Mackie

This is your great-grandad's mech. And boy did he kick ass in it.

The Mackie is, without much hyperbole, THE single biggest turning point in the BattleTech universe's history of warfare that didn't involve a FTL drive. It is the grandfather of all further BattleMech designs, and the single biggest gamechanger in warfare since the semi-automatic weapon.

Also in some of it's art it has cock-guns. Because yes.

History

The Mackie is the first true BattleMech, the result of a decade's worth of hard work by Terran Hegemony scientists and engineers putting the lessons learned from IndustrialMechs into a single 100-ton death robot. It was first put into combat testing on February 5th, 2439 against four remote controlled Tanks, piloted by one Colonel Charles Kincaid. Not a single one of the tanks could leave a serious mark against it, and after shredding the first three tanks into ribbons with it's gun, Charles proved his point by smashing the last one flat with the Mackie's foot; winning the simulated battle and surpassing all expectations wildly, and the Hegemony immediately put this walking gun platform into service; first against the Draconis Combine, and then proudly ensuring it made it's way to battlefields across the Inner Sphere for almost 110 years before the plans for such a beast were leaked to one of the great houses, and finally ceased production during the Aramis Civil War.

Though antiquated and almost never going to see real combat again, there are quite a few surviving examples of Mackies kicking around in the 31st century. Some of them even walk on their own still! Though like the grandpas they are, they're creaky and a bit slow.

Armaments

Because it was mostly a testbed technology that ended up becoming a full production Mech, nobody really knew how many guns were "too much" on a Mech it's size, and so they simply plopped the top of the line guns from other systems onto it; A PPC, an Autocannon/10, and two Medium Lasers. By modern standards, it's a bit undergunned, but you have to remember the only things this mech were firing at for the first 100 years of it's lifespan were tanks and jets, which don't do well to sustained fire or from just being stepped on by something much, much larger than it. This thing is considered old by the time of the Star League, so even trying to make one of these shoot something in the "modern day" of the BattleTech universe is a pointless endeavor; you're much better off just selling it as a relic of an older time to a museum.

Where it does have a huge leg up is in it's armor, of which 20 tons of it is dedicated to protecting the pilot, making it a very tough nut to crack, even in the modern day, especially once later variants began putting ablative armor onto it.

Variants

• MSK-5S - The prototype fielded by Charlie Kincaid against the four tanks. Had a somewhat different loadout, as it used an Autocannon/5 and a torso mounted large laser. Still did plenty of damage and paved the way for the production model.
• MSK-7# - The first upgrade from non-Terran Hegemony factions, typically giving the MSK-7 series a different letter designation and a slightly different paint job, though all had the production model's focus on an Autocannon and energy weapon basic loadout.
• MSK-8B - A less than official designation, as the -8B series it mostly describes any Mackie that's been refitted with more modern internals or weaponry.
• MSK-9H - The Mackie was the Terran Hegemony's baby, and while other powers were starting to wrap up it's use, they still wanted to make it sing. All of it's military use gave them a long list of improvements that could possibly be made for the old machine, and they packed as many of them as they could into this one; shedding a single ton of armor, and re-fitting the main armaments into being two PPCs and an Autocannon/20, all backed up by two Medium Lasers. While that did cut back on it's effective range and made it exceptionally expensive, it also made it almost twice as dangerous, and many of the surviving Mackies are from this class. Alex Kerensky wanted to take as many of these as he could into the Deep Periphery, but could only summon about 100 of them.
• Kill Roy's Little Buddy - A mascot mech for the Grimdark Olympics of the future. It was an MSK-9H fitted with two autocannons instead of the one big one with two tons of ammo stocked in the torso, protected by the CASE system. Probably collecting mothballs in a storage unit somewhere.