Salvage and Repairs

 One reason I like frankenmechs is the same reason I liked the original Battletech setting: it’s like lots of the Mechs are built, or at least reassembled, in a repair shop. Your Mech has been in your family for three or more generations, and it can’t easily be replaced. If it gets beat up, you take it in and repair it as much as you can or you just fight with a broken Mech. Technicians are worth more than tanks, and nobody has any idea how some advanced machines like jumpships work.

This was emphasized in the early Gray Death Legion novels. Mechwarriors always doubled as technicians, and when their base was captured, the worst part was that they couldn’t repair their Mechs. It was also front and center in the early scenario packs, where you had Mechs with permanent damage that couldn’t be repaired for lack of parts or permanent structural damage. One very cool take on it was the novel Double Blind, where Avanti’s Angels made a point to always collect what battlefield salvage they could get.

So how would I model this in a Mobile Frame Zero campaign? First, I wouldn’t use this as a hard and fast limit on frames or systems. That’s a restriction that seriously limits your tactical options in the pre-game bidding, and it gives one person the advantage based on how damaged their opponents’ frames are. It makes it so the winner of one battle is more likely to win the next. I would consider voluntarily limiting systems per frame for frames that were damaged in previous battles, but in that case it’s choosing to limit systems and then justifying it with the battle damage.

If you really want to limit frame loadouts based on previous damage, say that everyone was damaged in the previous battle and put the same limitations on every force.

It’s better to model previous damage in the way frames are constructed out of legos. Make one frame a little more patchwork, with a mismatched arm structure or different colors for different parts of the frame. Remove a few decorative tiles here and there to give it a more “exposed structure” look. Your field repairs may not be pretty, but they’re good enough to keep the frame functioning and in the fight.

To model battlefield salvage, consider duplicating opponents’ previously lost systems with similar parts for your frame. There’s an example of this in the opening fiction for Rapid Attack, where Estar notices an opponent’s frame carrying a riot shield that her own frame had dropped the previous week. If the other frame that had lost the part before shows up with a similar part again, they must have had spare parts available.

Finally, you can use a crate of spare parts or a group of technicians as stations for your company or as a special objective to capture in a battle. It won’t affect how you play (though you may decide that whoever ends up with it gets to decide a design constraint or system limits for everyone - see Rapid Attack pages 148-149), but it makes the narrative more interesting.