a strange, strange journey

 

So this here is a Destroid Tomahawk. Destroids are land-based mecha used by UN forces to fight alien invaders in the anime Macross, which was release in the United States as part of Robotech.

This is the edition of BattleTech that I played back in the eighties. That is not a Destroid Tomahawk. It is a Warhammer BattleMech. As I understand it, the company that licensed Macross to make Robotech then licensed the rights to the images to some of the mecha to the nice people at FASA. Through the same deal FASA also licensed some mecha designs from other shows, particularly Crusher Joe and Fang of the Sun Dougram. I knew none of this as a kid. Some of my favorite mechs looked exactly like some Japanese designs, but I didn't know why. It didn't matter much to me and my gaming crew.

FASA approached Ral Partha to make miniatures for the game, which they eventually did to great success. But the folks at Ral were hesitant at first, like maybe they weren't sure if a license of a license of a license would hold up in court. This makes sense to me, as it was not long after Task Force Games was making a lot of money off of Star Fleet Battles, which existed off a sublicense of Franz Joseph Designs license to do the Star Fleet Technical manual book. Was their litigation over that or merely the threat of litigation? I can't remember. Either way, I would've been skittish at that time as well. But as I said, Ral Partha balked initially and instead released a line of Macross knock-offs. The figure above was listed as the BattleAxe. It preserved the two key elements of the Warhammer/Tomahawk design: honkin' big cannons where the lower arms should be and a shoulder-mounted missile pack. (Later the real deal Destroid designs were released by Ral.)

Things got tricky once BattleTech was a smash hit and they wanted to do a Japanese language edition. The cost to license the Macross images in Japan was undoubtedly prohibitive, as it is essentially a license to print money. So they redesigned all the mechs for the Japanese edition. I find many of the redesigns to be flat out gorgeous.

Which is why I was delighted to discover that a 3-D modeller is selling STL files of about a dozen of the Japanese redesigns. Check em out!