Rocketman
This is a rough idea of Rocketman's armoured suit. The main garment is a modified, padded flight suit with an asbestos lining. Over this he wears a 'chemico' flak jacket with an attached groin shield. On his head Rocketman wears a modified paratroopers helmet with a fin. The idea is this assists in steering the rocket, though the rocket pack has its own steering system with smaller retro-jets behind each shoulder. Rocketman wears standard pilots goggles and his face and neck are covered with a silk scarf.
His lower arms are protected by steel vambraces with the left arm terminating in the rocket control mechanism (don't ask me how this works because I don't have a clue, its classified top secret). The controls for the pumps, and the master control switch for the rocket pack are located on the belt. Rocketman wears steel capped boots and steel greaves (with asbestos lining) to protect his legs.
The pistol is a .455 Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver, though this is not Rocketmans usual fire arm (that being a ZK383 heavy submachine gun).
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'Mad Dog' Mitchell
Mitchell didn't require much thought. He started off as a subsidiary character in RM1 and quickly became a staple of the game. He's inspired by every war hero actor of the 1945-1969 era, but especially George Kennedy, Humphrey Bogart and Wayne Morris. He is from Texas because thats where the meanest, toughest Americans are supposed to live, and he is a gun running, whiskey drinking, ex doughboy, safari hand and sometimes mercenary who owns a house in Egypt. He has a wide range of dubious contacts in the shady world of mercenaries and gun smugglers, and can soon find some well armed friends from Turkey to Madagascar. Quite why he is running around the world with Rocketman is not explained.
Apart from his Texan drawl the only constant detail about Mitchell is his .30 Browning Automatic Rifle and his tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
'Mad Dog' MitchellMitchell didn't require much thought. He started off as a subsidiary character in RM1 and quickly became a staple of the game. He's inspired by every war hero actor of the 1945-1969 era, but especially George Kennedy, Humphrey Bogart and Wayne Morris. He is from Texas because thats where the meanest, toughest Americans are supposed to live, and he is a gun running, whiskey drinking, ex doughboy, safari hand and sometimes mercenary who owns a house in Egypt. He has a wide range of dubious contacts in the shady world of mercenaries and gun smugglers, and can soon find some well armed friends from Turkey to Madagascar. Quite why he is running around the world with Rocketman is not explained.
Apart from his Texan drawl the only constant detail about Mitchell is his .30 Browning Automatic Rifle and his tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
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Helga Helga is a mysterious character. A tall, athletic blonde woman who is second in command to Baron Von Schöenburg. She may possibly be the most dangerous woman alive in 1936. Helga is based on numerous femme fatale stereotypes from a range of sources dealing with Germanic women, such as Disney's Helga Sinclair, Helga from Allo' Allo', and Doctor Elsa Schneider from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Helga wears a practical, dull brown mountaineer's anorak, usually carries a back pack and wears old style officer's boots. She carries two fully automatic weapons , a Bergman MP28 (Helga usually employs snail drum magazines with a fifty round capacity as opposed to the regular twenty round box magazine shown in the drawing) and a Mauser M712 (holstered in the drawing) and usually has a few grenades to hand. Those in the drawing are the standard German Model 24.
ONB-7 'Landship'
ONB-7 is a secret Bolshevik organisation, whose head is the mysterious Viktor Korsakov (note, most of the villains in RM are named after composers). Over the years, cut off by years of secret isolation from the Bolshevik leadership which had created it, ONB-7 grew independent and when Lenin died and Stalin took over, Viktor Korsakov resisted the change of leadership because he regarded Stalin as a tyrant dictator and no true communist. When Stalin's purges began, Korsakov severed all ties with the established Communist Party and aided by the fact that ONB-7 was so clandestine as to be invisible to the government in Moscow, he began to move the military and scientific resources of ONB-7 away from Russia and Siberia and into regions beyond Stalin's reach. Hampered in 1935 by Rocketman in a plan to use a Tesla Peace Ray secretly built in Khazakstan, to annhilate Moscow, and thus kill Stalin and his entire government, Korsakov and his remaining military resources retreated to Afghanistan. Rocketman it should be noted was not motivated by any regard for Josef Stalin but because Korsakov had kidnapped Audrey Summers in a bid to get a hold of Rocketman's rocketpack. Saving the hundreds of thousands of innocent Muscovites might also have played a part.
ONB-7 is characterized by two things, the first is the theft and plagarism of scientific discoveries and engineering designs from non Soviet sources and the second is the subsequent 'heavy metal' style of its retro-engineering. ONB-7 is therefore a small military force with sophisticated heavy weaponry.
As a part of Rocketman's alternative historical story, ONB-7 builds a number of ever bigger and more unrealistic war machines. This process culminates in the biggest of all such terrestrial war machines, the landship. Designs for super heavy tanks were common in the 1930's and 40's but largely didn't happen due their costs and the objective lessons of the Second World War. In Rocketman, these hinderances do not exist and ONB-7 having established a network of secret industrial bases outside of the Soviet Union in 1935 and 1936 begin construction of their first true landship in 1937. Their goal, to topple Josef Stalin and re-establish Communism in the Soviet Union and then throughout all Eurasia. The landship model will feature in RM11; The Manchurian Campaign.
