Building a tabletop game Campaign- need advice and inspiration on Redneck-ery

So to make a long story and idea as short as possible, it's a battletech group and the storyline is basically "Red Dawn in the 31st century, but it's a bunch of Rednecks turning work tools into technicals to fight space Fascists". The Duke Boys Reaplce the State Government. The idea is gaining steam with the right blend of "could actually happen in-universe" but with a 70% Funny / 30% serious style tone, and I'm starting to look into 1900s Unionization fighting and other historical origins of Blue collar labor for more inspiration while also making rules for how they're gonna yank 300+ year old nukes apart to make a new Fission plant for the equivalent of a Kubota diesel excavator with an MLRS.

Basically? I need inspiration. Wild and great examples of redneckery. Ideas from both history to make missions, but also aesthetics and designs to look "right". For example, here's gonna be one of the "prized" machines they'll use:

Can any of you guys help? I can post FAR more points if you need more details.

EDIT: Naturally I forgot an important detail. Pilots are drawn from the blue collar workforce that uses huge robots, so mining, dock working, cattlemasters (giant robots move space cows, its cool go away) forestry and such. The player characters are basically just dudes and other countryboys who had enough and formed their own militia.

There's a Love and Robots episode on Netflix that is a bunch of farmers with mechs defending against aliens. Might be a good start.

I'll come back to this thread once I'm done working on the house today, I might have some ideas, just a bit distracted currently

Damn.  I searched around and couldn't find any video, but there was a performance art group that basically built remote-controlled excavation equipment and the like and then staged these big apocalyptic battle dances with them.

Imagine an excavator swinging the boom wildly around and a backhoe repeatedly slamming the bucket down hard enough to make the whole thing bounce around like a lowrider... against a backdrop of liquid fire from an agricultural irrigation head pumping flaming gasoline over the whole area.

Like that.  Sorry I couldn't find any video but I don't remember the group's name.

Confederate ironclads came to mind - they tended to be really jury rigged. The first one, the Virginia, was made out of a captured warship that had been burned to the waterline to try to keep the Confederates from doing anything with it. Instead, they put a wooden box of cannons on it, hammered railroad rails flat to armor it, and instantly made all the Union warships obsolete - except for one. Later ones were even more jury rigged, made out of whatever engines, hulls, and scrap metal they could find. There's a book called Secret Missions of the Civil War that has some other interesting improvised bombs, torpedoes, and even a battle that involved a phony ship that had been thrown together out of wood overnight.

The Polish Underground from World War II had some pretty good examples of jury rigged weapons.

https://militaryhistorynow.com/2020/10/15/home-made-arsenal-nine-ingenious-weapons-of-the-polish-underground-2/

This guy is carrying a flamethrower made from a tank of gasoline and a tank of compressed air. The mindset to use something like that might not quite fit the spirit of the campaign - this seems like the sort of thing you'd use with a "It'll probably get me killed, but at least I'll give a lot of enemies a very painful death first" mentality. And then there's this tank built out of a truck.

The Russian Katyusha is another weaponized truck that kind of fits the idea. Take one cargo truck, put a bunch of rockets on it.

Damn it now I'm looking on eBay for an old copy of MechWarrior.

Zip ties and duct tape everywhere.

FloridaMan inspiration?  Swamp buggies and amphibious mechs?  I can see a giant mech hiding just below the water, sensory apparatus poking up just above the waterline just like a gator.

Are there giant bio-engineered beasts of burden that FloridaMan would work with?

One of the most common themes in early union history is a regular working joe that got pushed too far and turned against the employers.  Common in all revolutions, actually.

Go play some redneck rampage for a while.

I hear historical Redneckery, I think of the story of Cooter Brown.  If you don't know, the phrase "drunker than Cooter Brown" has been around for a while.  Supposedly there was a man, Cooter Brown, who lived on the Mason-Dixon line and had family on both sides of the Civil War so he didn't want to choose a side.  He solved it by getting as drunk as humanly possible and staying that way whenever someone official showed up to get him to enlist in one side or the other.

Peak redneckery doesn't care about safety, as evidenced by this Russian bike:

However, that doesn't mean the redneckery has to be as non-technical as this.  Project Orion is about the most redneck thing I can think of.  A starship that spits an atomic bomb out of its rear end, detonates that bomb, and then uses the force of that blast for acceleration.

Additionally, for improvised weaponry, Operation Plumbbob has a great one.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#Missing_steel_bore_cap

However, don't forget the Moon miners and the effects of the Earth being at the bottom of a gravity well would have.  The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is one of the first instances I can think of as using kinetic bombardment for effect, but it would be a good one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

The mech game "Heavy Gear" has some interesting mech design considerations that could apply.  Basically, there is the "default size" for how much crap you want to put in and making something bigger than it needs to be is easier/cheaper, and cramming 10 gallons of E36 M3 into a 5 gallon bucket is harder/more-expensive.  This lends itself to redneckery being easier to cobble and easier to hit.  There is also a cost associated with mass produced vs. a GRM project, with the increased chances of "lemon" features in the latter as well as randomly determining what those bugs might be.

Not really redneck, but you could also try Bolos.

Even though that one does not seem to have a Hellbore cannon.

Or a simple Toyota truck.

And last but not least. One more example for inspiration for mech fighters.

Tachikoma

I don't know.  Maybe find several old model kits cheap, tanks, cars, and farm machinery.  Take all the parts and put them into one box and build something.  lol

Stampie (FS) said:

Damn it now I'm looking on eBay for an old copy of MechWarrior.

I still have the MechWarrior RPG somewhere...  probably where I have my old Car Wars stuff hidden. I thought these games were cool, but I was never able to find anyone to play them with me 30+ years ago... 

In reply to Mr_Asa :

And he woulda got everybody if it hadn't been for that one wobbly wheel...

The Leveler from Ferngully

Crazy Soviet construction equipment

Beer Baron said:

Crazy Soviet construction equipment

Even comes with a theme song: