Lego Build 100 A — Infantry (Inner Sphere)
Three years and a bit more have passed since I started posting these builds. That’s a lot of time. In the meanwhile I have posted one hundred instructions for Mechs, vehicles, and aircraft based on the BattleTech setting, just for the main series. I have in the meanwhile expanded into other proprieties, like Homeworld, Halo, Redline, or Warhammer. It has always made me happy to make and share them and I think others have enjoyed them too. For their own leisure or to share some moments with their children and friends.
Three years of work and so many posts and conversations later I had to do something special, so I decided to make this a unique post of sorts. A two-parter to tackle something I haven’t done yet but is also an important part of warfare in the Inner Sphere — infantry. Mostly Battle Armor but a conventional build too.
Let’s start with the Inner Sphere.
After the Clanner onslaught in 3049 and onwards, the Great Houses realized how far back they had fallen in terms of technology. The single greatest terror of Clan battle technology (BattleTech), arguably even more than the Mad Cat, was the Elemental Battle Armor. It was obvious that armored infantry was a powerful force multiplier, so they ought to have their own.
Luckily for the Spheroids they weren’t totally hapless as a few years before the Gray Death Legion had found the Helm Memory Core, holding blueprints of many lost technologies. Armed with this knowledge, the shady aid of ComStar, and many captured Clan Elementals, the Spheroid scientists managed to craft an imitation of the original, dubbed the Inner Sphere Standard.
Blocky and unrefined, this was simply good enough, but still managed to be practical enough to stay in service throughout the decades, becoming the mainstay of most Great Houses. During the war against the Word of Blake (in my Blake’s war AU) it was the backbone of the Combine forces facing the Blakists, the Clans, and each other.
The success of the Standard led to many further developments of the concept after the defeat of the Clans in 3052. The Raiden was a creation of the Draconis Combine to expand on the concept of the Standard, giving emphasis to maneuverability and firepower. This armor also went on to become quite common among the Combine ranks, being one of the definitive of its type during the Jihad and beyond.
By this point you probably realized how I went around in making these. These suits take very few parts and are generally really easy to make. However, I was stuck with both the medium and the scale I am using. I couldn’t avoid making them blocky as they had to be really small to be on scale with the Mechs.
However, I could try to mix different parts to give each build its own personality. The concept, I must admit, is not mine. A few people have already worked infantry builds like these with great effect. I’m just riding the wave they’ve created to try to bring Battletech’s infantry to life.
But where was I?
One thing that was noticed early on was that in spite of their cost and added features they still had poor survibability during pitched battles. One idea was to make the suits stealthy in order to avoid being found and hit at all. The very first Battle Armor, the Infiltrator, was built around this concept. But it was the Purifier that matured it.
Equipped with stealth armor and electronic counter-measures, the Purifier could avoid detection and cause havoc where it hurt the most. The Purifier would develop a somewhat tainted fame because of their use by the Blakist elites during the Jihad. But they were also used by other factions, leading to an appreciation of its qualities and the development of a successor, the MkII.
Inner Sphere Battle Armor would continue to develop after the Blakist tantrum and more famous models would appear during the peace of the Republic of the Sphere. One of the most balanced of these, which mixed concepts from the three armors that I already described, was the Angerona.
Stealthy, but also agile and well-armed, the Angerona was a combination of concepts that was still good enough to form the backbone of the armed forces of the Republic. I really like this one, I think I managed to capture the shape despite originally thinking it wouldn’t be possible.
I really hope you’ve enjoyed this attempt of mine of doing something different and round-up the units of this wonderful universe. Next week, we’ll explore the Battle Armors of the Clans.
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