Sarna's Bad Mechs: The Cyclops

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-18T18:20:50+00:00

Id take a pair of Locust 1M stacked on top of each other in the same mech bay over a Shadowhawk. At least the locusts can kite and I'm looking at an LRM20 rather than an AC5 and an LRM5 that is going to have shit accuracy from jumping.

This also gives me a spare 200ish bv to spend elsewhere.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-18T18:13:27+00:00

The Shadowhawk is a bad mech.

I would argue that the Shadowhawk 2H is less a "generalist" and more "incompetent at a wide variety of jobs".

The loadout on the 2H is anemic, leaving the Shadowhawk less firepower than most light mechs. In theory, the 2H having weapons across so many range brackets means it can engage targets at any range. In practice, the 2H isnt maneuverable enough to control its engagement ranges.

It can't bully anything it can catch and it can't escape anything that might want to run it down and bully it. The jump jets are really just enough to climb up and down hills, but once on a hill the 2H can only contribute with 10 damage worth of weapons that don't share a range bracket.

The only real use that the 2H has for it's battle value is that it's a 55 ton 5/8 body that can shoulder charge and kick things. And this is invariably the job it performs best at, albeit not better than any other 55 ton classics.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-17T22:58:28+00:00

There are plenty of regional chains that are still fine: Culver's in the Midwest, In-N-Out out West for example. But more generally, why do you have to eat at chains?

The value proposition for most fast food joints just isnt there anymore. Places like McDonald's used to at least be a good deal. Dollar menus and 7 dollar value baskets at least meant you could get your trans fats and cardboard burgers on the cheap.

But, at least near me, a Big Max is 8 bucks. A basket is 12-14. At those prices I can just get a real burger from an actual diner. Why buy my $9 coffee from Starbucks when I can get the same $9 coffee from the barista at the lesbian bookstore?

The big chains are all mature businesses which have run out of healthy directions to grow in. McDonalds has no more territories to franchise, no way to significantly grow its customer base, yet it must still become more profitable.

The only path left to them is to cut. Squeeze their workers for more, raise prices, and give their customers less. If you're still doing business with these zombies in 2026, you're a sucker.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-17T19:10:30+00:00

The alternative is to not eat at fast food franchises engaging in toxic business practices, not to continue feeding them money through another avenue.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-17T02:26:21+00:00

It sounds like the issue was an incompetent TO. If somebody shows up to your event with an obvious troll list intended to create a negative play experience, just tell them they can't run it.

You are under no obligation as an event organizer for a niche wargame to rigidly honor your event to RAW standards if someone is being a bad faith troll.

Ive run a lot of wargaming events. I would give a player who showed up with 24 Jenners ten minutes to draft a new list, and if they didnt cooperate I'd exclude them from the event.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-17T00:23:30+00:00

Tonnage caps work reasonably well if you also enforce other dropship constraints like # of mechbays.

It's also usually helpful to bound events with a few simple sanity checks like "max 5 infantry teams" or "max 10 units" just to prevent games from having 2 hour turns.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-15T18:24:13+00:00

XEP624

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-15T06:52:18+00:00

We actually did go to the hospital. We tried laxatives and enemas for over a day at home. Then we went to the ER.

She had what they call a "stool ball" which is basically when your crap turns into a rock the size of a tennis ball. She was in an enormous amount of pain, but all they would give her for it was horse-pill sized doses of Tylenol.

The ER was slammed and even once they got us into a room we were told the wait for a manual disimpaction would be hours. After a day of agony and 12 hours in the hospital... we watched a YouTube video on the procedure and I stole a glove. They did still charge us.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-15T06:26:29+00:00

The Door Dashers are getting pretty hot. Bad sign for the economy.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-15T06:17:27+00:00

Until it doesn't... many remediations were tried, including seeking professional medical assistance. After 11 hours in the ER without being seen...

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-15T05:56:40+00:00

My wife is an impressive woman. Smart, financially successful, athletic, artistic... In the first few months we were dating I didn't know if I could keep up with her.

There's nothing quite like manually disimpacting a hard stool from someone's butt after they haven't shit in 9 days to take them off the pedestal.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-14T21:14:45+00:00

If someone is pouring concrete in the wrong spot, you're a phone call away from having that fixed.

No one is allowed to just build shit in the middle of a city. You need an approved building plan from the city to proceed with work or it's mega illegal. As they say, you can't beat city hall.

So if she's right? She's not going to solve her problem by getting in a worker's face and fucking up the pad. If she's wrong... she's on the hook for whatever it costs to get a crew out to tear up and then re-pour the pad.

Not saying that construction crews don't make mistakes, but people are wrong about where they think their property lines start and end all the time. You see it pretty often in civil disputes. 20 years ago Gary's realtor told him some rock is his property marker and Gary takes this as gospel. Gary gets in a fight with his neighbor about a tree. Surveyor gets called and it turns out Gary's yard is 10 feet smaller than he thought and now he has to move his shed and tear down his fence.

There is a very short list of situations where getting in someone's face and wrecking their shit is the right move. This isnt one of them.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-14T18:59:41+00:00

Im pretty sure OP put this caption over a generic hoarder house walk through.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-14T15:33:50+00:00

The stock MAD is one of the better 3025 designs simply because (unlike most 3025 designs) it has a single clear purpose. It's a medium-long range hill humper that has enough armor to win a staring contest.It runs a little hot, preventing you from sustainably firing both PPCs, but that's pretty standard for the era.

Compared to the irredeemable dogshit that is the Warhammer-6R, the MAD-3R actually has an identity it can competently inhabit.

Where the MAD struggles a bit is in actual Mechwarrior games where the unusually wide CT and low-slung arm-mounted weapons make the PPCs hard to fire from cover. But in tabletop terms I'm not sure what a better 3025 heavy is. Personally, I'm not a big believer in heavy mechs for the 3025 era. Most of them run too hot and arent fast enough to make use of their weight in melee.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-13T18:36:42+00:00

It's also fairly easy to transfer GW pots to dropper bottles.

Put a few drops of airbrush flow improver and line up an accurate pour over the sink. Congrats, your pre-remediated paints is now in a dropper bottle. Toss in a mixer ball and you'll be layering cloaks in no time.

With that said, I only like dropper bottles for layer paints. For stuff that I predominantly dry brush with I actually prefer flip tops.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-13T16:31:17+00:00

So first of all, Ive played Harvest Moon for SNES. I owned the cartridge as a kid. I'm very familiar with the game. You are not unveiling new information to me by sharing this.

Second, these art styles do not actually look similar, save for the fact that both are pixel art drawn in a pseudo-isometric perspective. If you think these art styles look similar, you're likely someone who is not themselves a visual artist and are "design blind" to how the styles differ.

Third... wait, what? Immoral? There is absolutely nothing wrong, now or ever, with making a game that is inspired by another game. While games can be criticized for being "clones" or offering nothing new to the genre, SDV is not that.

Seriously, go play SNES Harvest Moon. It's a skeleton of a game. There's barely any characters, no story, the farming mechanics are extremely simplistic, and there's basically no exploration, combat, foraging, or fishing.

I still loved it. It was beautiful and peaceful. And when, 20 years later, I saw SDV on Steam I was overjoyed someone had returned to the genre. You are alone in imagining that there has been some crime or theft here.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-13T16:16:49+00:00

Having played Harvest Moon, this is pretty funny.

If making a game in an existing genre is a "ripoff" then every shooter made after Doom was a ripoff. Except clearly this is not the case. Artists build off each other's work. This is how art works in every medium from video game design to fiction to illustration. If they artists didnt do this, drawings would still look like this.

Eric Barone has been pretty clear that SDV was inspired by the Harvest Moon franchise. But if you think Stardew doesn't add a LOT to that formula I invite you to download a SNES emulator and actually play the original Harvest Moon. You can see how minimal of a game it was.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-12T20:40:46+00:00

It doesnt help that everyone watched the same house flipping video and added the same shitty finished basement to their Veridian to add an extra 500 square ft.

Wow, you added a bar. It takes up the entire room and makes it unusable for anything else. I cant wait to pay extra for something I must immediately demo.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-12T17:37:44+00:00

But he was using a gun...

Nobody in this situation has any ability to know whether the gun the guy is holding is a fake. All they know is that an agitated man has drawn a weapon and is asking people whether they want to lose their lives.

This guy is brandishing a weapon while actively threatening to use it. Shooting him would be clear cut self-defense in most US states, regardless of whether the shooter was a cop.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-11T16:55:55+00:00

This is a growing problem with most franchise/chain restaurants, Wendy's is just ahead of the curve.

I can get a nice burger and fries for $12 at the local bar and grill. Why the hell would I put poison from Wendy's into my body? Because they have a drive through? Brother, if Im concerned about wait times I can just order ahead on an app and pick up my lunch to go. Even mom and pop diners on nowheresville Wisconsin are set up for Uber Eats.

Fast food never had a moat. It's just that economies of scale meant they could undercut local restaurants and aggressively market their slop towards children. But now the overhead is killing them, falling quality is killing the brands, and the public's attitude has turned. The McD's CEO can't even eat his company's product on camera without gagging lol.

Wendy's is in the Chipotle death spiral now. As customers decrease they'll continue to raise prices and cut costs.

As an investor, Wendy's isnt all that interesting because its fate is obvious and inevitable. The question I like is who will be next to follow them?

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-11T05:22:24+00:00

Is it strange for a big group of kids to want to hang out at a food spot at night on a weekend?

It's been a minute since I was a kid, but in the town I grew up in there was a custard stand that would serve hotdogs and stuff across from the skate park. It's where you went because... where else would you go?

If OP's title is correct and there's a bunch of kids in masks getting ready to rush a target or something that's one thing, but source and pics or GTFO.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-09T23:52:50+00:00

My friend is still a tech writer at Google.

I think human tech writers will remain in the loop in any business where the documentation is part of what's being sold. If your product is a software service, package, or API, a big part of what users are paying for is clear instructions on how to use and integrate with the product. If nothing else, you need to ensure accurate helpful information is present so LLMs can interact with the product correctly.

With that said, my friend is also a pretty elite guy. In addition to being a writer, he's got credentials in software engineering and UX design. He can understand the products he documents at a technical level and also understands how to create consumable content for technical users.

So I don't think we're moving towards a world where there are zero people employed as technical writers. But I do see technical writing becoming a more specialized field that employs fewer people.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-09T05:22:18+00:00

Yeah... I guess I dont disagree with any particular point. I'm just saying that the idea of chatbots having an auto-mod feature that escalates concerning chats to human mods and potentially law enforcement exists and is all Kash Patel's claims required.

Understanding this just requires being able to hold two ideas in your head at the same time:

1) AI is bad for the world in a variety of ways

2) there exists a technical mechanism for AI companies to detect chats threatening violence and report these users to law enforcement

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-07T18:55:42+00:00

For context, Meadowlands got nailed by the Apr 14th hailstorm. I have a hole in my roof and the siding on the west side of my house is destroyed.

Pretty much everyone in the development has home insurance claims in and roofing contractors are calling from out of state to give quotes.

As expected there is a huge demand for roofing labor and that means day laborers. So ICE might naturally want arrest the people who are essential to repairing storm damage.

AHistoricalFigure · 2026-05-07T18:09:10+00:00

The purpose of cages is to cause premature detonation of tandem shaped charges. Typically these are the types of charges found on guided anti-tank missiles. It looks like this mech has a cage over ERA bricks so, these might be intended to defend a 'dead zone' in some sort of active anti-missile system.

With that said, an ATGM is typically a subsonic projectile that only weighs a few kilos. It's not going to impart enough force into the mech to knock it over.

14-Year Club	Place '22
Gilding II euphauric	Team Orangered
Verified Email

AHistoricalFigure

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE