BattleTech Spacecraft

This page is about Spacecraft in the BattleTech universe. In general BattleTech space travel is mostly fairly well grounded with little really exotic technology being employed. From a narrative and most gameplay perspective, Spacecraft in the BattleTech universe generally takes a secondary role to combat on the ground with BattleMechs, Elementals and similar. Never the less, it is fairly well explored.

Systems

Kearny-Fuchida Drive

FTL Travel in Battletech is achieved thanks to Kearny Fuchida Drive (KF Drive or Jump Drive for short). Developed in the early 22nd century by the Deimos Project it made it's first jump in 2108, it opened up the galaxy to human colonization shortly afterwards with the first extrasolar colony being established in 2116 on Tau Ceti IV. After that there has been some incremental refinements but the basic system have not changed much since then. Physically, it’s a titanium-germanium alloy core that’s meters thick and surrounded by a super-cold envelope of liquid helium while hooked up to controls and circuits to act as a capacitor. Some (mostly WarShips) also have a Lithium-Fusion battery to enable a second Jump immediately after entering another Jump Point to avoid the need to recharge immediately. On the other hand, said battery is expensive and doubles the amount of time to recharge everything once all the energy is depleted.

To Jump from system to system, you need a lot of power and that power takes a long time to build up from collecting solar wind from a sail-shaped energy collector. Then you need a Jump Point, typically these are zones of space above the North and South Poles of a Star which are the preferred points but there are other spots to jump from called Pirate Points which are riskier. It takes a bit of time to spin things up even when the Drive is fully charged but once the timer reaches zero, you are effectively instantly transported to your destination, another Jump Point within 30 LY of where you started from¹. Jump Drives release a lot of light and radiation when they Jump, meaning that a stealthy arrival is not really possible. They are also rather pricey pieces of hardware.

Occasionally things go wrong: a ship missjumps and ends up far off course, arrives badly damaged, blows up or simply disappears. The risk goes up if you don't calculate things right and there is less fudge factor with Pirate Points. Even so while it is kind of clunky, it's a generally safe way to get from Point A to Point B across interstellar distances (at least in comparison to the inherent risks of Space Travel), the mechanisms can last for centuries and of course you are not literally taking a detour through Fucking Hell.

¹ This means that for practical purposes interstellar travel is often reckoned in Jumps. If Star Systems A, B and C are respectively 40, 50 and 65 light years away, a ship would need to jump twice to reach A or B and three times to reach C.

Artificial Gravity

Either comes from thrust while the ship is under acceleration or rotating centrifugal sections. Former is more common but very high maintenance from the crews having to balance health and morale against fuel use. Latter is less intensive on maintenance but requires a much bigger hull to support.

In the 2018 Battletech video game, the prototype Argo DropShip (that is the player’s base) is designed to make use of both, with a centrifuge section which folds up so that "down" is either being spun outward or against acceleration.

Weapons

Basically larger versions of BattleMech, Aerospace Vehicle, or Combat Vehicle armaments called Capital, Sub-Capital, or Naval weapons. The only difference is their scale to the point they’re the size of a BattleMech and (if big enough) possible capabilities in orbital bombardment. Smaller versions tend to be optimized for engaging Aerospace Fighters, Small Craft, and DropShips. Larger ones are for WarShip-to-WarShip while the biggest ones can be used for bombarding continents and planets into oblivion.

They have their own damage scale where 1 point of capital scale damage = 10 points of standard scale damage.

• Lasers
• Particle Projector Cannons
• Conventional Missiles
• Nuclear Missiles
• Gauss Cannons
• Mass Drivers
• Auto Cannon

JumpShips

An Invader JumpShip with the Argo latched onto one of it's hardpoints

A Ship with a Jump Drive is called a JumpShip. Typically the Ship is built around the Jump Drive, with up to 95% of the total volume of a typical JumpShip being dedicated to that specific mechanism and it's ancillary systems. They are also typically large. The smallest JumpShip was the Bug-Eye, a 129 meter long 6,100 tonne specialized surveillance craft and it's rare to find one under 100,000 tonnes. The highest limit a conventional JumpShip’s size is theorized to be 500,000 tonnes.

Civilian JumpShips as a rule can't do much more than Jump, having only minimal STL fusion drives they spend most of their days skipping from point to point ferrying STL ships which latch onto their Jump Points and using a big array of solar panels to recharge. Only occasionally coming into port at space docks for maintenance and so their crews don't die of boredom. These were either owned by government bodies for their logistical needs or are privately owned and operated, offering their service to whoever has the C-Bills. By 3055, there were something to the effect of 30,000 JumpShips in operation in the Inner Sphere at a minimum. In the early 31st century, production of new civilian JumpShips had been reduced to a trickle compared to what it had been under the Star League. Fortunately JumpShips are built to last.

Some of them might might have a few guns for defence and occasionally pirates might slap on some more for raids, but this is like slapping an M2 Browning and some Katyusha rocket launchers onto a river barge or a cruise ship. Yes, it works but it's far from optimal since you're under-armored and under-armed. You'd only really do it if you could not put together something proper, speaking of which...

WarShips

WarShips are JumpShips that have two defining features. First of all and most obvious is that they are heavily armed, armored, and are made for combat. Secondly they have Compact KF-Drives which do the same job as the regular civilian models while being half the size, but come at a price-tag five times higher than normal. This means they have space left over for fuel, weapons, armor, redundant systems, engines that can get around a system faster than a metaphorical space tortoise and similar. These range from comparatively small frigates a couple hundred meters long to two-kilometer long Dreadnoughts. Mass-wise, their upper limit is theorized to be 2.5 million tonnes.

The thing about WarShips is that one of them in orbit of a planet can drop a lot of fuckload of nukes and cause a lot of devastation, as well as being able to provide less apocalyptic orbital support to forces on the ground. After the collapse of the old Terran Alliance, the powers that had the resources to build WarShips of their own were able to impose their social orders onto systems and planets which lacked them, giving rise to the Successor States. When the peer powers met, this caused it's own problem. The best response to a WarShip is another WarShip, hopefully to intercept before it reaches a populated world or if that fails as a means of retaliation. The Ares Convention was put into place to prevent worlds from burning and Star League tried it's best to demilitarize the Inner Sphere to avoid that. Unfortunately, their worst nightmares came true after the First Succession War when the Successor States proceeded to spend their fleets bombing everyone back into the stone age.

During the Succession Wars, Warships became LosTech to most of the Inner Sphere the Near Periphery. All examples were destroyed and the survivors had only a limited capacity to churn out a few new civilian JumpShips every year. ComStar had a few Warships squirreled away in distant asteroid bases as well as the technical data in hidden vaults. The only place were WarShips were actively being made was Clanspace, in which bigger and badder WarShips than ever before were coming out of Clan drydocks, on top of a lot of old SLDF WarShips that had been part of the Exodus.

YardShips

Straddling the line between a converted WarShip and a collapsible orbital space station equipped with a KF Drive (like the Hughes-derived Hephaestus class orbital factories), they’re basically the equivalent to naval heavy-lift ships used for transporting ship hulls in real life. More focused on repairs and accommodation of crews, they’re not as well armed as WarShips. While they became LosTech with the bulk of the Newgrange and Faslane class being destroyed in the Succession Wars, Clan Sea Fox in the Dark Age converted some of their WarShips into CargoShips and ArcShips from Potemkin class WarShips to transport their orbital factories, house their population, and store their merchandise on a massive scale to support their nomadic civilization.

STL Craft

Monitors

A failed experiment in designing an interplanetary WarShip without a Jump Drive and replacing the mass it would occupy with more engines, weapons, or armor. If all you do is strip out the Jump Drive from an existing WarShip design, you lose key structural supports that cause the monitor to tear itself apart when attempting maneuvers. Nobody ever got around to designing one that was structurally sound. After the catastrophic failure of the first Monitor prototype, nobody in the Battletech universe believes its possible to even conceive such a thing, much less attempt to build it; even while the Succession Wars were ranging and WarShips were becoming LosTech artifacts because nobody could replace the Compact K-F drives they used, everyone understood that monitors were as useless as a sword made out of gold. Never mention them, ever.

Officially, CGL has declared that WarShip-sized Monitors will never be a thing in Battletech because their existence would fuck up the setting too much. Given the way tonnage works in the game, any WarShip would be outclassed by any Monitor of equal tonnage while their relative technical simplicity would make them far more common and thus a much more important part of the setting than WarShips, DropShips, and AeroSpace Fighters currently are. A similar problem exists in most ship-building combat systems (BFG, D20 Future, Rogue Trader RPG, etc), with the effect of making it much easier to defend than to attack (much like Axis & Allies).

The only technical Monitors that exist are Pocket WarShips, which are essentially DropShip-sized space torpedo boats designed to live long enough to fire anti-ship naval missiles and defend proper WarShips from fighters. Even the smallest WarShip is at least 10 times the mass of a common DropShip, though post-3150 TROs state that the Republic of the Sphere fielded examples of the Castrum Class Pocket WarShip at least 100,000 tons, nearly the size of the lightest Corvettes that range from 130,000 to 200,000 tons.

DropShips

Weighing between 200 to 100,000 tonnes, DropShips are STL ships which are capable of landing on a planet's surface, launching themselves back into space and getting around a star system on their own carrying people, cargo and BattleMechs. It is possible to build a JumpShip which can do this as well, but it's generally considered to be not worthwhile and almost all of them them are built, work and meet their ultimate fates (salvage, destruction in battle, lost in a missjump, whatever) entirely beyond a planet's atmosphere. To get from system to system, DropShips latch onto specialized hardpoints on JumpShips to be ferried about.

Both Civilian and Military DropShips are built and used, with the distinction being one of armor, armament and intended cargo. In a pinch a civie DropShip can deploy Mechs into the fray, but you'd prefer one that can take a beating and actually fight back somewhat against interceptors and provide a bit of ground support. Military DropShips are sometimes used in Fleet Battles, especially when on the offensive. Sub-variants of Military DropShips are Pocket WarShips (which are equivalent to modern fast attack patrol boats armed with torpedo's or missiles) and Assault DropShips designed to shoot any BattleMech or Aerospace Fighter trying to take on it head-on before it can unload its armed cargo.

Most of them are egg shaped, landing pointy side up. Others look like bulked up Space Shuttles. Some are equipped to release BattleMechs in Drop Pods but only for special operations where anti aircraft defenses are too stiff to mount a conventional landing.

Aerospace Fighters

Fusion-reactor powered Fighters that can operate in both planetary atmospheres and in space. A bit chonky compared to, say, Star Wars fighters and can weigh between 20 to 100 tonnes. They are dependent on carrier vessels. Another variation are OmniFighters. They are just as modular as OmniMechs but just as expensive and niche. Like BattleMechs, they are split into weight classes of:

• Light (20-45 tonnes): fastest and most agile with flexibility to take on multiple roles.
• Medium (50-70 tonnes): slower than lighter fighters but have more staying power in dogfights due to heavier armament and armor.
• Heavy (75-100 tonnes): slowest and least agile, they shine the most in attack roles against DropShips and Warships or as bombers.

Conventional Fighter

Combat aircraft that are restrict to planetary atmospheres with a weight restriction of 10-50 tonnes and are much less capable at frontline combat than their Aerospace brethren. Unlike their more advanced brethren, they can use propellers and conventional combustion engines instead of fusion reactors while being cheaper and much easier to manufacture for militia. They are often supported by VTOL aircraft that are rotary wing vehicles.

Small Craft

Small shuttles, life boats, and escape pods and so forth that weigh less than 200 tonnes. They're basically the equivalent to the real-life Space Shuttles and reusable lifting-body space planes that we see in the 21st Century.

Notable Battletech Spacecraft

JumpShips

• Invader: In 3025 this single miss-named class of cargo ship constituted about 46% of all Inner Sphere JumpShips.
• Merchant: second most common JumpShip at 32% of Inner Sphere JumpShips, it does have a problem with securing spare parts for the engine power converter.
• Tramp: an older model, it’s more common in the Periphery and has some defensive armament to deter pirates. While originally discontinued in favor of the more capable Star Lord class with twice the DropShip capacity, it was reintroduced once the Succession Wars hit.
• Magellen: ComStar's version of the Enterprise while also possessing a stronger communication system, a built-in HPG node, and a Lithium-Fusuon Battery, it was used to explore the Deep Periphery, one of these ships had the misfortune of stumbling to Chimney Kitten territory in 3048 and set off the Clan Invasion.
• Argo: A one-off experimental DropShip created for exploratory missions, the Succession Wars ended any hopes of it being mass produced. It comes with unique experimental features, like three deckpods that can use the ship's inertia to simulate gravity when in motion or open up and spin to simulate gravity through centrifugal forces when stationary. It also came with multiple degrees of advanced, automated medical and maintenance bay equipment for supporting explorers and their gear. Technically only pseudo-canon when it took center stage in the 2018 Battletech video game, it was canonized in the House Arano (The Aurigam Coalition) supplement published by CGL.

WarShips

• Leviathan: The biggest fucking ship in BattleTech at 2.4 million tonnes, built by the Clans in no small part as a flex.
• Nightlord: The most recent Clan Battleship, whose combat efficiency suffers slightly since the designers decided it should also be capable of langing a whole planetary assauly force on its own. Still, a Clan tech Battleship is stil a serious threat to everyone.
• McKenna: THE Old Star League era Battleship with a mass of 1.9 million tonnes. Armed with massive PPC batteries, and built in numbers only the Star League of old could afford, these were the backbone of the fleet that retook Terra from Amaris.
• Texas: A somewhat older Battleship class, the Texas class were noted for their durability. Was most famous in BattleTech history for being involved in a mutiny during the SLDF's Operation Exodus; which had a major foundational effect on the formation of Clan culture via Nicholas Kerensky.
• Fox: a tiny corvette that wouldn't have raised any eyebrows in the olden days... but these are also the first warship class built after the loss of warship building technology due to the Succession wars. A symbol of the FedCom technology reintroducing proper Warship combat to the Inner sphere.

DropShips

• Normandy: The classic egg fulla mechs.
• Overlord: The other egg full of mechs. Also capable of serving as command posts but with only decent defensive armament. Has a clannerscum upgrade
• Union: The other common staple. Basically a metal baseball crammed with mechs. Good enough that the Clans made their own clannerscum upgrade to it.
• Confederate: The rival baseball to the Union. Was more spacious for crew but was smaller and had more advanced components that were harder to maintain.
• Intruder: An example of an Assault DropShip, it’s smaller than the Union like the Overlord but was armed to the teeth and equipped with a medical bay. The Clans made their own version called the Sassanid.
• Leopard: The classical shuttle version of a DropShip. The Clans upgraded all theirs to be the Broadsword.

Aerospace Fighters

• Shilone: a Kuritan Aerospace fighter. It’s biggest claim to fame was being used in a kamikaze attack by the Free Rasalhague Republic that killed the IlKhan during the Clan Invasion and made it stall for a year as the Clans elected a new one.
• Chippewa: a Lyran attack aerospace fighter with slow speed but lots of firepower, it was used by Clan Mongoose to design the Chippewa IIC with advanced targeting computers. Unfortunately, Clan Smoke Jaguar, who absorbed them, refused to use the design from such dishonorable schemers.
• Spad: The same way the Mercury BattleMech is the OmniMech’s grandfather, the Spad is the OmniFighter’s grandparent. The Spad was designed to be modular and use off the shelf components interchangeably.
• Issedone: One of the earliest Omnifighters created by Clan Snow Raven and likely the first, it was a successful technology demonstrator but wasn’t top notch compared other fighters. It would serve as a predecessor to the widespread Bakshir Omnifighter.

Conventional Fighter

• Mechbuster: Essentially a conventional aircraft analogy to the UrbanMech. It’s basically a flying AC-20. While possessing a hard hitting gun, it was tied to vulnerable airfields, had limited ammo, little fuel, and minimal armor.
• Angel: alternatively called the Light Strike Fighter, this fighter was exported from the Free Worlds League to every industrial power in the Inner Sphere and Periphery while being easy to make. While lightly armored, it has good speed for a conventional fighter.
• Defender: also known as the Medium Strike Fighter, it is also from the Free Worlds League and is just as widespread due to being easy to make. Even the Clans created a IIC clanner upgrade for it.
• Meteor: additionally referred to as the Heavy Strike Fighter, it was created by the Federated Suns and was exported or captured on an interstellar scale as the Succession Wars hit; ensuring its spread across all human space.

Small Craft

• KR-61 Long-Range Shuttlecraft: the most common aerodyne small craft in use, it’s usually used for ferrying passengers between ships. Also comes with armed boarding version called the NL-43 Battle Taxi and another variant with clanner tier armor.
• K-1 DropShuttle: a spherical small scraft, while technically a DropShip due to possessing a Docking Collar, its mass below the 200 tonne definition of DropShip classifies it as a Small Craft. Lightly armed for self defense, the Clans created their own version.
• Aquarius/Lyonesse: the former being younger and larger by several dozen tonnes, both of these Free Worlds League small craft originated as armed surface-to-orbit escort vessels with armament equal to small DropShips. They got superseded by more versalile Aerospace Fighters but made a comeback during the Blakist Jihad with upgrades. The Wobbies in particular converted them into flying artillery craft that land and shoot before flying away.
• NL-42 Battle Taxi: originally brought by the Wolf’s Dragoons Clan mercenaries to the Inner Sphere as the Lupus, this export version removed the ClanTech but remains in use as an armed boarding vessel.