The Bushwacker

Greetings Mech Fans. I have put together a few reviews of various mechs, mostly assault class and given you my thoughts on each one so far. Today I will venture into the medium class mechs.

The Medium Class mechs offer speed and the beginnings of some big firepower. I would venture to say that in many league settings, the Medium Class of Battlemech sees the most action. I do not have any stats to back that up, it is just a gut feeling.

The reason I say that is the weights of this class, 40 to 55 tons. There is also a good variety to choose from. In this class, a drop commander can find something for all purposes, something that packs a bit of a punch and stays up until the last shot is fired.

The Bushwacker fills this slot nicely. At 55 tons, this machine can fill many roles. Lets take a closer look.

To start, let’s look at the electronics package. The Bushy has the following options available to a pilot, BAP, LAMS, IFF and Advanced Gyro. This is a decent package. BAP and IFF allow this ground pounder to see things a long way off while keeping itself difficult to target. The Advanced Gyro keeps this baby on its feet when the shots eventually do find it. Most of you already know how Vettie feels about LAMS (take 'em if you can).

At full Ferro armour, the Bushwacker holds just over 11 tons with standard internals. The Chassis is very low slung, near “V” shaped. This is one of the toughest mechs in the game, regardless of class. The shape, the small profile and the standard internals make it hold up very well in the course of a battle.

Offensively, this mech is well rounded. The right arm holds up to a 3-slot ballistic weapon. The nose has another 2-slot ballistic and a 2-slot energy. The missile slot on the rear of the torso can hold a 2-slot weapon and the left arm can hold a 3-slot missile weapon. Initially, one would think of the Bushy as a good missile platform, having BAP and all those missile slots, but you do not see many of those on the battlefield. The missile slots are often emptied in favor of the ballistic slots.

This mech is often used as a brawler. Those ballistic slots allow for some fine weapons, as well as some speed, and if you choose, the Advanced Gyro makes it one tough customer in battle. One of the most brutal configs for this machine is 2 RAC5 Auto Cannons and a Large X-Pulse laser. Set the speed at 84 and rip away.

Along the brawler theme, one of my favourite configs is to load full reactive armour, LAMS, IFF and Advanced Gyro while setting the speed to 77. For weapons, I like the LBX20 with a double load in the right arm, a medium pulse laser in the nose and in the torso missile rack I put the InfernoSRM. This combo smacks the enemy with an LBX very hard. The medium pulse laser seems to work very well against an opponent in a brawl allowing for multiple shots in rapid succession. Usually, your opponent will have reactive armour as well and the pulse lasers seem to just rip the armour away. Finally, the ISRM does not do much damage, but it heats the opponent up very quickly, often times shutting down their mech as they scramble to flush coolant. You, on the other hand are very cool in your ride as you come up to the shut down mech and blast away with that LBX hammer and rip holes with that pulse gun in your nose.

Briefly, I touched on the defensive part of this battlewagon. The shape of the Bushwacker has a lot to do with its longevity in battle. The sloping nose and “V” shaped torso seem to make many ballistic shot glance off without doing full damage. The center torso of this mech is hard to find, although it does have one. Most of the damage absorbed by the Bushy is taken in the side torsos or arms before the center takes critical damage. In battle, you will often see ‘armless’ Bushwackers limping towards you still firing from the nose trying to do you in. Legs of the Bushy often are favourite targets for the enemy as they are probably the weakest part of the mech.

I like the Bushy, but do not use them very much. I have used a few in situations where I knew it was going to be a brawl or in city fights. Make no mistake, this is a tough mech. A Bushwacker pilot skilled in spreading damage can often be the last guy standing in battle. You can load weapons that support a ranged fire game. The BAP option helps in locating the bad guys up to 1200 meters away. It can pack an ARROW TBOLT or Cluster making for lots of missile punch. It can hold 2 Lt. Gauss for extreme range fights. In closer, 2 AC10s and an X-Pulse will hurt anyone. All in all, I would say this is a well-rounded mech.

Well, I do not know what else to say about this mech, time to rate it. Vettie’s Rating? A solid 4 minutes, excellent for its weight class, good in most situations and a tough mech to bring down.

Bushwacker – 55tons of stomping toughness.

The first review of the Bushy brought us a very good rating talking about the toughness of this mech. MP3 visited this mech but I don’t believe much was changed. The slots are still the same, the speeds seem to be the same and the electronics package is the same.

I went through this mech and bounced it against my earlier review. The Bushwacker has not changed for MP3. It is a very tough mech and well designed. The low slung body (very similar to the Clan Ares) shaped like a cigar appears to be the best torso design for our Battlemechs.

Take a look at the ‘tougher’ mechs, the ones that seemingly are the hardest to kill, the ones that just seem to be a bullet sponge and continue to take damage. The Bushwacker, Ares and Marauder all share a very similar torso design, long and narrow, rounded or pointed at the nose. The Ares got a boost in body size, that is, the overall scale of the mech was increased to make it more in line with others of its size, but it is still one tough mech.

There are a couple of problems that I see with the Bushwacker, but overall, it is a damn fine mech. The issues? I see overall speed and weak arms as the two things that keep this battlemech from being uber. The basic speed is just over 77kph. To put a good weapons load on this mech with full or near full ferro armour, you only get about one speed increase up to 84kph. Sure you can strip some armour or drop some weapons to increase your speed, but most will opt for firepower, I would.

The arms are a tad on the weak side. The missile arm almost always is used to strip armour from (similar to a Thanatos) but the ballistic arm is not much better. This arm holds a 3 ballistic slot that is very important to the overall firepower of the mech. Pilots will need to learn to shield this arm from incoming enemy fire.

That about wraps up the Bushwacker. Few if any changes for MP3 as this mech was already pretty good. My original rating still stands.