MLR-B* MjolnirThe
Mjolnir is one of those demonstrations that sometimes just because you
can achieve something in a light `Mech, maybe you shouldn't. Yes, the
Mjolnir is a cheap 25 ton melee `Mech with a 12 point swing. That's about the only trick you've got. Everything else is straight out of your grandfather's old copy of
Zen and the Art of Not Dying In A Wasp. Fair warning: This is not going to be one of those glowing, complimentary `Mech of the Week articles. I'm not a fan. I don't think the
Mjolnir is useless - I'd actually love to see it added to HBS's game, where its quirks would fit in better, and it has some utility I'll cover once I'm done trashing its reputation - but it's not exactly what I'd call a good idea unless you like cheap `Mechs sold to people you don't like so you can make a profit on setting them up to die horribly to a pirate
Wolverine or something. For that, the
Mjolnir has you covered and then some! For all my trash talk, there are going to be things I like about this `Mech, and we'll start at the beginning. That artwork up there? Dynamic! Active! It makes the
Mjolnir look good which helps distract you from the, uh, let's call them
challenges in the stat block to the left.
"Light melee `Mech" is kind of a bad idea. Melee damage is, much more directly than other types of damage, directly dependent on tonnage to get the job done, so "25 ton melee 'Mech" kind of starts off on the wrong foot there. To make up in fancy myomers what the tonnage rating can't supply, TSM is used. Not the worst idea! It certainly works for the SCB-9T
Scarabus. The problem is you're not the
Scarabus, which has armor, ECM, and sheer speed a
Mjolnir doesn't have thanks to the XLFE. The 9T takes a nasty light harasser/spotter and makes it faster and meaner. So you can see why when Arc-Royal MechWorks proposed this, a lot of people's idea of the correct response was "Go home, you're drunk". I will give whoever was behind this credit for marketing this as an export product... that was promptly sold to the Lyran Guards and Regulars. Whoops! And hey, they sold them to the Republic, too. I thought Steiner liked those guys! (The Federated Suns on the other hand can be justified as lingering resentment from the whole civil war thing a while back.)
So what exactly makes me - and plenty of other people - so hard on this guy? Well, let's start with being 25 tons and going 6/9 on a design that - as we've noted - has a serious compulsion to get right in someone's face. Okay, there's TSM, which helps both the speed and “not big enough to hit hard” problems, and I'll give someone credit for having the sense to stick jump jets on here. It takes up a lot of payload you really need for guns but sometimes being able to jump is vital to controlling range (something a
Mjolnir needs to do desperately) and it can let TSM `Mechs build heat aggressively without playing silly games with their heat sinks. Fortunately, they got some single heat sinks off a LAW fire sale, so you don't have
that problem... except that there's only two guns on here, an ERML and an ERSL. Uh. Huh. Yeah, you're going to
need those jump jets. And that melee weapon! Ah, the glorious hatc- oh, wait. No, this isn't a hatchet. It's a mace. The difference is maces hit harder (a hatchet on a 25 tonner does 5 points instead of 6) but they're vastly less accurate (a +2 relative target modifier, ouch!) and when you miss (which you will) you get to roll a PSR. Did I mention the part where this is an el cheapo light `Mech built on standard bones and fusion engines for sale to low-end units? No? Well it is. That means that PSRs caused by melee rolls are going to be a serious issue because the pilots making those rolls don't tend to be the best of the lot. The armor is not horrible - the splurge on ferro-fibrous gets an armor rating 25% tougher than the
Commando the
Mjolnir gets compared to and on the MLR-B2, the head is fully armored, a great relief to light `Mech jocks who get stuck in these things. Hell, it's actually decently armored with 12 points over the centerline and 10 on the legs. The side torsos and arms are more thinly armored - 9 and 7 respectively - and the rear plates are more notional than stopping power but it's a 25 tonner. Well-armored only gets you so far at this tonnage bracket and this is one aspect of the `Mech I can wholeheartedly endorse.
Let's sum up: Thinly armored for the modern battlefield, 6/9/6, ERML, ERSL, inaccurate melee weapon that likes to trip the wielder, and TSM that when lit up telegraphs to everyone in range you just went from "annoyance" to "I have a headcapper and a deathwish, come at me bro!" That's the MLR-B2. Now imagine someone looked at this and went, "It's not
Commando enough." This is pretty much the entire development process of the MLR-BX in a nutshell. Some Lyran commander thought they needed SRMs to exploit holes opened by the mace and stuck an XLFE and XL gyro in here, then got rid of the lasers. Now you get to burn ammo to light up the TSM and the SRMs can crit-seek... on the target you haven't... hit... with the mace? Yeah, I'm not sure why they didn't just buy an extra
Commando or
Wasp and toss it in the back of the DropShip. It's more heavily armed, something most people like. Along the way, someone shifted armor from the center torso and head to the sides, bringing them up to 10 points. That makes sense given there's a much more vulnerable engine back there. Given the number of 10 point weapons out there these days, not having one open the side torso like a can opener is a good thing. That said, I imagine a lot of pilots look at that thinner cockpit armor and wonder if this was really that good an idea. All in all, the MLR-BX is not really any impressive than the B2 but it's a lot more expensive, has trouble generating heat reliably, and gets things that go BANG right next to the engine on a `Mech that is encouraged to
turn off heat sinks. Thanks, no thanks; if you want to crit-seek on a TSM `Mech, do it with lasers. That said, another time I need to agree with the designer's thinking here: On a light, if you're taking gyro damage, you are already about to die, so the XLFE is kind of a wash and it's certainly a better choice on a `Mech with a mace than a small cockpit's PSR penalty, and any thought of this being a mass market model on the B2's scale went out with the XLFE anyway.
Operationally, the two variants are close enough to be discussed basically the same way. Swapping ammo out for anything other than Narc in the BX is frequently a bad idea with only the one ton, although I guess you could use one for crowd control with some tear gas rounds. So, you've got one of these in your lance. What
do you do with it while you're looking for a way to bribe and/or blackmail the quartermaster into swapping it for something better? Okay, I know I trashtalked 6/9/6 a little, but it's still moderately fast - faster than a lot of big `Mechs ' so scouting is never a bad choice. On the other hand, it's a light `Mech, you had to know that suggestion was coming, right? The other role a
Mjolnir does well in is as a raider or when facing things of its own ilk, the kind of low-end militia lights like
Quasits or
Patrons, or hammering on the escort vehicles of a light convey. Stay out of pitched battles unless you have to and focus on the job - get in, hit/scan the target, and bug out. You need to plan your moves ahead, too, and have a decent idea what the enemy is going to do (or the rest of your lance can make them do) - you have to disable heat sinks to quickly activate TSM, so even more so than other bad `Mechs, the
Mjolnir requires a bit of chessmaster to make it work. Let the guys in the
Scarabus and the
Osiris get all the glory clashing with the 123rd Falcon Swooping Doves led by whatever the Scientists decanted out of the Pryde line last decade.
You just wreck their supply lines with the rest of your similarly disfavored and ill-equipped lance while those guys are keeping them busy.
I'm interested to hear your opinions. This is a `Mech that's charitably described as "flawed" but it has some genuine uses and any flawed `Mech that triumphs has fun stories with it, even if it's just teaching some pirates to respect the might of your mace. I imagine they also make good mook `Mechs against less experienced players. No one in their right mind takes a 12 point smash across the torso plates twice, teaching them about melee, but it doesn't have the kind of speed, armor, and/or firepower to really be an overwhelming threat, so for a certain type of game, that makes the
Mjolnir a perfect fit. I'm also curious to hear what the Alpha Strike players think. Alternative rules can sometimes expose different sides of a `Mech and the
Mjolnir could use some good press.
MUL:
http://masterunitlist.info/Unit/Details/2194/mjolnir-mlr-b2