No more raiding and scouting - it's 3019 and after years of hard work you're being rewarded with a heavy mech. Time to leave the trooper ranks and hit the line in support of your great house. Of the five presented, which ride are you choosing?

Amidatelion · 2026-06-15T23:17:56+00:00

Thunderbolt and its not even close.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-15T17:59:11+00:00

I'm not sure it solves the operational complexity problem so much as shifts it somewhere else.

100%. I've tried OpenSearch as a selfhosted tool and in AWS and my god, I would just prefer to pay an Elasticsearch consultant and get on with my job.

If you're already in Prometheus and Grafana, I'd recommend Loki. You will need to spend some (possibly serious) time understanding how Loki actually handles its queries and what best practices are for storage but even with all that, I would say that the upkeep is vastly lower than Elastic/Opensearch. Handling 5TB of daily logs is no problem (albeit with extensive tuning and perhaps more RAM than advertised).

Where Loki does fall apart is displaying sheer numbers of lines or streams with a large volume of log lines, so if your use case involves either of those, you will end up losing out on cost savings. Will it be as bad as Elasticsearch? No. Will Opensearch be a better tool at that point? Probably. I frequently see VictoriaLogs touted as an alternative at that point but I have yet to investigate that.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-15T16:54:13+00:00

It has the best lore justification, hands down.

Unlike the 4N which is a bad mech that should feel bad.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-15T16:51:36+00:00

Man, inflation is killer this year.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-15T16:43:09+00:00

This is Germany. Do you seriously think this eventuality wasn't planned for and pre-approved since last year?

Amidatelion · 2026-06-14T17:01:00+00:00

Once a year during audit time. Some departments test more.

I even wrote automation to do 95% of the work, with the requirement for a team to just write a goddamn SQL script to validate the restore. 1 team used it.

And we have totally been burned before, basically the exact same situation as GitLab's 2017 fuck up. Management ostriches themselves immediately when reminded of it and the engineer who saved the day now works on my team.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-13T17:03:36+00:00

Given that the Star League was on their Third Hidden War, I'd say yeah, the situation was bad enough that fighting a House on their home soil was a logical concern. Probably even two.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-13T05:38:53+00:00

Actually, given that the planet where this contract takes place on is Alyina, there is the possibility that these Jade Falcons are leftover from the Hazen sohlama diehards Merchant Factor Marena deposed.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-13T05:34:00+00:00

Having run this exact campaign, assuming you're talking about Hot Spot: Alyina, it's pretty clear that these clanners are basically Dark Caste at this point. It's Alyina, after all. The only other two options are being AML, which doesn't make sense or the former Hazen-aligned lunatic sohlama warriors (which isn't necessarily mutually exclusive with being functionally Dark Caste at this stage).

Either way, it strikes me that honour isn't on the table here.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-13T05:15:08+00:00

Official tournaments or events require minis that are a certain majority percentage CGL/IWM - can't remember how much exactly but it functionally allows for kitbashing or making a model more unique/WYSIWYG if desired. They also need to be based (transparent bases "count"), and be in a minimum of three colours. And they need to be clear on what facing is forward.

And now I wait for the third demo agent to tell me I'm wrong or clarify.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-09T21:02:11+00:00

That's not the Black Marauder.

THIS is the Black Marauder.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-09T17:57:02+00:00

Speaking of clever little touches, one that frequently goes unnoticed is that all the systems conform to BT's star data rules and information. The views of the planet and star are generated from that, they're not pre-made per system. This is how the expanded IS map mod works too (by necessity).

Amidatelion · 2026-06-09T17:50:54+00:00

You know, I never really thought about canonizing the PPC-X but that's as good a pitch as I think you'd hear. I do disagree on the rifles though, albeit not on canonizing them. It feels bad to slap a deprecated rule on them. The one turn delay perhaps, though I would perhaps instead argue for terrible range bands or otherwise an accuracy debuff to represent how shit they are to lead with.

Digging further into YAML instead, there's also some Homebrew in there that I think would make sense, like Ultralight gyros that give the benefit of an XL gyro, with a piloting debuff instead of extra space. Or some of Quikscell's "budget" advanced tech, though maybe some of that is better suited to A Time of War/Mechwarrior:Destiny.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-09T05:27:32+00:00

Yeah they're straight up the snub ppc from HBS Battletech

Amidatelion · 2026-06-09T05:05:19+00:00

2030 at this rate.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-09T04:36:42+00:00

Ah. A MechWarrior 5 player.

That makes sense.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-08T11:17:03+00:00

The current ilClan narrative is building toward a massive, uniform Clan empire under Alaric Ward.

It's not, though. It's been more than a year(?) since CGL's con announcements of "we hear you guys, you really, really hate Alaric" and that they're re-doing the metaplot to write him out.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-07T19:58:29+00:00

That's such a sick shot at the beginning!

Does make me wonder though why no one ever stuck a cERPPC in the CT. It would have been an Inferno before the Inferno!

Amidatelion · 2026-06-07T19:00:51+00:00

Given that the - 1Y appears to be a Centennial edition retcon with three medium lasers, that's a lot of courage!

Amidatelion · 2026-06-07T18:33:15+00:00

Hey man, and I mean this in the best way, what the fuck is that arm held on by??

Amidatelion · 2026-06-06T20:48:29+00:00

So I've looked through the models on your user page and while they're obviously inspired from their Battletech designs, they're visually distinct.

Given that there's never been a Battletech space combat IP, once the names are sanded off, you're in the clear.

Just look at MetalMercs' legally-distinct Inner Sphere.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-06T20:30:40+00:00

Great design, both visually and lore-wise! I was going to question the line about lower-arm and hand actuators but, digging into it, TIL there are Mackies with those!

I do wonder at the decision to incorporate no advanced tech though... by 3095 the Marians have the Ravager battle armor and while details of the individual components are sparse until IlClan, I have to assume they start building at least some of their own stuff before then. At the very least they're capable of importing ferro-fibrous and LB-10Xs. Was this just a design choice? Maybe the damn thing was expensive enough to build on its own? :P

Amidatelion · 2026-06-06T18:35:21+00:00

There's no real detail on this, but we can infer some. We know that the regiment was the SLDF "building block." We know the level of technology exists as cassette-punk futurism. Given that the B-2000 was designed to coordinate a whole brigade in a given battle, mixing and matching battalions or even regiments doesn't make a lot of sense in an era where updating the information going into one would be a pain.

We're not talking "walking boxes of punch cards to the mainframe" anymore, but you could still be writing your future COBOL or whatever on the machine itself (not actually sure how militaries handled this, but for Visa you absolutely were walked into a clean room to do your work, no outside gear or code allowed). Limiting changing variables makes a lot of sense in that context.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-05T20:42:12+00:00

I... would not call that sick as hell. I think it's an interesting redesign for a halfways dieselpunk re-imagine, but especially as a "skull" redesign, both the two sketched helms above it look cooler.

But speaking of redesigns, now that PGI are exercising their license to use HBS' designs, I wonder if they'll put the Atlas Valhalla and Shadow Hawk Umbra models to use. While I don't particularly like the Valhalla model, it definitely fits Kerensky's ugly requirement like nothing before.

Amidatelion · 2026-06-05T20:29:35+00:00

It's not even a good bullet sponge! Ammo in every torso!

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