30mm Scale Urbanmech

So I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned here, but my first real experience with miniature gaming (outside of Heroquest) was Battletech. It’s a game about piloting a 30-ft tall mech, what’s not to love for a young teenage Dave? In the game box, you got a few plastic miniatures, some paper maps to play on, and the rules/record sheets. While my friends and I only played on the paper maps, there were rules for transforming your dinner table into a battlefield with trees, hills, and buildings. You could play the game on a diorama! Amazing! Fast forward a few years and I’ve moved on from Battletech into other games where painted models and scenery were the standard, but the idea of a fully modelled Battletech project never really left. Enter my Elegoo Jupiter.

Fighting back the urge to do my favorite mech first, I wanted to start with something “small” that could pull double duty in other miniature games while still feeling like Battletech. So of course I went with the Urbanmech, it was always going to be the Urbanmech, it’s everyone’s favorite. It’s sort of silly looking and not super amazing in the game, you can’t help but love it. Thankfully, Syllogy has an excellent digital model of the Urbanmech on his MyMiniFactory page, which has the added bonus of already coming split in half for easier printing. Having it divided into the top and bottom halves meant that I could scale the model up large enough for it to fit in with the other scifi models in my collection, but how large should it be? Battletech miniatures are scaled for ~6-10mm gaming (meaning a 6′ character would be about 6-10mm tall), but I play games in the 28-30mm scale (a 6′ character would be about 28-30mm tall) (scale in miniature games is a mess), so I would need to resize the Urbanmech by at least 400%. Which, of course, looked too small and so I went bigger, citing the rule of cool.

Then all I had to do was send it to the printer and let the Jupiter get to work, which handled beautifully. Absolutely no complaints on my end.

Now for painting! I wanted to go with something eye-catching that wouldn’t be too hard or monotonous to work on, so I went with the bright white and blue of the Lyran Guards, thinking it would fit the House Steiner mentality of “bigger is better” to deploy a mech when other militaries might send in a squad of troops.

After that all that was left was to tint the cockpit windows and finish the base.

I’m just so, so pleased with how this model turned out. It’s giving me ideas that maybe I should try again, this time with a bigger mech. But that would be silly, right? Unless…

Be good,
-Dave

so cut me loose