The Vulture from MechWarrior

The BattleMech, the mighty war machine of the 31st century from the dystopian BattleTech universe. Massive mechanized machine piloted by MechWarrior with the help of a neurohelmet for real time balancing and maneuvering of the Mech.

As a teen, I played the tabletop game a bit with a friend. Having been exposed to the universe, I found the one of the BattleMech sexy and would have loved to pilot it. This mech was named Mad Dog. It's code-name the Vulture. This was a ~12.5 meter tall machine of 60 tons that could run up to 86 km/h. The Vulture was classified as a heavy BattleMech. It's strategy was to stay at a distance to wreck havoc to it's opponents but could also be good up-close. The IP belongs to Topps, I think...

The Vulture armament for the prime version was:

• 2x LRM-20 (Long Range Missile)
• 2x Medium Pulse Laser
• 2x Large Pulse Laser

The 2 images above were mostly the only sources I used to model the BattleMech. But I still downloaded everything I could find from the web... I modeled the mech to the scale of 1:24 so that it goes with Playmobil's figurines. But this thing even at the Playmobil scale was 52 cm tall or half a meter. This took some time to model. Some nights I would advance a lot if the shapes were easy and some other nights, I would barely model anything. As usual, I model the mech so that all the piece that I think should move moves with 29 point of articulations not counting the individual missiles that are movable. For some reason I'm proud of the toes and the cockpit.

Joints are hard, figuring out by how much you want them to move, the joint type, if you want continuous/smooth or fixed movement, depending where they are the amount of needed pressure and how tight they need to be... joints are hard. Sometime you built a complicated system to notice that when printed, there is enough surface fiction rendering the internal joint not needed at all. Some joint were create so that there was an internal piece that I could change, and change I did. The 2 sets of lasers on the arm have different joints to the upper arms, the second one I created was a better one. Joint wise, I think I have more joints that failed/were unintended poor successes than true successes.

I had fun building the cockpit. The chair model came from my daughter's Mars Research Vehicle. The cockpit canopy slides forward and the back of the cockpit is removable for playability. Behind the chair, I added a few clamps for stuff. I modeled the instrument panel from the cockpit of the Vulture in MWO.

Once everything was printed, I noticed that it was very top heavy... I should have printed the legs and hip at a higher density and the body and arms at a lower density... But it still holds itself upright; I just can't put it in certain positions without the mech toppling back.

It took me a while to figure out how to paint it. There are so many different paint job that could have been cool, but liking winter and thinking I was driving this mech in either a polar region or a cold planet I decided to go with a winter themed paint job. I wanted the bottom to be white with maybe some type of rock camo, the middle to be broken ice and the top to be blue with some cracked ice/marble effects. 

I first painted it all white. For the legs, learning how to do water marbling with YouTube and going to the drugstore to buy some grey and white nail polish. I marbled the legs. To do the broken ice effect, I used painters tape that was cut into pieces. To do the blue cracked ice/marble effect I tried following Frostedsnow's tutorial for marbling. After testing a few different masking materials I decided to use used dryer sheets to create the cracked ice/marble effect.

The missiles were divide between my 2 kids and I for painting. Pretty much all missiles got some type of markings on them.

To finish everything I decided to create and print some decals. I heavily base myself on this model because I loved all the markings on it. Again I had fun with the cockpit's 4 screens. In the cockpit pic above, only 3 screens are visible; the 4th screen in the canopy. I also used something close to me as the house sigil and I really liked creating the kill counter marking that I ended up placing on the left foot.

To really, so far, finish everything, because it looked too pristine, I added some laser burn marks on it's nose ridge.

Here are some other shots and video for your pleasure.

Some of the thread that helped me:

• https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Mad_Dog_(Vulture)
• https://bg.battletech.com/forums/general-discussion/official-height-(dimensions)-of-mechs-and-vehicles/?PHPSESSID=nbtlj1q3m3j3b7brhak44rps9c
• https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Main_Page
• https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/clans-mad-dog-vulture-battlemech-87927ee6338540b88fb8756bfb0713de
• https://twitter.com/ArtofBattletech/status/1303732337843331079

Overall this project started in February 2021 and I finished printing it in June 2021 and finished painting it in September 2022.

The model is free under the CC BY-SA license.

Anybody that wants the model let me know. As long as you accept the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License we'll be all good!