Giant Effing Robots Pt 3

So it all starts when you paint one miniature.

as trite as it may seem that is the honest to gods truth. in my case the one miniature was a Mech called a Goshawk. I painted it to be a character for a Role Playing game that went tits up in its infancy. the concept was simple, a navy gray with racing stripes.

I loved the design so much I made more like them, and it just sort of blew up. next thing I knew I had twenty Battlemechs with this look, and planned to do more. then I realized that these were just funny painted machines, with no history in the universe. My Creation amounted to nearly nothing. so I sat down in front of my computer.

it took nearly twenty days of research. I did not want a single charismatic "leader" that everyone else flocked to. so I settled on a small group of friends, all who had vast experience, and had thier own friends and crew that flocked to them. then came the question. how could I have a handfull of people who were in thier fifties, but keep them young. that is what puzzled me the most. it was not enough for them to ACT young, I wanted these main characters to LOOK young. the best example I have is in the Wolverine movie, how Logan commented owning an original WWI era motorcycle to a man that looked old enough to be his father.

it was a relativly new book that gave me the answer I craved. miners who lived in the asteroid belts around Earth genetically enhance themselves for long life. normally the group is insular, but I took a liberty to present five (six originally but I had one killed off) people who left the belts for the sake of adventure. all of them were in fact 50-70 years old, but they looked thirty years younger, creating the dichotomy between age and experience that I wanted. As a result the lioness combat team was born. I already wrote one story for them (as completly infeasable as it would be in the battletech universes canon) and am working on a second. they are a little fan fictionish, but if people are interested they can be found at

http://www.solarisseven.com/index.php?board=13.0

look for "Tales of the Lioness Combat Team"