Battletech - The Atlas Suit

Remember Virtual World? It was a company which, back in the 90s, developed Battletech simulators. It was wicked cool. As a gimmick they would stay open on Christmas Day and let anyone play for free who came dressed as Santa Claus. The first time they did this, in 1994, I built a quickie Santa Mech suit, which you see below.

As you can see it was a pretty crude design but it was the best suit that day. The following year business was kind of slow for me so I had time to sit down and develop the Santa Mech, Mark II for the next free-for-all. This is the result:

In case you're wondering that's a 19" color TV it's sitting on so this thing is BIG! We had to cart it over to Virtual World in the back of a mini-van.

You'll notice there's no thigh armor because it was just technically impossible. A human's legs come together at the crotch and thigh armor, if I'd added it, would have continually chafed against itself.

The suit was created to fit me, a 5' 9" 40 regular, and there is no room to spare inside even though the shoulders are over three feet across. It's made entirely from cardboard except for a few pieces of trim and a sacrificial basketball that became the shoulder actuators.

My arms, generally draped in a black sweatshirt, exited either side of the body just below the armpits. My hands entered at the wrists of the suit where I could then work the arms like a puppet. Although individual finger-actuators would have been cool I neither had the time nor the technical expertise to craft them. The fingers, thusly, are joined as a whole and I'm limited to a moderate flexing motion. Generally, though, they just flop around.

This is the back and you can see where my arms exit the body just under the armpit. You can also see the basketball/shoulder actuators here. The pack on its back houses a computer fan that is powered by a large, heavy, 12v dry-cell battery stored in the shoulder area. Yes, it's a working heat-sink! The torso is hinged at the top, opening like a clam, as that was the only way to get into the suit.

The head was created by coating a round balloon with pa pier mache. After cutting it to shape I coated the inside and outsides with multiple layers of epoxy, which made it rigid enough to glue the "armor" plate. A sheet of one-way mirrored plastic was always planned to mask the area inside the head but I never got around to it.

Cardboard wasn't always happy being shaped across an arc-ed surface but, as you can see, there was only moderate deformation. See next pic.

BTW, there was NO room inside the torso for rocket launchers.

The head tended to trap a lot of heat so I cut this hole in the top, but only the really tall can see it. Note the speaker.

The speaker was attached to a toy voice-amplifier that ran off a single 9v battery. As you can see I simply glued the guts of the toy to the inside of the head and hooked up the speaker. It never worked very well in noisy areas as 9v isn't a lot of power.

This is the top of the shoulders, looking into the neck. You can see the fan, and the battery nestled in a compartment to the left. A power switch is embedded in the right torso. The head slipped down over the two upright lugs on either side of the neck hole. Apart from these only the weight of the head kept it in place. Being top-heavy, due to the speaker, it tended to leap off the body if I bent over too far.

Close-up of the arm laser, which is just a hunk of PVC.

This is the right-rear of the body showing the AC/20 detail.

This is the left leg which has a hidden, built-in hinge at the ankle. The sole rests on a two inch tall grid of cardboard, like a milk crate, as it put my ankle closer to the actual fulcrum of the mech's ankle. The inside surface of the shin is coated in thick sheets of foam-rubber. This serves to hold the leg snugly in place as I walk.

Same leg, other side. The whole suit is covered in about ten years of dust. I knocked off most of it but an annoying patina clung with grim tenacity.

Below are two links to a pair of two Youtube videos, one of me donning the suit and one showing it in action.

Donning

In Action

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The following is a recollection of the best, most dramatic Battletech game I ever witnessed.

Back in the mid-90s I was running the Battletech concession at a local convention and decided it was time for a tournament. The rules were simple: Single-elimination using any legal 'mech you chose. The terrains were small, only 13 hexes across, but with lots of hills, trees, etc. The battles would be fast and brutal.

The Final came down two excellent players, Gene Senter and Josh Cohen. Josh chose a stock Orion while Gene took an up-armored Jenner variant. Classic power vs. speed.

The battle took over an hour and, by the end, Josh had lost both gyros and was down. Game over. All Gene had to do was stand next to the Orion and kick it to death. Instead, he moved his Jenner behind a level-one hill, into the Orion's rear arc.

So here's the scene if this were a live-action movie: The hero is down, his gyros out, there's probably even a fire in the main console. He can hear his opponent laughing evilly over the comm and watches helplessly as the Jenner calmly strolled behind a small, protective hillock and adjusted its lasers for the killing blow. Out of desperation the hero fires a wild, almost impossible shot from his two rear lasers (Yes, two rear lasers.) and watches as the Jenner's cockpit melted into slag.

I felt really bad for Gene but it was a fantastic ending.
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The following is the most disappointing experience I recall as a Battletech player.

It was during another tournament, run by a fellow named John, who was a competitor in the Dallas Battletech scene. He and I did not get along, mostly because we're both arrogant jerks. Which is okay unless you're the one running the tournament, which he was.

His rules were simple: Pick six 'mechs whose total tonnage does not exceed 465 tons.

I crunched the numbers and decided to go with a missile-heavy assortment as they offered more damage potential on an open field, which proved to be deadly accurate. The idea was to never move the 'mechs, thus reserving heat, and let them rain death on the opponents before they figured out what was happening. Missiles also multiplied the possibility of head hits and crit rolls. Four rounds of merciless destruction later I and my partner were in the semi-finals.

John was peeved about this.

(For the record, my partner had to attned to other business. I played alone.)

So just before the semi-final began he asked to look at the 'mechs I planned to use, which was the standard assortment of missile 'mechs and a back-up King Crab. He then left to construct the battle map, in secret.

The terrain he assembled, just for this battle, had more trees than I had ever seen on a battle map. This makes sense when you know that our opponents, John's pals, were using 'mechs heavily reliant on pulse lasers.

Yes, John built the terrain to heavily favor his friends.

The battle took forever, owing to the overly-lush terrain, but it was deemed over when one of their Penetrators crit-rolled the ammo in my nearly untouched King Crab. I actually watched John jump in excitement when the ammo location was called. (Which was a good trick as John weighed well over 300 pounds.)

So, yeah, good job, John, you dishonorable slob. (I should also mention that in another John-led tournament he let his friends run illegal 'mechs and didn't disqualify them when caught. But that's another story.)

Thanks for reading.