[extremely-nervess]

I'm sorry i had to.

Look at how sad you've made her :( :(

[e-steack]

Might as well see this to the end.

[apothecaryassistant]

[apothecaryassistant]

Lol, look at the Vulcan. Such a derpy mech. All gangly and armed with an AC/2 - he sucks at being a mech. Point and laugh.

...oh, right, it's a 40-ton walking tank armed with flamethrowers. It will leave your charred corpse in the ruins of whatever building you thought you could hide in.

If the Mechwarrior games have done anything wrong, it's letting us get too cozy in heavy mech cockpits, forgetting how terrifying these things are to your average trooper.

[apothecaryassistant]

Had sudden impetus to draw Battletech-style spaceships. Because they have to be built around a long spine of a jump core, they kinda have their own aesthetic - this long, irregular shape with spars jutting off of them. Contrasts a lot to the compact and often spherical dropships.

Also, I'll probably never be able to draw jumpship sails in proper scale, as those are supposed to be, like, kilometers wide. It's a massive disk with a barely-visible pencil of a ship in vague proximity to it.

[apothecaryassistant]

[apothecaryassistant]

Whoops, that was supposed to go with The Chart.

Oh well.

[apothecaryassistant]

Just taking an IRL break to note that I'm totally stoked about the Artemis program. This is so cool. The official NASA stream may have borked the launch video, but it doesn't even matter because we're going to the moon and that's so cool. Just some nice, uplifting scifi in real life while the world keeps falling apart.

Totally want to just sit watching launchpad engineering cameras while listening to "Control's Wishes" from Lonetrail.

[apothecaryassistant]

The Chart: It's Back.

Welp, I couldn't leave well enough alone. Been doing other stuff, but The Chart still grows, and passed the 600 entry mark a few months ago. It's steadily approaching the maximum resolution limit of Illustrator, and still giving my computer a hard time. I have to restart the machine every time I open it just to ensure I have maximum memory availability. Really need to move to a new machine, but as Adobe no longer supports CS5.5 - and I can't find it anywhere - I'm going to have a devil of a time learning something new when I do change computers. I've been using the same program for over a decade after all.

Anyways. So yeah, some new stuff. The Malice and RISC plug the superheavies in to the core without the need of the Unseen, the Enforcer's linked to the Jenner, and a few other things like that. Some additions, some corrections, some moving things about since last time.

The Chart in full. Tumblr has a tendency to squash it if you don't use the workaround link.

Uhhh... Oh, yeah, I'm still looking to completely overhaul it from scratch, redoing all the connections in a way to show how strong (or tenuous) they are, as well as adding new mech cards, trying to both add more info to the chart and make the main chart more efficient. (Wildly varrying resolutions in the images is not helping when there's over 600 pictures to process.)

So yeah, if you have anything you wish was info-at-a-glance, let me know before I get started on that. I'm thinking manufacture and date of origin for sure, maybe core faction and eras. Might start colorizing things for more pop too, rather than the black-and-white.

Anywho, to those that have been following this: Thanks. The Chart'll be back again, for sure. It's already too well ingrained in my psyche to ever leave me.

[apothecaryassistant]

Stop.

...Have you considered tactical Centaurs today?

[apothecaryassistant]

Only took me like a billion years but I've finally got book 34 trimmed up to send out.

[apothecaryassistant]

Bulk upload to finish the book as I'm finally finishing the 34th book.

Been working on Cazadores, and having to deal with all the annoying bits of administration and advertisement - talking to people, ewww - and as a result I slipped out of my daily drawing habit. So I went from a book every few months to basically one this year.

Glad to be getting Cazadores out (hopefully) but I'm ready to be done with it - I like creating stuff, but with the rules set, I'm not creating anymore, I'm managing. And I am not a manager.

...

Well, you're not here for my griping. so have a bunch of sketches of a dual-AC5 battlemech. What's the least efficient weapon in Battletech? The AC2. (But the AC5 is next in line.) So why not mount two of them on a mech? Big punchy fists is a free bonus.

I just really like the Shadowhawk's shoulder gun, so sue me.

[apothecaryassistant]

Sometimes I pretend to sing the opening to Lion King for no particular reason, but I don't actually know how it goes so at random I'll just start screaming

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH ZETANYAAAA BOBBADBEE BABADEYAAAAA"

[apothecaryassistant]

Clocks should have 0 instead of 12.

...I just...feel it would be more intuitive? So you'd count up from 0 to 1 - like it'd be 0:45 at a quarter to one.

I feel like it'd clear up my confusion when someone says 12PM does that mean 12 noon or 12 midnight? Because like 12 noon is the start of PM but also you spend all AM counting up to it so shouldn't it be AM? So if we had hour 0 it'd be super easy to just go "0 PM? Oh yeah, that's noon" because it's the start of the count up.

Anyways thanks for coming to my TED talk, join me next time when I once again explain why we should abolish time zones.

[apothecaryassistant]

The Marauder Chart is back

High-rez workaround as usual.

Took some time off to do actual, worthwhile projects, but, y'know, obsession and all that. Mostly just did some rearrangement to make things fit better (the footprint has expanded considerably) but there are a number of new additions. Some frankenmechs - I bought Shrapnel #19 explicitly for the ABRF article - and a big expansion of the SDS zone. Oh yeah, and the Urbie is in the main tree now.

As usual, The Chart(tm) is a hodgepodge built in Illustrator and fed through Photoshop, because it breaks my computer in any other form. Errors are likely. Some links are tenuous at best (Centurion to Trebuchet being my go-to case study) and a lot of links that feel like they should exist but don't canonically (Hector is obviously an early Marauder, but has no given link) have been left out.

We're close to 600 at this point. Some day, every mech will have a link, even if I have to throw things at Shrapnel until they canonize it.

And some memes while I'm wasting time and terrorizing the BT subreddit:

[apothecaryassistant]

It's easier to deny liking something than explain why you like it.

[apothecaryassistant]

Pinterest on that 2025 website grindset today.

[apothecaryassistant]

I need to start a new Palworld save. A lot's changed since I was last on.

[apothecaryassistant]

Magic dragon with magic wings collecting magic for magic wings of magic.

Magic.