successful kickstarter of the project and people are really psyched on the world he's built. 

For a while though I had gotten my fill of his universe. I was still stoked on the games development, but, well, idk what it is about mechs that doesn't really light my flame... maybe the lack of humanity.

On this new episode of Hive Scum (65), Steve talks a bit about a more RPG focused Flames games he's been running. I dug into it a little with him and well, here I am - excited about envisioning what a mech pilot might look like, and creating ONE mech that will be his to pilot.

This is what I want from Flames of Orion, a world where I feel like I'm living in it. Less about a fleet of robots and more about the story of some hot-rodder, fixing his damn rig and keeping an eye on the horizon for potential threats.

The mech I wanted to use is my favorite mech I've seen for BattleTech: the Marauder. I pulled this from a blind box and was taken by the interesting shape. I painted this up a while ago, and I'm going to add greebles and modify it before I prime over it and paint it again, but that's for another day. 

Pilot first:

I pulled out a bunch of "potential" frames to build my dude from. I wanted "chill guy" energy from this pilot. not someone engaged in combat, but someone who might just be sippin' coffee, waiting around for a call to roll in about potential credits he could score. 

Think Spike Spiegel

Ultimately I cut a couple of these bodies up to make the frame for the mini, welding the two with green stuff

Found this head off a Victoria Miniatures sprue, I'd never noticed it on there, but boy does it have the perfect relaxed and kinda cocky look to it. Plus he's got the little rangefinder, for firing his big ass long range cannon.

I wanted his hands doing nothing important. It's hard to find hands like that so I modified two "gun holding" hands I found in my bin. One went into a green stuff pocket and the other I created a cigarette being held up to his mouth with speaker wire strands. Nothing says dystopian than a cigarette.

Cleaned him up a bit, added some little flavor bits and he's done! Meet David "Dax" Bauer

Now to work on the mech itself...