In my ongoing storyline, the merc unit, the White Hawk Irregulars, were badly mauled by Blakeist forces in the final months of the Jihad. The surviving members left the inner world's and signed a mediocre garrison and training contract in the Periphery, defending a loose coalition of independent world's in the dangerous space near the Marian Hegemony border. Very low on cash reserve and with half a dozen mechs needing serious repair and replacement parts, the White Hawks made a deal for parts and service from a low tech armored vehicle factory on the planet. With help and guidance by the company tech's, the engineers at the factory (having never worked on a fusion powered system let alone a mech) did the best they could putting the units mechs back together with locally sourced parts and weapons available through salvage or trade on a relatively poor world. The most significantly altered mech was the company exec's almost totaled Crusader.
Replacement LRM launchers for the mangled arms proved impossible to find for the small budget, so the tonnage was spent piling as many locally manufactured single shot Rocket Launcher systems on the heavy frame as the mech could carry. Meant as a temporary fix until the proper weapons can be salvaged of found, the mech now carries 12 10-tube rocket launchers, 6 in each arm, clustered around the shoulders in 4 massive armored launch boxes. The relative abundance of medium lasers made replacing those fairly easy, even if the locally made versions are more bulky than typical. Also the use of less advanced locally made armor, cut from non-standard plates necessitated the change in armor coverage and layout. Old fashioned single heat sinks were easy to get so some of the weight and space saved from the missing LRMs went to increasing the heat tolerance of the mech, even though an alpha strike of all 12 Rocket packs would likely generate enough heat to melt the mech down around the pilot! The new machine is a textbook case of the importance of fire discipline in heat management.
The new White Hawks version of the Crusader, given the indicator "RR" (Retro-Rebuild) has yet to see action, and while on paper the machine looks competent enough to face the typical Periphery pirates and bandit attackers, the viability of such a drastic rebuild has some in the unit questioning the mechs reliability, including its worried pilot, Lt. Katelyn Brown, White Hawks executive officer....
