Inspired decision
Me mates and I enjoy a bit of steampunk engineering, and most of the time we use one of our garages. This is fine since we usually tinker about making wee clockwork rodents. Occasionally we'll go for something a bit more adventurous such as doing contract work doing up cars and motorbikes with superfluous pipes, lenses, and a bit of a spraypaint job. It's bloody good fun, and we're getting pretty adept at "salvaging" scrap piping from construction sites at night.

Now for a quick aside; I used to work in the Lifescan packaging plant up in Inverness, and there was this one bloke who told me a story about a time of his at a music festival years earlier. He was on MASSIVE DRUGS when he starts hearing screams coming from one end of the campsite. The screams keep getting closer so he pops his head out to see what's happening, and to his horror there's a man on a fucking five foot tall, hydraulic spider-leg mech. My workmate looks up at the goggle-wearing pilot of this magnificent beast and promptly shits himself. At this, the pilot bends over and leers right in me mate's face, then buggers off again.

So, back to the garage; remembering this story, I wanted to try and make something similar myself. A quick look at our supplies told us that it'd be nigh impossible to pull off an eight, or even a six legged machine, so we drafted a plan for what basically looked like a metal plated Indian elephant. The way we managed to do it was by having the pilot in the front with the huge engine behind him. This way we only had to power the back legs. The pilot would not only have to manipulate the engine-powered legs but would also need to manually operate the unpowered front legs in time so as to not fall over.

Over about two years we managed to get it to a state where we reckoned we could fire it up for a quick test-run. The best place for this in Inverness was Bught Park, but we hadn't counted on the circus being around.

Since we were quite a shy bunch - not too surprising for a bunch of fringe geeks - we decided to do our test at night. Since the park is fairly big we were pretty confident that we wouldn't wake anyone, but like I said, we hadn't counted on the circus. So when we started the thing up it made a hell-shattering racket that woke up the circus workers, who being as they are, got pissed off immediately. They started throwing things at us, but I, the pilot, realised that I couldn't shut down my damn machine. The circusians eventually got so bonkers - they couldn't hear our protestations over the noise - that they used their fucking cannons to fire things at us. One by one, my friends ran away or were knocked out, but I was stuck. Eventually the nuts had run out of inanimate objects to fire and started shooting their goddamn midgets. One hit the midsection of the mech, and another hit just behind the front legs. My beautiful, awful elephant was fucked and fell over.

It was at this point that I realised the boiler in the engine might over-heat due to the vent being bent and blocking off escaping steam. It might over-heat to the extent that it would explode. It was also at this point that I noticed that the midgets (or dwarfs) we holding fucking spears even as they flew at me. One of the little shits was even dressed as a cunting bear, and I now knew I either had to dodge ewok or fix.

_{Please kill me}
( clockworkrat has nice pants, Thu 14 Jul 2011, 6:39, 2 replies)

Haha
Not a bad effort at punnage, but good build-up.
(Blunt Logic, Thu 14 Jul 2011, 8:59, closed)

An excellent effort
I thought.
( Funkenschlag still likes dogs more than cats, Thu 14 Jul 2011, 10:35, closed)