However, for our S&D campaign, it’s likely we’ll be modifying some of the mechs at some stage. How do you get a CL-style record sheet when there isn’t a program to do it?

Well, in my case, I write my own. I took one of the CL sheets in pdf format and extracted it as a high-definition image. I tinkered with it in an image editor to remove all the armour circles, weapons, critical hits areas and suchlike – so I had a blank sheet with only the outlines of where the data needed to go.

I’m now writing a Visual Basic program that loads this blank sheet onto a document and then populates it with the armour circles, weapons, heat sinks and the like. I’ve got the armour and weapon code finished, and they’re looking really good; still need to finish the code for internal structure, critical hits, heat sinks and ‘mech data – those shouldn’t be that difficult to do.

It’s looking really good! I’ll probably include a basic ‘mech creator into the code at some point (to verify the designs I put in there). I’m pretty happy.

As you can imagine, this program will be for my own private use only, for otherwise I’d get into a bunch of copyright problems.