As an intro? Honestly, it wouldn't be terrible given that it's about Dr Davendra Ellstone learning about the ilKhan Alaric Ward and how his new Star League will run Earth, so you learn setting details with her. (She and Alaric do plenty of other stuff, of course: it's a PG-13ish romance novel)

I like the Mustang better, because it was bad enough at high altitudes that RAF Fighter Command didn't use them... until they put a Rolls Royce Spitfire engine in it, and then it was one of the best.

This is probably why my favourite thing they do is Blood Bowl, which I'm not sure would be possible to make serious.

Them: you cannot hold back progress. You must accept your new computational overlords who need all your water. New tech is everything

Also them: Ew not GREEN tech

That Hatamoto-Chi actually belongs to an old man who was left behind after a failed Kuritan raid on Apostica; he's the temporary hire available for the Apostica contracts in the book.

Wrong arms isn't really a thing with these guys. The blue one (Gargoyle) would have come with matching arms and it looks like one of them is on the red one (Executioner). But the thing is: these three mechs are meant to have swappable weapons, so in canon they would just be alternate configurations.

I think the Griffin looks superior, and you'd have to be quite unchrasimatic to disagree with that.

(And hey, we might have to start talking about why gelatin salads were a thing, because they were a form of cold food safety. You blanched everything you wanted to go in the gelatin, so those all got clean, then the gelatin itself used boiled water. When the food’s inside the gelatin, it’s aseptic.)

Dragon Warrior III on NES for both questions. My younger brother got it because we were big into swords & sorcery stuff like The Hobbit and He-Man. Kept playing it despite barely ever getting anywhere because I was 11-12 and a little too impatient to wait for the levels in the included guidebook.

Be warned, the record sheets in it have damage values for playing them against each other rather than against BattleTech-era equipment, and their weapon ranges reflect real life (like long range for a machine gun being somewhere in 36 - 44 hexes).