MAC ATTACK 2 - Making the MAC's

with more words from Amanda Lee Franck

Amazingly we are still in time for you to back ‘MAC ATTACK’ on Backerkit if you wish. FOUR HOURS LEFT! CLICK HERE!

(It still feels utterly silly whenever I have to say 'MAC'. Every time I start saying 'Mech' and then have to correct myself and then carefully enunciate the word 'Mac'. It feels like ‘MAC’ is a boutique gender and I am being judged.)

Anyway; to play 'MAC ATTACK' we needed MACs. But these do not yet exist. Solution = make them.

HOW WE MADE OUR MACS

I cheated (?) ahead of time by buying a £20 pile of plastic Mechs from eM4 miniatures

https://em4miniatures.com/products/25-plastic-mech-miniatures-army-builder

25 BattleTech-scale Mech frames for £20!

These would be mildly annoying to use 'as is' (though they do have various weapon options), but they are PERFECT for Kitbashing. Cheap, plentiful, the right scale, tech-greebled and PLASTIC, meaning they can be cut as you wish and melted with plastic glue if you desire. They even have separate arms and in some cases, legs, making perfect points for attachment or improvisation, along with a range of weapon and missile pods.

If you are kitbashing for MAC ATTACK and already have a general pile of bits but need MAC bodies of the right scale, I can recommend these.

BITS AND SCALE

The big advantage of MAC ATTACK being the scale that it is, is that, while its difficult to perfectly kitbash, its really really really easy to functionally kitbash.

The MACS are around the scale of Warhammer infantry and if you have a bits pile full of 'techy bits', and robot bits, (and for one faction, biological bits), you can easily kitbash a crude MAC force.

You only need three to six figures which would be about 'heroic' human scale in a warhammer game, a warband really.

My MACs probably ended up a bit too 'large'. I based them on 35mm octagonal MDF bases which I ordered at the same time as the EM4 mechs.

These seem about right. But for my 'Class Three' very-large MAC, (the game background hints but doesn't specify that each faction only has one of these), they were no large enough and I ended up cutting out some square plasticard to serve as a base

THE KNIGHTS OF THE WEEPING EYE

I ignored the book, or more, got swept away by own conceptions, and started building 'Knightly' MACs. The simple addition of a Knights helmet seemed to make the theme work out - I rationalised these as mercenary descendants of the 'First Regiment' faction.

My Class 3, the William Blake, is the body of an old tank kit with the tracks ripped off, greebling with bits from 'Dropzone and Dropship commander (these have feel like they have the right scale of greebles). The legs and 'torso' are from the EM4 kits. I gave him a MEGA LANCE which is just an ordinary Knights lance, a MEGA PENNANT, again from my 28mm spares, a Knights head awkwardly glued on and then plenty of milliput and guitar string cables as a kind of skirt to make him look sort of ok. His gun is from a Horus Heresy kit (only part with a skull).

This made a 'winged hussar' gun-dick, centaur MAC, seemingly appropriate for the head of a Mercenary warrior faction.

My second MAC had the body from the EM4 kits, cut in half and bent over. I wanted him to be like a servant to the 'William Blake's glorious knight.

I added a Knights plumed helm (bent over), a shield, a little claw from my AdMech spares, (this made him seem defensive and pathetic which seemed appropriate) and a big pile of missiles like a heaped backpack to act as the 'weight' he was labouring under. That is my Class 2 MAC, 'The Seneschal'.

My last MAC was an utter failure. I experimented greatly with a four-legged arrangement and totally fucked it up. Eventually I drilled the head off a 28mm mech suit I had, jammed a knights helm on it, and there we go.

That was my last, Class 1 Mac, the Man-at-Arms. I forget where the original model is from, sorry!

AMANDAS BUILD

Amanda is an artist and so basically just... made her MACs. Her chosen faction was the 'Arksworn Order', who drive massive cyber ships-prows into battle surrounded by crackling electricity.

The only part she had that was even a little appropriate was one ships stern from an old model build. For the rest she simply assembled everything. Her legs are pieces from the EC4 kit, cut and glued this way and that. The 'Ships' she built directly from plasticard and structural bits. Some paper straws she found in my cupboards became cannons, more guns from the EC4 were added.

The most important 'bits' Amanda used may have been some old sprues from a 3d Print - these produce complex lattices of girderwork which happen to fit well at the scale we were using and produce an industrial surface.

She sculpted on her own baroque-future prow textures, and later painted similar designs directly onto one of her cannon. A key element was a marble she found in a stream. Guitar cables and others were added.

Skills acquired; plastic glue, use of plasticard, milliput, greenstuff and guitar string cabling, basing, the use of paint masks on complex forms, varnish, basecoat zenithal and I think painting she already had in full.

THOUGHTS FROM AMANDA

"thoughts about the experience of making models which you wanted me to write down:

or like, more specifically about kit-bashing as different from either modelling something completely from scratch vs modeling something where you are provided all the parts and the colors to use

Maybe the pleasure of this is being in that space where you are a little constrained, and you have to push against those constraints to make something? Its really interesting to me that the Mold guy, whose pieces look the least like they were made from what they were made from, says that he starts by reading the warhammer lore for a faction & then he builds what he imagines that faction would look like. Maybe what this does is, makes them illustrations & takes away the burden of having to explain why they are worth making? Keeps them safe from the land of Fine Art where you are not really allowed to play? I do not know.

Making something like this feels like collage to me, which is a very pleasing way of making something because you get to have all the textures and techniques expended on the original thing without having to have made them yourself. Like whatever aura is attached visually to a painting of a certain era or a style of printing goes on your piece, like a costume, and its cheap & fast & easy. In a very good collage (Max Ernst, Henry Darger, throw in the entire history of hip hop) what you get from this is so transformative it justifies the theft.

An important part of 2d collage is that you get to move the component pieces around before you glue them down, like a puzzle (I think this is how Darger got so good at composing images- you can shift things around until they just click into place & the whole piece feels right). Its not so much about the bits and pieces you start with as it is about the new relationships you have given them. The interesting thing with doing this in 3d is that it is accretional, it happens in stages over time. When making models I had to work out how to make the basic form out of parts that were close enough to what I wanted, glue that together, and then go back to the boxes of parts or the stuff I found down at the beach and see what would work on top of that. Like you are discovering the form in layers outwards. I guess it would be possible to like plan a whole piece out start to finish & then carry it out, if it is very simple? but then you still have to paint it which forms this last transformative layer and hides all the edges between things and doing that feels very magical.

oh wait I thought of one more thing

i think the pleasure of making the guys straight out of the kits with the like, recipes for which paints to use in which order is like if I am being generous following a recipe (you are doing a craft with your hands which feels good but all the creative decisions have been made so no pressure) and if I am being ungenerous it is like getting really into digging tunnels under the hill you live on."

PAINTING

I am a poor painter so relied on my old methods of; black undercoat, zenithal, metallic drybrush then universal light contrast, followed by decals and a coat of varnish to stop the paint coming off during handling.

I threw in some spot colours of white and gold

Micro-sol and micro-set were useful in making some of the decals adhere to the industrial surfaces.

If you want to learn Amandas thoughts on painting minis and MACs - ask her.

BRINGING OUT THE IMPLIED SETTING

I failed to actually do properly any of the factions in the book and got lost a bit in my own conceptions. I feel slightly bad about this as Chris and Amanda deliberately designed several of the factions to be relatively easy to Kitbash and identify = (add horns & faces, or add spikes and industrial greebling). If we were doing the creepy modernist hivemind faction we could literally have just used greenstuff or milliput I think. Amanda would have done a good job with that. If you want to see her make more of these factions join her Patreon or Comradery and pay to nag her about it!

However I am reasonably happy with my little team. The conception of 'Knighthood' which really sealed in with making the Class 3 a Centaur-MAC, was aided by the ample supply of 28mm Knight Helms

If the face is a Knight then it must be a knight.

And if it’s a team of knights then the social relations are clear from size, who is riding, who is stooped over etc- they do 'feel' to my like a little noble entourage, the proud Knight, stooped servant and little muscly man at arms

if I were do o more.... maybe a 'Lady' MAC? A 'Bishop' MAC? And some shitty cheap 'Peasant' MACs. (a rules artefact does let you create cheaper 'MACS').

Amanda, of course, helped to design the factions and produced, from almost nothing, a beautiful set of the Arksworn Covenant. Rare that you get to see one of the designers of a faction actually make that faction.

Next

We have already tried to play MAC ATTACK once and got the rules wrong, so the next post will probably be me complaining about that - luckily it will come out after the Backerkit has closed!

Then, hopefully, a battle report from a full actual, (correct rules), game of MAC ATTACK.