BattleMech design options.

Other than breaking things in Battletech Live and fixing other things, I’ve been looking at design options for various units. I’ve started with Atlas.

Illustration of the original FASA Atlas model.

An Atlas in use in Classic BattleTech.

Atlas from MechCommander 2

The original Atlas is a little chunky, but still a good design.  The pewter model is nice but in some ways, still seems like a collection of boxes piled together.  The model used in MechCommander 2 is extremely plain, as most of the models are, and uses the paint scheme to make it appear to have more detail than it really does.  The first picture below is a drawing I found of an Atlas that has been heavily redesigned.  While this is an excellent picture, I think it’s a little too far separated from the original Atlas.  I might make something like this available to the later time periods, but not to the early years.  The next picture is the lower half of a Kodiak.  I think that they’re similar enough that this could serve as a workable style element for Atlas.  I like the angular look to it.  The third is a Mad Cat made with Google Sketchup.  This is probably fairly typical for polycounts.

A very advanced redesign of an Atlas.

Lower half of a Kodiak as drawn for MechWarrior 4.

Mad Cat

When all said and done, I’m hoping that the look and level of detail will be similar to the following: