Name: Alec Carrick
Appearance: Short and well-muscled, with jagged brown hair and grey-blue eyes. His flightsuit is a grey base with orange accents, and he typically wears slacks, vests, and t-shirts in muted tones when not piloting.
Biography: Alec is a spacer child, born aboard a freighter. At sixteen he took his accumulated pay and jumped ship while docked at the colony; a year later he was broke and unemployed and enlisted with the colony's defense force. His life aboard ship hadn't been very good in terms of preparing him for groundside life, but his mechanical skills won him a spot as a mech technician. Three years later, at the age of twenty, Alec managed to earn a qualifying score in the biannual sim tourneys, and he began his training as a pilot. He graduated into active duty at twenty-two, scarcely six months before the independence movement arrived at the tipping point. He wasn't born there, but the colony is his home, and what few friends he has live on the fledgling world--if nothing else, he's damned sure that the Earthers are going to look after themselves first and the rest of humanity never.
Mech: Hurricane Spirit was originally something of a relic, a decades-old Grasshopper II-b variant designed for infantry support and forward spotting for artillery. When it came into the hands of the previous owner, she and her rather eccentric mechanic decided to upgrade it with every cutting-edge device that the two had developed, or so the story goes. They upgraded the old gasoline-burning engine and added a sidealong antimatter reactor as the new main power source, as well as an energy shroud similar to one that had only recently left testing back in Earther research facilities. The CIWS also got an upgrade from the absolutely ancient rounds it was firing, and the two layered the thing with all the stealth devices they had build. To top it off, after testing the thing and finding that it--amazingly--wasn't an unstable deathtrap, they (possibly after a night of too much alcohol mixed with old cartoons and wargames) upgraded the thing to include a variable-form shift into a fighter aircraft.
Life being what it is, the pilot drank herself to death less than a year later, after her friend killed himself testing sarin-gas bullets without protective gear. This left the mech sitting in storage for months; variable-form mechs aren't common to begin with, and they tend to require a certain type of skill to handle the transformation well, never mind that this one was full of barely-tested equipment, including a damned AM reactor, without so much as an ejection seat. Naturally, when a rookie pilot came along with sim crosstraining as a fighter jock as well as a mech pilot, the base commander was more than happy to be generous and flat-out give him a cutting-edge mech with relatively few contractual clauses regarding duration of service or repayment.
Hurricane Spirit is an upright, two legged mech with a somewhat lopsided look (though the actual balance has been compensated for) thanks to the large gauss cannon mounted on the left shoulder. The arms bulge, on the right with the high-powered CIWS, and on the left with the armored housing for the shield generator. The torso is surprisingly bulky for such a small mech, mostly thanks to the shielding around the A-M reactor, though there's also a large, rounded protrusion from the back which houses the primary jumpjets. All of these lumps, however, have been formed into a highly angular design thanks to modifications to the armor and the additional stealth plating. Alec has been reluctant to repaint the machine before being in a real battle, so it has retained the original owner's color scheme: a lime green base with hot pink accents. It's sort of embarrassing, but superstition is rarely worth flouting, at least as far as spacers are concerned.
When transformed, the mech-plane is still highly angular, and takes on something of a delta-V shape, with the main gauss cannon embedded in the left wing and the CIWS closer to the center-line in the right wing. The legs form into a number of additional flight surfaces, while the paired jet engines emerge from within the torso and settle at the rear, powered directly by the A-M reactor, which is located at the heart of the craft. The jump-jets shift down to the lower surface of the aircraft, giving it VTOL capability. Thanks to the expertise of the people that converted it, the entire change occurs in less than three seconds.
Skills: (Divide 60 points amongst these)
15 - Reflexes : Used to determine initiative, as well as dodging
15 - Piloting : How good you are at controlling the mech. Used for most basic and advanced maneuvers.
10 - Engineering : Damage control, Identifying enemy mech, gauging a building's structural entigrity
15 - Targeting : Not only does this include firing most of your weaponry, but also spotting and various other techniques
5 - Communications: NPC relations (though this is more influenced by actual RP), but also used for coordinated tactics.
Traits: (Between 1-4. Specific bonuses for your character. Serves as a balancing mechanism for your mech, so expect less if you have a really good one.)
-Space-Born: Like most people raised in space, Alec is comfortable with both high- and zero-G conditions, as well as positional orientations other than the typical head-up feet-down of groundside life.
-That Tingling Sensation: Long years of life in space inure you to the constant presence of death, when a tiny mistake or malfunction could kill you or the entire crew of your ship. For Alec, this has become almost instinctual, a subconscious awareness of small details signalling danger from mechanical problems and external threats, which may manifest from time to time as a vague awareness that something is wrong.
-Mental Coordination: Despite his relative newness as a pilot, Alec has spent a great deal of time training in sims during off-hours, especially with one of the easiest skills to translate from sim work to real combat: the speed at which he can translate thoughts and intentions into actions, particularly in regards to reducing the delay between spotting a target and firing on it.
Author
Topic: Illion : Mech RPG: Game thread: (Read 14649 times)