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Clan Diamond Shark

2023-01-10T19:52:00Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Why This is Great for GMs */

'''Clan Diamond Shark''' (AKA '''Clan Sea Fox''' at various points in it's history) is a [[The Clans|Clan]] in the [[Battletech]] universe.
== History ==
Originally created as Clan Sea Fox in 2807, this clan was put under the command of Karen Nagasawa. A woman who was the child of several SLDF officers and been raised in SLDF facilities during the Ameris Civil War, was a teenager during the Exodus and tried to hold things together when Star League In Exile began to fall apart. She had signed on with Nicky during the exodus to try to salvage some semblance of order, but remained idealistic. She was also a prominent orator and writer and played a major role in propagating the nascent ideology of The Clans. During Operation KLONDIKE, the Sea Foxes invaded Babylon. After the war, she would do what she could within the system to try to make it as equitable as possible for it's populace on the quiet without rocking the boat too much. Given what happened to [[Clan Wolverine|the more overtly defiant]] this was a logical course of action.

Like many other Clans Clan Sea Fox was named for a critter native to the Clan Homeworlds, in this case a Sea Otter analog. In 2984, Clan Snow Raven did a dick move and genetically engineered a species of super sharks to hunt the critters into extinction. In spite of this, the response of Clan Sea Fox was to rename themselves to Clan Diamond Shark. That said, they also saved some Sea Foxes and relocated them to new homes. In 3100 they changed it back to Sea Fox.
== Culture ==
The most notable fact about Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox is that it is probably the least Martial of the Clans. The Warrior Caste remains prominent, but it does not dominate. The Civilian Castes have a greater say in not only their day to day lives than in most Clans, but also in the course the Clan takes as a whole and in particular the Merchant Caste is often in the driver's seat. The distinction between Warriors and Civilians is also less cut and dry as instead of signing up to be suicidal cannon fodder, Diamond Shark/Sea Fox warriors can honorably retire to the civilian castes. While "retired" Warriors are required to retest to maintain their warrior credentials if war occurs, most are happily willing to swap their Warrior beret for a Merchant's cape and vice versa when the situation calls for it. Naturally it's outlook has always tended to be more Economic than most and they're damn good at it. Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox set up and ran the HPG network in Clan Space, operated a major media empire and maintained major trade network between Clans. These tendencies were maximized after the [[Clan Invasion|Battle of Tukayyid]], in which the Diamond Shark warrior Caste was decimated.

Other Clanners do tend to look down on the the Diamond Sharks/Sea Foxes as being Un-Clanlike for pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. On the other hand; Diamond Shark/Sea Fox could outright buy whole Toumans of warriors if they wanted to, and their tendencies to go with the flow, pick their battles carefully, and not stir up trouble usually ensures they are not seen as a pressing enemy by most, but when properly assed into a fight, Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox acquit themselves well.

==Organization and Disposition==

The Clans had always enjoyed a somewhat mixed reception with Battletech fans, but one of the main problems with writing them is that there were just too damn many of them. The characterization of several of the less popular Clans was quite shallow. Clan Ice Hellion is the "I wanna go fast" clan, Clan Nova Cat was the hippie clan, Clan Goliath Scorpion was the ''other'' hippie clan I guess, um, there were a bunch of clans named after snakes and I guess one of them invented heavy lasers at some point? Point was, some of the clans were interesting and popular, and others really weren't.

Of the original twenty Clans, five (Burrock, Mongoose, Widowmaker, Wolverine, Smoke Jaguar) had bitten the dust by 3071 and [[Clan_Wolf|Clan Wolf]] had split into two. That left fifteen Clans, sorta kinda sixteen, and several of them just weren't that popular. The writers rescued this situation with the Wars of Reaving, an absolutely ''glorious'' orgy of destruction starting in 3071 that whittled the remaining clans down to just nine... or ten... it depends how you count. But, most importantly, four of the Clans that did survive got cut off from the Inner Sphere and thus essentially written out of the story, at least for the foreseeable future. The Clans remaining in the Inner Sphere got cut off from their cultural homeland, and this gave a chance for their cultures to evolve and become more interesting.

Clan Sea Fox got re-written from being a proud warrior race with a hint of merchant savvy to ''ronin capitalist warrior merchants'' which is a heart-warming concept. After getting booted out of the Clan homeworlds during the aforementioned Wars of Reaving, Clan Diamond Shark began a series of reforms which would ultimately culminate in the heavily de-centralized form in which they exist in the Dark Age era after Khan Mori Hawker's tenure starting in 3113.

As of the Dark Age setting, the re-re-named Clan Sea Fox no longer has a homeworld at all. They have some land enclaves on planets, mostly manufacturing centers and spaceports, but the bulk of their forces and personnel live a nomadic existence in gigantic spacecraft called ArcShips. These are modified WarShips that have most of the weapons stripped out and additional habitation areas and manufacturing facilities put in. Per Field Manual: 3145, the bulk of the Sea Foxes' manufacturing might is in these gigantic faster-than-light ships. Since the faster-than-light communications network in the Inner Sphere was 80% crippled in 3132, the true extent and disposition of Clan Sea Foxes' trade fleets are a mystery.

Clan Sea Fox is organized into five Khanates which are the largely autonomous sub-divisions of the Clan akin to Clan Galaxies. Each of those Khanates is further subdivided into Aimags, which are still smaller administrative units similar to Clam Clusters. What makes them different is rather than being merely military units, they’re wholesale nomadic groups of civilian and military clansmen. While the Sea Foxes hold very little planetary territory, very nearly the entire Inner Sphere is divided up into exclusive sales territories of the Khanates. The rights to buy sell and barter in specific parts of space can be contested between the Khanates by various means including, you guessed it, trial by combat. If the idea of annoying door-to-door weapons salesmen fighting honor duels among themselves for the right to sell arms to both sides of a particularly fractious part of space doesn't strike you as ''absolutely hilarious'' then I'm afraid there's no hope for your sense of humor.

Clan Sea Fox ''mostly'' stays out of local disputes, though the era sourcebooks dutifully note the few major exceptions. There's a mention in some fluff text to Skate Khanate attempting to trade with a planet in the Capellan Confederation. The Capellans tell the Foxes 'no, absolutely not', and start shooting at the Sea Fox forces when the latter attempt to land on their planet despite being told to fuck off. Clan Sea Fox considered this ''so outrageously unreasonable'' that they promptly invaded the spaceport, shot up the defenders, and declared all the ships in the spaceport as well as anything valuable in the warehouses to be war booty. That is what you get for not embracing the mutual benefits of free trade.

In short, Clan Sea Fox is ''goofy,'' but they are absolutely not ''harmless''. The fluff in the 3145 sourcebooks notes that despite their capitalist bent, their warriors are top-notch and their force deployment table notes a higher than normal percentage of elite units, and more of their units are at or near full strength. Still, their total military strength is about half that of, say the [[Clan_Jade_Falcon|Jade Falcons]] during the same period, and they're spread quite thin.

==Why This is Great for GMs==

For games set in the Clan Invasion or Jihad eras, clantech is really, really hard for anyone in the Inner Sphere to get their hands on. The most straightforward way to get some is to salvage it after fighting the Clans, but the problem with this is that fighting the Clans is an extremely good way to die. Happily, in Dark Age, this is no longer a problem. Clan Sea Fox will sell very nearly everything to everyone, with a large number of the hot 'mech designs from the era being explicitly fluffed as export designs of their invention. The random assignment tables for the Dark Age era reflect this too, with a light sprinkling of clantech mechs even showing up in the periphery courtesy of Clan Sea Fox. If one of the players in your campaign wants a shiny clantech mech, the existence of Clan Sea Fox is an extremely convenient and reasonable contrivance to allow that to happen. As an added benefit, they are literally everywhere in the BattleTech universe outside the Clan home worlds and the furthest reaches of the Dee Periphery. So they form a useful glue that narratively connects factions from one end of human space to the other; even if they don’t share borders or direct travel routes.

{{stub}}
{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

Clan Diamond Shark

2023-01-10T19:50:54Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Why This is Great for GMs */

'''Clan Diamond Shark''' (AKA '''Clan Sea Fox''' at various points in it's history) is a [[The Clans|Clan]] in the [[Battletech]] universe.
== History ==
Originally created as Clan Sea Fox in 2807, this clan was put under the command of Karen Nagasawa. A woman who was the child of several SLDF officers and been raised in SLDF facilities during the Ameris Civil War, was a teenager during the Exodus and tried to hold things together when Star League In Exile began to fall apart. She had signed on with Nicky during the exodus to try to salvage some semblance of order, but remained idealistic. She was also a prominent orator and writer and played a major role in propagating the nascent ideology of The Clans. During Operation KLONDIKE, the Sea Foxes invaded Babylon. After the war, she would do what she could within the system to try to make it as equitable as possible for it's populace on the quiet without rocking the boat too much. Given what happened to [[Clan Wolverine|the more overtly defiant]] this was a logical course of action.

Like many other Clans Clan Sea Fox was named for a critter native to the Clan Homeworlds, in this case a Sea Otter analog. In 2984, Clan Snow Raven did a dick move and genetically engineered a species of super sharks to hunt the critters into extinction. In spite of this, the response of Clan Sea Fox was to rename themselves to Clan Diamond Shark. That said, they also saved some Sea Foxes and relocated them to new homes. In 3100 they changed it back to Sea Fox.
== Culture ==
The most notable fact about Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox is that it is probably the least Martial of the Clans. The Warrior Caste remains prominent, but it does not dominate. The Civilian Castes have a greater say in not only their day to day lives than in most Clans, but also in the course the Clan takes as a whole and in particular the Merchant Caste is often in the driver's seat. The distinction between Warriors and Civilians is also less cut and dry as instead of signing up to be suicidal cannon fodder, Diamond Shark/Sea Fox warriors can honorably retire to the civilian castes. While "retired" Warriors are required to retest to maintain their warrior credentials if war occurs, most are happily willing to swap their Warrior beret for a Merchant's cape and vice versa when the situation calls for it. Naturally it's outlook has always tended to be more Economic than most and they're damn good at it. Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox set up and ran the HPG network in Clan Space, operated a major media empire and maintained major trade network between Clans. These tendencies were maximized after the [[Clan Invasion|Battle of Tukayyid]], in which the Diamond Shark warrior Caste was decimated.

Other Clanners do tend to look down on the the Diamond Sharks/Sea Foxes as being Un-Clanlike for pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. On the other hand; Diamond Shark/Sea Fox could outright buy whole Toumans of warriors if they wanted to, and their tendencies to go with the flow, pick their battles carefully, and not stir up trouble usually ensures they are not seen as a pressing enemy by most, but when properly assed into a fight, Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox acquit themselves well.

==Organization and Disposition==

The Clans had always enjoyed a somewhat mixed reception with Battletech fans, but one of the main problems with writing them is that there were just too damn many of them. The characterization of several of the less popular Clans was quite shallow. Clan Ice Hellion is the "I wanna go fast" clan, Clan Nova Cat was the hippie clan, Clan Goliath Scorpion was the ''other'' hippie clan I guess, um, there were a bunch of clans named after snakes and I guess one of them invented heavy lasers at some point? Point was, some of the clans were interesting and popular, and others really weren't.

Of the original twenty Clans, five (Burrock, Mongoose, Widowmaker, Wolverine, Smoke Jaguar) had bitten the dust by 3071 and [[Clan_Wolf|Clan Wolf]] had split into two. That left fifteen Clans, sorta kinda sixteen, and several of them just weren't that popular. The writers rescued this situation with the Wars of Reaving, an absolutely ''glorious'' orgy of destruction starting in 3071 that whittled the remaining clans down to just nine... or ten... it depends how you count. But, most importantly, four of the Clans that did survive got cut off from the Inner Sphere and thus essentially written out of the story, at least for the foreseeable future. The Clans remaining in the Inner Sphere got cut off from their cultural homeland, and this gave a chance for their cultures to evolve and become more interesting.

Clan Sea Fox got re-written from being a proud warrior race with a hint of merchant savvy to ''ronin capitalist warrior merchants'' which is a heart-warming concept. After getting booted out of the Clan homeworlds during the aforementioned Wars of Reaving, Clan Diamond Shark began a series of reforms which would ultimately culminate in the heavily de-centralized form in which they exist in the Dark Age era after Khan Mori Hawker's tenure starting in 3113.

As of the Dark Age setting, the re-re-named Clan Sea Fox no longer has a homeworld at all. They have some land enclaves on planets, mostly manufacturing centers and spaceports, but the bulk of their forces and personnel live a nomadic existence in gigantic spacecraft called ArcShips. These are modified WarShips that have most of the weapons stripped out and additional habitation areas and manufacturing facilities put in. Per Field Manual: 3145, the bulk of the Sea Foxes' manufacturing might is in these gigantic faster-than-light ships. Since the faster-than-light communications network in the Inner Sphere was 80% crippled in 3132, the true extent and disposition of Clan Sea Foxes' trade fleets are a mystery.

Clan Sea Fox is organized into five Khanates which are the largely autonomous sub-divisions of the Clan akin to Clan Galaxies. Each of those Khanates is further subdivided into Aimags, which are still smaller administrative units similar to Clam Clusters. What makes them different is rather than being merely military units, they’re wholesale nomadic groups of civilian and military clansmen. While the Sea Foxes hold very little planetary territory, very nearly the entire Inner Sphere is divided up into exclusive sales territories of the Khanates. The rights to buy sell and barter in specific parts of space can be contested between the Khanates by various means including, you guessed it, trial by combat. If the idea of annoying door-to-door weapons salesmen fighting honor duels among themselves for the right to sell arms to both sides of a particularly fractious part of space doesn't strike you as ''absolutely hilarious'' then I'm afraid there's no hope for your sense of humor.

Clan Sea Fox ''mostly'' stays out of local disputes, though the era sourcebooks dutifully note the few major exceptions. There's a mention in some fluff text to Skate Khanate attempting to trade with a planet in the Capellan Confederation. The Capellans tell the Foxes 'no, absolutely not', and start shooting at the Sea Fox forces when the latter attempt to land on their planet despite being told to fuck off. Clan Sea Fox considered this ''so outrageously unreasonable'' that they promptly invaded the spaceport, shot up the defenders, and declared all the ships in the spaceport as well as anything valuable in the warehouses to be war booty. That is what you get for not embracing the mutual benefits of free trade.

In short, Clan Sea Fox is ''goofy,'' but they are absolutely not ''harmless''. The fluff in the 3145 sourcebooks notes that despite their capitalist bent, their warriors are top-notch and their force deployment table notes a higher than normal percentage of elite units, and more of their units are at or near full strength. Still, their total military strength is about half that of, say the [[Clan_Jade_Falcon|Jade Falcons]] during the same period, and they're spread quite thin.

==Why This is Great for GMs==

For games set in the Clan Invasion or Jihad eras, clantech is really, really hard for anyone in the Inner Sphere to get their hands on. The most straightforward way to get some is to salvage it after fighting the Clans, but the problem with this is that fighting the Clans is an extremely good way to die. Happily, in Dark Age, this is no longer a problem. Clan Sea Fox will sell very nearly everything to everyone, with a large number of the hot 'mech designs from the era being explicitly fluffed as export designs of their invention. The random assignment tables for the Dark Age era reflect this too, with a light sprinkling of clantech mechs even showing up in the periphery courtesy of Clan Sea Fox. If one of the players in your campaign wants a shiny clantech mech, the existence of Clan Sea Fox is an extremely convenient and reasonable contrivance to allow that to happen. As an added benefit, they are literally everywhere in the BattleTech universe outside the Clan home worlds and the furthest reaches of the Dee Periphery. So they form a useful glue that narratively connects factions from one end of human space to the other.

{{stub}}
{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

Clan Diamond Shark

2023-01-10T19:50:31Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Why This is Great for GMs */

'''Clan Diamond Shark''' (AKA '''Clan Sea Fox''' at various points in it's history) is a [[The Clans|Clan]] in the [[Battletech]] universe.
== History ==
Originally created as Clan Sea Fox in 2807, this clan was put under the command of Karen Nagasawa. A woman who was the child of several SLDF officers and been raised in SLDF facilities during the Ameris Civil War, was a teenager during the Exodus and tried to hold things together when Star League In Exile began to fall apart. She had signed on with Nicky during the exodus to try to salvage some semblance of order, but remained idealistic. She was also a prominent orator and writer and played a major role in propagating the nascent ideology of The Clans. During Operation KLONDIKE, the Sea Foxes invaded Babylon. After the war, she would do what she could within the system to try to make it as equitable as possible for it's populace on the quiet without rocking the boat too much. Given what happened to [[Clan Wolverine|the more overtly defiant]] this was a logical course of action.

Like many other Clans Clan Sea Fox was named for a critter native to the Clan Homeworlds, in this case a Sea Otter analog. In 2984, Clan Snow Raven did a dick move and genetically engineered a species of super sharks to hunt the critters into extinction. In spite of this, the response of Clan Sea Fox was to rename themselves to Clan Diamond Shark. That said, they also saved some Sea Foxes and relocated them to new homes. In 3100 they changed it back to Sea Fox.
== Culture ==
The most notable fact about Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox is that it is probably the least Martial of the Clans. The Warrior Caste remains prominent, but it does not dominate. The Civilian Castes have a greater say in not only their day to day lives than in most Clans, but also in the course the Clan takes as a whole and in particular the Merchant Caste is often in the driver's seat. The distinction between Warriors and Civilians is also less cut and dry as instead of signing up to be suicidal cannon fodder, Diamond Shark/Sea Fox warriors can honorably retire to the civilian castes. While "retired" Warriors are required to retest to maintain their warrior credentials if war occurs, most are happily willing to swap their Warrior beret for a Merchant's cape and vice versa when the situation calls for it. Naturally it's outlook has always tended to be more Economic than most and they're damn good at it. Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox set up and ran the HPG network in Clan Space, operated a major media empire and maintained major trade network between Clans. These tendencies were maximized after the [[Clan Invasion|Battle of Tukayyid]], in which the Diamond Shark warrior Caste was decimated.

Other Clanners do tend to look down on the the Diamond Sharks/Sea Foxes as being Un-Clanlike for pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. On the other hand; Diamond Shark/Sea Fox could outright buy whole Toumans of warriors if they wanted to, and their tendencies to go with the flow, pick their battles carefully, and not stir up trouble usually ensures they are not seen as a pressing enemy by most, but when properly assed into a fight, Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox acquit themselves well.

==Organization and Disposition==

The Clans had always enjoyed a somewhat mixed reception with Battletech fans, but one of the main problems with writing them is that there were just too damn many of them. The characterization of several of the less popular Clans was quite shallow. Clan Ice Hellion is the "I wanna go fast" clan, Clan Nova Cat was the hippie clan, Clan Goliath Scorpion was the ''other'' hippie clan I guess, um, there were a bunch of clans named after snakes and I guess one of them invented heavy lasers at some point? Point was, some of the clans were interesting and popular, and others really weren't.

Of the original twenty Clans, five (Burrock, Mongoose, Widowmaker, Wolverine, Smoke Jaguar) had bitten the dust by 3071 and [[Clan_Wolf|Clan Wolf]] had split into two. That left fifteen Clans, sorta kinda sixteen, and several of them just weren't that popular. The writers rescued this situation with the Wars of Reaving, an absolutely ''glorious'' orgy of destruction starting in 3071 that whittled the remaining clans down to just nine... or ten... it depends how you count. But, most importantly, four of the Clans that did survive got cut off from the Inner Sphere and thus essentially written out of the story, at least for the foreseeable future. The Clans remaining in the Inner Sphere got cut off from their cultural homeland, and this gave a chance for their cultures to evolve and become more interesting.

Clan Sea Fox got re-written from being a proud warrior race with a hint of merchant savvy to ''ronin capitalist warrior merchants'' which is a heart-warming concept. After getting booted out of the Clan homeworlds during the aforementioned Wars of Reaving, Clan Diamond Shark began a series of reforms which would ultimately culminate in the heavily de-centralized form in which they exist in the Dark Age era after Khan Mori Hawker's tenure starting in 3113.

As of the Dark Age setting, the re-re-named Clan Sea Fox no longer has a homeworld at all. They have some land enclaves on planets, mostly manufacturing centers and spaceports, but the bulk of their forces and personnel live a nomadic existence in gigantic spacecraft called ArcShips. These are modified WarShips that have most of the weapons stripped out and additional habitation areas and manufacturing facilities put in. Per Field Manual: 3145, the bulk of the Sea Foxes' manufacturing might is in these gigantic faster-than-light ships. Since the faster-than-light communications network in the Inner Sphere was 80% crippled in 3132, the true extent and disposition of Clan Sea Foxes' trade fleets are a mystery.

Clan Sea Fox is organized into five Khanates which are the largely autonomous sub-divisions of the Clan akin to Clan Galaxies. Each of those Khanates is further subdivided into Aimags, which are still smaller administrative units similar to Clam Clusters. What makes them different is rather than being merely military units, they’re wholesale nomadic groups of civilian and military clansmen. While the Sea Foxes hold very little planetary territory, very nearly the entire Inner Sphere is divided up into exclusive sales territories of the Khanates. The rights to buy sell and barter in specific parts of space can be contested between the Khanates by various means including, you guessed it, trial by combat. If the idea of annoying door-to-door weapons salesmen fighting honor duels among themselves for the right to sell arms to both sides of a particularly fractious part of space doesn't strike you as ''absolutely hilarious'' then I'm afraid there's no hope for your sense of humor.

Clan Sea Fox ''mostly'' stays out of local disputes, though the era sourcebooks dutifully note the few major exceptions. There's a mention in some fluff text to Skate Khanate attempting to trade with a planet in the Capellan Confederation. The Capellans tell the Foxes 'no, absolutely not', and start shooting at the Sea Fox forces when the latter attempt to land on their planet despite being told to fuck off. Clan Sea Fox considered this ''so outrageously unreasonable'' that they promptly invaded the spaceport, shot up the defenders, and declared all the ships in the spaceport as well as anything valuable in the warehouses to be war booty. That is what you get for not embracing the mutual benefits of free trade.

In short, Clan Sea Fox is ''goofy,'' but they are absolutely not ''harmless''. The fluff in the 3145 sourcebooks notes that despite their capitalist bent, their warriors are top-notch and their force deployment table notes a higher than normal percentage of elite units, and more of their units are at or near full strength. Still, their total military strength is about half that of, say the [[Clan_Jade_Falcon|Jade Falcons]] during the same period, and they're spread quite thin.

==Why This is Great for GMs==

For games set in the Clan Invasion or Jihad eras, clantech is really, really hard for anyone in the Inner Sphere to get their hands on. The most straightforward way to get some is to salvage it after fighting the Clans, but the problem with this is that fighting the Clans is an extremely good way to die. Happily, in Dark Age, this is no longer a problem. Clan Sea Fox will sell very nearly everything to everyone, with a large number of the hot 'mech designs from the era being explicitly fluffed as export designs of their invention. The random assignment tables for the Dark Age era reflect this too, with a light sprinkling of clantech mechs even showing up in the periphery courtesy of Clan Sea Fox. If one of the players in your campaign wants a shiny clantech mech, the existence of Clan Sea Fox is an extremely convenient and reasonable contrivance to allow that to happen. As an added benefit, they literally everywhere in the BattleTech universe outside the Clan homeworlds and the furthest reaches of the Dee Periphery. So they form a useful glue that narratively connects factions from one end of human space to the other.

{{stub}}
{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

Clan Diamond Shark

2023-01-10T19:48:34Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Organization and Disposition */

'''Clan Diamond Shark''' (AKA '''Clan Sea Fox''' at various points in it's history) is a [[The Clans|Clan]] in the [[Battletech]] universe.
== History ==
Originally created as Clan Sea Fox in 2807, this clan was put under the command of Karen Nagasawa. A woman who was the child of several SLDF officers and been raised in SLDF facilities during the Ameris Civil War, was a teenager during the Exodus and tried to hold things together when Star League In Exile began to fall apart. She had signed on with Nicky during the exodus to try to salvage some semblance of order, but remained idealistic. She was also a prominent orator and writer and played a major role in propagating the nascent ideology of The Clans. During Operation KLONDIKE, the Sea Foxes invaded Babylon. After the war, she would do what she could within the system to try to make it as equitable as possible for it's populace on the quiet without rocking the boat too much. Given what happened to [[Clan Wolverine|the more overtly defiant]] this was a logical course of action.

Like many other Clans Clan Sea Fox was named for a critter native to the Clan Homeworlds, in this case a Sea Otter analog. In 2984, Clan Snow Raven did a dick move and genetically engineered a species of super sharks to hunt the critters into extinction. In spite of this, the response of Clan Sea Fox was to rename themselves to Clan Diamond Shark. That said, they also saved some Sea Foxes and relocated them to new homes. In 3100 they changed it back to Sea Fox.
== Culture ==
The most notable fact about Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox is that it is probably the least Martial of the Clans. The Warrior Caste remains prominent, but it does not dominate. The Civilian Castes have a greater say in not only their day to day lives than in most Clans, but also in the course the Clan takes as a whole and in particular the Merchant Caste is often in the driver's seat. The distinction between Warriors and Civilians is also less cut and dry as instead of signing up to be suicidal cannon fodder, Diamond Shark/Sea Fox warriors can honorably retire to the civilian castes. While "retired" Warriors are required to retest to maintain their warrior credentials if war occurs, most are happily willing to swap their Warrior beret for a Merchant's cape and vice versa when the situation calls for it. Naturally it's outlook has always tended to be more Economic than most and they're damn good at it. Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox set up and ran the HPG network in Clan Space, operated a major media empire and maintained major trade network between Clans. These tendencies were maximized after the [[Clan Invasion|Battle of Tukayyid]], in which the Diamond Shark warrior Caste was decimated.

Other Clanners do tend to look down on the the Diamond Sharks/Sea Foxes as being Un-Clanlike for pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. On the other hand; Diamond Shark/Sea Fox could outright buy whole Toumans of warriors if they wanted to, and their tendencies to go with the flow, pick their battles carefully, and not stir up trouble usually ensures they are not seen as a pressing enemy by most, but when properly assed into a fight, Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox acquit themselves well.

==Organization and Disposition==

The Clans had always enjoyed a somewhat mixed reception with Battletech fans, but one of the main problems with writing them is that there were just too damn many of them. The characterization of several of the less popular Clans was quite shallow. Clan Ice Hellion is the "I wanna go fast" clan, Clan Nova Cat was the hippie clan, Clan Goliath Scorpion was the ''other'' hippie clan I guess, um, there were a bunch of clans named after snakes and I guess one of them invented heavy lasers at some point? Point was, some of the clans were interesting and popular, and others really weren't.

Of the original twenty Clans, five (Burrock, Mongoose, Widowmaker, Wolverine, Smoke Jaguar) had bitten the dust by 3071 and [[Clan_Wolf|Clan Wolf]] had split into two. That left fifteen Clans, sorta kinda sixteen, and several of them just weren't that popular. The writers rescued this situation with the Wars of Reaving, an absolutely ''glorious'' orgy of destruction starting in 3071 that whittled the remaining clans down to just nine... or ten... it depends how you count. But, most importantly, four of the Clans that did survive got cut off from the Inner Sphere and thus essentially written out of the story, at least for the foreseeable future. The Clans remaining in the Inner Sphere got cut off from their cultural homeland, and this gave a chance for their cultures to evolve and become more interesting.

Clan Sea Fox got re-written from being a proud warrior race with a hint of merchant savvy to ''ronin capitalist warrior merchants'' which is a heart-warming concept. After getting booted out of the Clan homeworlds during the aforementioned Wars of Reaving, Clan Diamond Shark began a series of reforms which would ultimately culminate in the heavily de-centralized form in which they exist in the Dark Age era after Khan Mori Hawker's tenure starting in 3113.

As of the Dark Age setting, the re-re-named Clan Sea Fox no longer has a homeworld at all. They have some land enclaves on planets, mostly manufacturing centers and spaceports, but the bulk of their forces and personnel live a nomadic existence in gigantic spacecraft called ArcShips. These are modified WarShips that have most of the weapons stripped out and additional habitation areas and manufacturing facilities put in. Per Field Manual: 3145, the bulk of the Sea Foxes' manufacturing might is in these gigantic faster-than-light ships. Since the faster-than-light communications network in the Inner Sphere was 80% crippled in 3132, the true extent and disposition of Clan Sea Foxes' trade fleets are a mystery.

Clan Sea Fox is organized into five Khanates which are the largely autonomous sub-divisions of the Clan akin to Clan Galaxies. Each of those Khanates is further subdivided into Aimags, which are still smaller administrative units similar to Clam Clusters. What makes them different is rather than being merely military units, they’re wholesale nomadic groups of civilian and military clansmen. While the Sea Foxes hold very little planetary territory, very nearly the entire Inner Sphere is divided up into exclusive sales territories of the Khanates. The rights to buy sell and barter in specific parts of space can be contested between the Khanates by various means including, you guessed it, trial by combat. If the idea of annoying door-to-door weapons salesmen fighting honor duels among themselves for the right to sell arms to both sides of a particularly fractious part of space doesn't strike you as ''absolutely hilarious'' then I'm afraid there's no hope for your sense of humor.

Clan Sea Fox ''mostly'' stays out of local disputes, though the era sourcebooks dutifully note the few major exceptions. There's a mention in some fluff text to Skate Khanate attempting to trade with a planet in the Capellan Confederation. The Capellans tell the Foxes 'no, absolutely not', and start shooting at the Sea Fox forces when the latter attempt to land on their planet despite being told to fuck off. Clan Sea Fox considered this ''so outrageously unreasonable'' that they promptly invaded the spaceport, shot up the defenders, and declared all the ships in the spaceport as well as anything valuable in the warehouses to be war booty. That is what you get for not embracing the mutual benefits of free trade.

In short, Clan Sea Fox is ''goofy,'' but they are absolutely not ''harmless''. The fluff in the 3145 sourcebooks notes that despite their capitalist bent, their warriors are top-notch and their force deployment table notes a higher than normal percentage of elite units, and more of their units are at or near full strength. Still, their total military strength is about half that of, say the [[Clan_Jade_Falcon|Jade Falcons]] during the same period, and they're spread quite thin.

==Why This is Great for GMs==

For games set in the Clan Invasion or Jihad eras, clantech is really, really hard for anyone in the Inner Sphere to get their hands on. The most straightforward way to get some is to salvage it after fighting the Clans, but the problem with this is that fighting the Clans is an extremely good way to die. Happily, in Dark Age, this is no longer a problem. Clan Sea Fox will sell very nearly everything to everyone, with a large number of the hot 'mech designs from the era being explicitly fluffed as export designs of their invention. The random assignment tables for the Dark Age era reflect this too, with a light sprinkling of clantech mechs even showing up in the periphery courtesy of Clan Sea Fox. If one of the players in your campaign wants a shiny clantech mech, the existence of Clan Sea Fox is an extremely convenient and reasonable contrivance to allow that to happen.

{{stub}}
{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

Draconis Combine

2023-01-09T21:24:17Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Foreign Relations */

{{Infobox 40k Nations
|name=
|image= [[Image:056305F5-09B6-4E2D-9C7F-DB74714C94E3.png|250px|center]]
|bgcolor= DarkRed
|fgcolor= white
|Capital= Luthien
|Official Languages= Japanese, Swedish
|Power=
|Size= Around 350 controlled worlds
|Head of State= Coordinator of Worlds
|Head of Government=
|Governmental Structure=Militarized Feudal Fascist Empire
|State Religion/Ideology=
|Demographics=
|Military Force=*Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery
*Draconis Combine Admiralty
}}
{{Topquote|Always preserve the dragon and its magic will keep you strong.|Shiro Kurita}}

In the [[Battletech]] setting, the '''Draconis Combine''' is one of the five successor states of the Inner Sphere who are led by <s>The Rightful Rulers of the Galaxy</s> House Kurita. They are modeled to a large degree after Japan, with bits taken from the Sengoku Jidai, the Tokugawa Shogunate and Imperial Japan 1930-1945.

== Origins ==

The Combine was formed from the work of the legendary Shiro Kurita, a nobleman who was raised in an exceptionally traditional household, which held to even 17th century Japanese thinking and manners. Shiro, as well as his brother Urizen, were power hungry and destined to hold control; with Shiro using all the political games in the book to gain power on the planet of New Samarkand, and his brother quickly becoming his top military advisor. Eventually, he was able to create an alliance with a neighboring planet in Galedon V to help strong-arm a Mercantile alliance into helping them build a merchant fleet. By 2319, they'd built a burgeoning empire that had swiftly proven itself against most of it's neighboring foes, and Shiro crowned the alliance by it's new name, the Draconis Combine, after a region of space it once bordered and then completely subsumed, which it has been ever since.

== House Kurita ==
Since the Combine's founding, the Combine's Coordinators have largely come from House Kurita, aside from a two hundred year period where only tangentially related bloodlines got their turn, only to give up the Chrysanthemum Throne willingly as the Kuritas married themselves back onto the throne, to the delight of everybody.

Their general character is a bit hard to pin down aside from their imperious, expansionist rhetoric. While most have been perfectly competent and generally dull characters on the galactic stage, those Kurita Coordinators who have distinguished themselves to the larger Inner Sphere community did so in huge ways. This is largely because of the Combine's insistence on keeping the mystique of the position as the autocrat and more or less god figure and the raising of a nobility; meaning that if the Combine suffered any sort of setback, that all fell at their feet, and repeated failure often ended in assassination from the overeager military or aggrieved nobles, or seppuku from the shame of some especially great failure. As a result, much of the Coordinator's job is managing not just the armed forces, but the expectations and fall guys so that they can cover their own ass; often by ensuring that their actual spoken orders are exceptionally vague, to the point of being Haiku in certain circumstances.

Chances are if you're seeing a Kurita's name more than once, it's because they're either exceptionally adept leaders and conquerors, or exceptionally insane dictators.

==== Notable Kurita Coordinators ====
* '''Shiro Kurita''' - Founder and creator of the Combine along with his brother Urizen. Usually considered one of the top 3 Coordinators if not the best one. Flew a dope custom ''Sabre'' AeroSpace Fighter as a hobby.
* '''The Von Rohrs Bloodline''' - An illegitimate child of one of the earlier Kuritas by the name of Nihongi came to hate his Kurita bloodline after the Coordinator at the time killed his dad, and hatched a plot to take over the Combine from within. Of course, thanks to the politics of the time, his dad got axed before he ever got a chance, and he decided to just execute Parker Kurita, the last mainline member of Shiro's line, and ended up the sole remaining heir. Naturally quite stunned and terrified by having accidentally painted the largest target on his back possible, Nihongi secluded himself and several of his successors, while never once trying to actually better the Combine in any way, causing much of it's major issues from the Rasalhague league at the time. The House was fully wiped out once McAllister took over.
* '''Martin McAllister''' - A Rasalhague noble directly descended from Shiro Kurita, who married into the Sorenson family. Previously distinguished as a DCMS strategist and warrior, he inevitably was the man responsible for the deposement and annihilation of the Van Rohrs, and once again put the bloodline of the Kuritas back on the throne. Died young, however.
* '''Siriwan Kurita, the Dragon Lady''' - Martin's daughter, who lost her mother at a young age. While the Kurita's especially conservative ideas on whether or not women got to be on the throne was a bit of an obstacle, Martin suggested she find a distant cousin and marry up that way, and marry she did until her spouse died of "mysterious causes", and she became Regent while guiding her infant child who would inevitably become Coordinator when he became a man. She ended up being a fantastic and exceptionally smart Coordinator who kept the warfare to a minimum while reigning absolute for almost four decades, only giving up power to her kid who died under a similar set of "Mysterious causes" as well as his heir, causing her to end up Coordinator again. While she enjoyed the gig, the nobility was starting to get wise to the fact that she almost certainly had a hand in her spouse/child's deaths, and she at long last abdicated to her granddaughter after two years. She is the only person in the family to have been Coordinator three separate times thanks to the quirks in the line of succession.
* '''Urizen Kurita II''' - The Star League's ailing health needed to be nudged along by somebody, and that somebody was this guy, at least within the confines of the Combine.
* '''Takiro Kurita''' - Previously sort of a monk-like figure when he took the job, he dissuaded any doubt that he would be a capable leader of the Combine's armed forces by surviving an assassination attempt by the ISF, torturing the men to find out who paid them, then killing the two men who performed the act and their male heirs. Ruled through the twilight of the Star League, and begged his son, Minoru, to treat the situation carefully on his deathbed.
* '''Minoru Kurita''' - Minoru, Takiro's son, ignored his dying father's wishes and basically began the Succession Wars on his own, and as a result more or less created the first bad backslide of humanity into [[LosTech]]. Got boom-headshot'd by a Federated Suns Sniper during the First Succession War.
* '''Jinjiro Kurita''' - The son of Minoru. While starting off his childhood as a decent kid, the death of his mother who was a concubine caught up in political infighting traumatized him and made him… [[That Guy|off]] despite his tactical savviness. After hearing his dad had been killed, he made the very normal and obvious decision in that situation, and ordered a planet-wide scouring of Kentares IV, the planet he had died on, ending up killing '''52 Million people''' to the point that he was fed up with guns involvement, and just began hacking people down with Katanas himself. Surprisingly, he didn't turn out to be the most stable individual; as he started the Second Succession War based on terrible information, and was constantly plagued by psychotic episodes regarding the [[Clan Wolverine#Minnesota Tribe|Minnesota Tribe]] once they appeared, finally going straight over the edge when somebody sent him a doll of a Star League Officer past his security detail. This made him permanently lose his mind and he hung himself in solitary confinement. He's the main reason the Fedrats despise the Kuritas.
* '''Takashi Kurita''' - Coordinator during the Third Succession War. Unlike the previous two Coordinators, Takashi was not a complete raving lunatic and/or glory-hound...at first. While he had some diplomatic traits, he was still an expansionist and a brutal driver of his armies through his kid, and had a fierce rivalry with Wolf's Dragoons that continued up to his dying day. To his anger, his kid ended up being pretty non-traditional when it came to warfare but also wildly successful; and ultimately made Combine tactics look hilariously out of date. THEN he begins his spiral into being a complete raving lunatic and glory hound until he basically gets locked in place by his son who wanted to protect his grandmother, gets a medical treatment that cures him of being nuts, but it only came too late as he found out that he'd been played into weakening either the Combine or strengthening the legend of the Dragoons, and chose to commit Seppuku with his son at his side.
* '''Theodore Kurita''' - The greatest Coordinator-General of the Combine, bar none. His mother's only child, she lavished him with love and care and his family made good and goddamn sure he was set up for success in life, and he hit the ground running as the commander of a Penal legion that he turned into an incredible fighting force, making enormous changes to the way the Combine fought, and distinguished himself as able to defend and attack during both the War of 3039 and also the Clan Invasion, using tactics almost counter to what Bushido demanded. His father hated that, but he was inevitably humbled by Teddy's genius and his own familial love. When he was crowned Coordinator, he immediately made getting rid of the Clans a #1 priority, and began recruiting from the ranks of Women and Criminals to bolster the Combine's ranks, and successfully convinced the Inner Sphere to help him go fuck up Clan Smoke Jaguar, then was named First Lord of the rebuilt Star League. Had plenty of enemies from the ''Kokuryu-Kai'', or Black Dragon Collective, who were hardliners who thought his reforms were detrimental to the Combine, and spent a lot of his downtime fighting them off, especially during the Jihad.
* '''Yori Kurita''' - The second woman to be Coordinator. She only ever got to the position in 32nd century because of a series of unrelated mishaps that got her promoted from "unimportant minor noble" to "Queen of the Dragon" in very short order. While there were some initial grumblings, what with her initial bringing to the court having been done by a Warlord who openly wasn't a fan of the last few guys to take the throne, she pretty quickly made herself a competent and ruthless Coordinator, including finally...''finally'' getting one over on the Federated Suns, to the point that the Combine took their capital under her watch. Granted, her ascension to the throne involved overthrowing the mainline Kurita's in a coup and crippling the Combine in a civil war that flanderized them back to their pre-Theodore-era lunatic selves which pissed a lot of people the fuck off out of universe.

== Society ==
The Combine's society is, as stated above, influenced greatly by Feudal and Imperial Japan, and is separated largely into what is called the "Five Pillars" of Draconis society, each with it's own symbolic meaning, which largely helps people within those pillars define themselves and define their worldview. They are:

# '''The Pillar of Gold''': The head of government, known as the Coordinator of Worlds (or more commonly just "Coordinator"), and all their myriad ministries and bureaus that help govern the Combine and keep it both loyal and under the Coordinator's thumb.
# '''The Pillar of Steel''': All Combine military, sometimes referred to as the "Arm of the Dragon". While nominally led by the Coordinator, most Coordinators have their Tai-Shu, or Warlords, deal with the day-to-day running of the various military ops of the Combine, specifically to allow the Coordinator to cover their ass in case their orders turn out to not work. Most of the Combine's military adhere to some form of the Bushido code, and all are expected to follow a superior's orders to the death. Given that they place an emphasis on hard and fast Battlemech assaults, as well as the open threat of death looming, it's not especially hard to get with the program. If you survive however, you'll be a capable warrior and well-respected within Draconis society, as regardless of position, military members are treated well.
# '''The Pillar of Teak''': The non-military sector of Draconis life, combined with cultural indoctrination. Basically a caste system consisting of nobles, warriors, craftspeople, common laborers, and then the vestiges of society consisting of outcasts and criminal elements. If you know anything about Imperial Japan or the Sengoku period, just assume much of Draconis society follows that because everyone who lives within their borders is the biggest fucking weeb to ever exist, to the point of openly demanding any government official or noble learn the Japanese language just to make sure they keep up to date on it.
# '''The Pillar of Ivory''': Religious and Spiritual leaders and advisory. Unsurprisingly, Shinto, Buddhism, and any collectivist philosophy does especially well within Combine space as Shiro intended it to be, and every non-eastern philosophy, and especially any individualist or egalitarian philosophy gets pretty tightly controlled.
# '''The Pillar of Jade''': The manufacturers and merchants. The Combine has historically never been especially big on resources, and the succession wars didn't do that any favors, so most of the economy is run by the state. There are independent companies, but they pale in comparison to the vast number of powerful state-backed companies that have been cut into two categories; Military and Civilian, ensuring maximum exploitation of what little the Combine has.

In general terms, the Draconis Combine could be best be described as a Feudal Fascist Empire (not unlike the Japanese Empire with a twist of state-sponsored mega corps) being authoritarian, reactionary, militaristic, nationalistic, chauvinistic (including being rather sexist) with tight cooperation between the state and corporate power blocks and a mentality that it is the highest honor to die for Coordinator and Combine. While it may be limited in scope, marginalized by the nobility, corrupt, ineffective or simply a sham, the other four successor states make at least some pretext to democratic government. Even [[The Clans]] have representative elements. The Draconis Combine does not. The Coordinator Reigns, the Nobles and Warlords rule and command on his behalf, the people obey.

This is not to say that more liberal minded individuals don't exist in Combine Space, see Theodore Kurita. But even when a reformer reaches the height of power in the Combine they would face significant resistance and push-back from entrenched conservative blocks up to and including Civil War.

== Foreign Relations ==
* [[Capellan Confederation]]: Alliance of Convenience out of mutual hatred for the Federated Suns.
* [[The Clans]]: Wary neutrality to Bad. Due to past experience from the Clan Invasion, they don’t go out of their way to prod their nest. Though they will fight tooth and nail as seen with the Nova Cat annihilation in the Kuritan civil war
* [[Federated Suns]]: Bad. The Combine's been the Federated's sun's biggest foe for three centuries and has done some pretty nasty things in that time.
* [[Lyran Commonwealth]]: Also Bad. Only reason they’re not actively killing each other is the Clan Occupation Zones forming a buffer.
* [[Free Worlds League]]: Neutral to Good. Due to mutual hatred against the Lyrans historically.
* [[The Periphery]]: Ambivalently neutral. Used to bully the Outworld Alliance before it took in the Snow Ravens.

== Military ==
[[Image:DC soldiers.jpg|thumb|left|Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery Infantry: you see these guys walking down the street you best start learning japanese and to love Udon noodles]]
The Combine lives by the old ''Bushido'' code for all things, but most specially in warfare, which has been part of their success as much as it has been their downfall. They are among the most dangerous and vicious of the entire Inner Sphere's militaries, but their warfare has a fucking enormous cost to it; they prefer absolute loyalty to their superior officers, and a rigid adherence to the concepts of frontal assault warfare, often fighting to the last man and refusing to retreat even in the face of overwhelming odds. This means in the face of battle, they've often been completely outclassed by commanders who were able to adjust to what the Combine was giving them and fight back. Further, their officer corps are often subject to the same politiking as their nobility, and are often trying to cover their ass. It should say something that one guy almost 500 years into their existence would become their best general simply because he'd dare to adjust tactics against an enemy.

While this likely would've been the easiest place for the creators of Battletech to just let Gundams exist, the Draconis are more well known for creating Particle blasting speed demons and walking samurai armor mechs. They are also well-known for only using Light and Heavy-class Mechs in their warfare; seeing Medium-class Mechs as a poor compromise for what they want to do; which is to attack as fast and as hard as possible, their mechs bristling with armaments and clad in bright [[Speed Freek|red and gold]] paint, and they ''love'' their Battlemechs. To the exclusion of almost everything else. Seriously, it got to the point that it took almost 500 years for things like tanks to become widespread in their military due to years of Coordinators playing favorites with the Mechwarriors.

===== Notable Mechs=====
* '''''Charger''''' - An assault mech with the firepower of a light mech, the original CGR-1A1 model of the ''Charger'' is a commonly-cited contender for worst mech in the whole setting. For some reason originally conceived as a heavily-armored scout, the ''Charger'' is an 80-ton mech sporting the heaviest possible engine and by extension the highest top speed of any introtech mech in its weight class. However, the sheer amount of tonnage dedicated to the engine leaves it with an utterly impotent weapons package consisting of five small lasers, meaning that it is outgunned by most medium mechs and even some light mechs. The Draconis Combine ended up stuck with the overwhelming majority of ''Chargers'' at the outset of the Succession Wars, and assignment to one was commonly used as a form of punishment within the Combine military. The Mech would be improved by the Capellan Confederation at the end of the Third Succession War by downgrading the engine and freeing up space for more firepower, and the ''Charger's'' frame would be repurposed for the development of the iconic ''Hatamoto-Chi'' during the War of 3039, but the ''Charger'' itself would not be redeemed in Combine service until the Clan Invasion, where the rediscovery of extralight engines would allow for upgraded firepower without sacrificing the ''Charger's'' top speed.
* '''''Catapult K''''' - While the Catapult itself is ubiquitous throughout the Sphere, the K series has never caught on outside the Combine. This "novel" design ditches the Catapult's characteristic LRMs for a pair of PPCs, turning an aged but capable indirect fire support platform into an outdated direct fire glass cannon.
* '''''Hatamoto-Chi''''' - The signature assault mech of the Combine, which looks like a mech designed in the image of Super Shredder. Essentially two different mech designs merged into one (namely the venerable ''Thug'' and the much-maligned ''Charger''), it's a formidable, tough-as-nails all-range Assault mech with the one minor flaw of generally being rather difficult to keep heat control on.
* '''''Dragon''''' - While the ''Hatamoto-Chi'' might be the most recognizable, the ''Dragon'' and its upgrade, the ''Grand Dragon'', were unquestionably some of the DCMS' favorite mechs. It's a fast, flexible, hard to knock over, capable of carrying huge guns, and generally ubiquitous part in any Combine regiment, and well-loved by its pilots. However, for a Heavy Mech it's considered slightly undergunned due to the Combine's insistence on "light or heavy mechs only" creating what many consider an oversized medium mech for the same roles as a Medium would have, but few things in the early eras of BattleTech are as fast as the ''Dragon'' while also being as heavily armored and also still maintaining a reasonable weapons package. In the 31st century, the ''Grand Dragon'' began to replace regular ''Dragons'' due to a generally improved design as well as stronger weapons and cooling.
* '''''Gladiator''''' - The first Combine-designed BattleMech. Built under the Von Rohrs' rule, this line most famous for their role in the first Battlemech VS Battlemech combat in history, the Battle of Nox of 2475. Although both sides were equally matched in numbers and the Gladiators being better-armed than the Fedrats' Commandos, [[FAIL|they lost badly to the latter due to their faster speed and maneuverability, despite more than doubling them in weight and weaponry.]] The defeat at Nox was so humiliating and dishonorable the Gladiator's reputation was permanently tainted in the space Fish-heads' eyes, which led to them ceasing production in 2488 and the mech line nearly going extinct, with Alex Keller's highly custom version being the only known survivor by the 31st century. Curiously, the Jihad led to the Gladiator's revival as part of a retrotech-focused initiative to choke the Blakist forces on Age of War-era designs.
* '''''[[Jenner]]''''' - Their signature light Mech. A fast and light jump-capable design with respectable firepower, the Jenner is often considered one of the best Inner Sphere light mechs in the early eras of the game, often seeing success by ganging up on larger mechs and peppering them with some form of laser or heat-producing round, then letting their ''Panther'' partners swoop in to land the finishing blow.
* '''''Mauler''''': The finished monster that came out of the failed ''Daboku'' mech prototype, the ''Mauler'' is a 90-ton extremely long-range fighter whose LRM-15s, AC/2, and ER Large Lasers make it at the very least an exceptionally obnoxious armor chipper, or at worst a Mech sniper from hundreds of yards away. Thanks to its history as the reimagined ''Daboku'', it has an extremely inconsistent history, but that doesn't comfort anybody getting pelted with missiles and laserfire from four counties away. Anything that can get up close to it however has free game to add a ''Mauler'' to their kill total, as its payload suffers at close range.
* '''''Panther''''' - Their other signature light mech. Only 35 tons, this thing can actually keep pace pretty well with others in it's class and is a massive pain in the rear with its Lord's Light Particle Projector Cannon being a shockingly powerful piece of tech. It runs hot ''very'' quickly, on the other hand, and the Clan Invasion-era "upgrade" of the ''Panther'' takes this to next level, switching out the PPC for a LosTech extended range model that outputs significantly more heat - without upgrading the mech's cooling. [[FAIL|This means that the Clan Invasion-era PNT-10K cannot fire its main weapon without going at least 2 points over its heat-sinking threshold.]]
* '''''Thug''''' - An assault mech built to be successor of the Warhammer (the battlemech). Initially fielded by the Star League, but the Succession Wars put its production to a halt. Comstar however were able to keep many of them in storage. When the technology became available the Combine resume production of the mech. Its weaponry is a pair of PPCs, and a pair of SRM-6s, making it good at either long-range or short-range combat. The Combine would eventually fuse the ''Thug's'' weapons package with the ''Charger's'' frame (and a bunch of samurai cosplay) to produce the iconic ''Hatamoto-Chi''.
* '''''Von Rohrs/Hebi''''' - A short-lived 'Mech named after the usurper House Von Rohrs, originally built under the rule of Yama, the third Coordinator of that house. It was intended to replace the Gladiator after the Mech line became dishonored after the battle of Nox. After the Von Rohrs were killed off and the Kuritas returned to the throne, the 'Mech was renamed "Hebi" (Snake, often seen as a symbol of betrayal) and McAllister forbade salvaging them, which led to the line going extinct in 2518, only 8 years after their namesake house. [[EPIC FAIL|Worse, the Mechs they were intended to replace ended up outliving them by over half a millennium.]]

{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

Draconis Combine

2023-01-09T21:23:11Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Foreign Relations */

{{Infobox 40k Nations
|name=
|image= [[Image:056305F5-09B6-4E2D-9C7F-DB74714C94E3.png|250px|center]]
|bgcolor= DarkRed
|fgcolor= white
|Capital= Luthien
|Official Languages= Japanese, Swedish
|Power=
|Size= Around 350 controlled worlds
|Head of State= Coordinator of Worlds
|Head of Government=
|Governmental Structure=Militarized Feudal Fascist Empire
|State Religion/Ideology=
|Demographics=
|Military Force=*Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery
*Draconis Combine Admiralty
}}
{{Topquote|Always preserve the dragon and its magic will keep you strong.|Shiro Kurita}}

In the [[Battletech]] setting, the '''Draconis Combine''' is one of the five successor states of the Inner Sphere who are led by <s>The Rightful Rulers of the Galaxy</s> House Kurita. They are modeled to a large degree after Japan, with bits taken from the Sengoku Jidai, the Tokugawa Shogunate and Imperial Japan 1930-1945.

== Origins ==

The Combine was formed from the work of the legendary Shiro Kurita, a nobleman who was raised in an exceptionally traditional household, which held to even 17th century Japanese thinking and manners. Shiro, as well as his brother Urizen, were power hungry and destined to hold control; with Shiro using all the political games in the book to gain power on the planet of New Samarkand, and his brother quickly becoming his top military advisor. Eventually, he was able to create an alliance with a neighboring planet in Galedon V to help strong-arm a Mercantile alliance into helping them build a merchant fleet. By 2319, they'd built a burgeoning empire that had swiftly proven itself against most of it's neighboring foes, and Shiro crowned the alliance by it's new name, the Draconis Combine, after a region of space it once bordered and then completely subsumed, which it has been ever since.

== House Kurita ==
Since the Combine's founding, the Combine's Coordinators have largely come from House Kurita, aside from a two hundred year period where only tangentially related bloodlines got their turn, only to give up the Chrysanthemum Throne willingly as the Kuritas married themselves back onto the throne, to the delight of everybody.

Their general character is a bit hard to pin down aside from their imperious, expansionist rhetoric. While most have been perfectly competent and generally dull characters on the galactic stage, those Kurita Coordinators who have distinguished themselves to the larger Inner Sphere community did so in huge ways. This is largely because of the Combine's insistence on keeping the mystique of the position as the autocrat and more or less god figure and the raising of a nobility; meaning that if the Combine suffered any sort of setback, that all fell at their feet, and repeated failure often ended in assassination from the overeager military or aggrieved nobles, or seppuku from the shame of some especially great failure. As a result, much of the Coordinator's job is managing not just the armed forces, but the expectations and fall guys so that they can cover their own ass; often by ensuring that their actual spoken orders are exceptionally vague, to the point of being Haiku in certain circumstances.

Chances are if you're seeing a Kurita's name more than once, it's because they're either exceptionally adept leaders and conquerors, or exceptionally insane dictators.

==== Notable Kurita Coordinators ====
* '''Shiro Kurita''' - Founder and creator of the Combine along with his brother Urizen. Usually considered one of the top 3 Coordinators if not the best one. Flew a dope custom ''Sabre'' AeroSpace Fighter as a hobby.
* '''The Von Rohrs Bloodline''' - An illegitimate child of one of the earlier Kuritas by the name of Nihongi came to hate his Kurita bloodline after the Coordinator at the time killed his dad, and hatched a plot to take over the Combine from within. Of course, thanks to the politics of the time, his dad got axed before he ever got a chance, and he decided to just execute Parker Kurita, the last mainline member of Shiro's line, and ended up the sole remaining heir. Naturally quite stunned and terrified by having accidentally painted the largest target on his back possible, Nihongi secluded himself and several of his successors, while never once trying to actually better the Combine in any way, causing much of it's major issues from the Rasalhague league at the time. The House was fully wiped out once McAllister took over.
* '''Martin McAllister''' - A Rasalhague noble directly descended from Shiro Kurita, who married into the Sorenson family. Previously distinguished as a DCMS strategist and warrior, he inevitably was the man responsible for the deposement and annihilation of the Van Rohrs, and once again put the bloodline of the Kuritas back on the throne. Died young, however.
* '''Siriwan Kurita, the Dragon Lady''' - Martin's daughter, who lost her mother at a young age. While the Kurita's especially conservative ideas on whether or not women got to be on the throne was a bit of an obstacle, Martin suggested she find a distant cousin and marry up that way, and marry she did until her spouse died of "mysterious causes", and she became Regent while guiding her infant child who would inevitably become Coordinator when he became a man. She ended up being a fantastic and exceptionally smart Coordinator who kept the warfare to a minimum while reigning absolute for almost four decades, only giving up power to her kid who died under a similar set of "Mysterious causes" as well as his heir, causing her to end up Coordinator again. While she enjoyed the gig, the nobility was starting to get wise to the fact that she almost certainly had a hand in her spouse/child's deaths, and she at long last abdicated to her granddaughter after two years. She is the only person in the family to have been Coordinator three separate times thanks to the quirks in the line of succession.
* '''Urizen Kurita II''' - The Star League's ailing health needed to be nudged along by somebody, and that somebody was this guy, at least within the confines of the Combine.
* '''Takiro Kurita''' - Previously sort of a monk-like figure when he took the job, he dissuaded any doubt that he would be a capable leader of the Combine's armed forces by surviving an assassination attempt by the ISF, torturing the men to find out who paid them, then killing the two men who performed the act and their male heirs. Ruled through the twilight of the Star League, and begged his son, Minoru, to treat the situation carefully on his deathbed.
* '''Minoru Kurita''' - Minoru, Takiro's son, ignored his dying father's wishes and basically began the Succession Wars on his own, and as a result more or less created the first bad backslide of humanity into [[LosTech]]. Got boom-headshot'd by a Federated Suns Sniper during the First Succession War.
* '''Jinjiro Kurita''' - The son of Minoru. While starting off his childhood as a decent kid, the death of his mother who was a concubine caught up in political infighting traumatized him and made him… [[That Guy|off]] despite his tactical savviness. After hearing his dad had been killed, he made the very normal and obvious decision in that situation, and ordered a planet-wide scouring of Kentares IV, the planet he had died on, ending up killing '''52 Million people''' to the point that he was fed up with guns involvement, and just began hacking people down with Katanas himself. Surprisingly, he didn't turn out to be the most stable individual; as he started the Second Succession War based on terrible information, and was constantly plagued by psychotic episodes regarding the [[Clan Wolverine#Minnesota Tribe|Minnesota Tribe]] once they appeared, finally going straight over the edge when somebody sent him a doll of a Star League Officer past his security detail. This made him permanently lose his mind and he hung himself in solitary confinement. He's the main reason the Fedrats despise the Kuritas.
* '''Takashi Kurita''' - Coordinator during the Third Succession War. Unlike the previous two Coordinators, Takashi was not a complete raving lunatic and/or glory-hound...at first. While he had some diplomatic traits, he was still an expansionist and a brutal driver of his armies through his kid, and had a fierce rivalry with Wolf's Dragoons that continued up to his dying day. To his anger, his kid ended up being pretty non-traditional when it came to warfare but also wildly successful; and ultimately made Combine tactics look hilariously out of date. THEN he begins his spiral into being a complete raving lunatic and glory hound until he basically gets locked in place by his son who wanted to protect his grandmother, gets a medical treatment that cures him of being nuts, but it only came too late as he found out that he'd been played into weakening either the Combine or strengthening the legend of the Dragoons, and chose to commit Seppuku with his son at his side.
* '''Theodore Kurita''' - The greatest Coordinator-General of the Combine, bar none. His mother's only child, she lavished him with love and care and his family made good and goddamn sure he was set up for success in life, and he hit the ground running as the commander of a Penal legion that he turned into an incredible fighting force, making enormous changes to the way the Combine fought, and distinguished himself as able to defend and attack during both the War of 3039 and also the Clan Invasion, using tactics almost counter to what Bushido demanded. His father hated that, but he was inevitably humbled by Teddy's genius and his own familial love. When he was crowned Coordinator, he immediately made getting rid of the Clans a #1 priority, and began recruiting from the ranks of Women and Criminals to bolster the Combine's ranks, and successfully convinced the Inner Sphere to help him go fuck up Clan Smoke Jaguar, then was named First Lord of the rebuilt Star League. Had plenty of enemies from the ''Kokuryu-Kai'', or Black Dragon Collective, who were hardliners who thought his reforms were detrimental to the Combine, and spent a lot of his downtime fighting them off, especially during the Jihad.
* '''Yori Kurita''' - The second woman to be Coordinator. She only ever got to the position in 32nd century because of a series of unrelated mishaps that got her promoted from "unimportant minor noble" to "Queen of the Dragon" in very short order. While there were some initial grumblings, what with her initial bringing to the court having been done by a Warlord who openly wasn't a fan of the last few guys to take the throne, she pretty quickly made herself a competent and ruthless Coordinator, including finally...''finally'' getting one over on the Federated Suns, to the point that the Combine took their capital under her watch. Granted, her ascension to the throne involved overthrowing the mainline Kurita's in a coup and crippling the Combine in a civil war that flanderized them back to their pre-Theodore-era lunatic selves which pissed a lot of people the fuck off out of universe.

== Society ==
The Combine's society is, as stated above, influenced greatly by Feudal and Imperial Japan, and is separated largely into what is called the "Five Pillars" of Draconis society, each with it's own symbolic meaning, which largely helps people within those pillars define themselves and define their worldview. They are:

# '''The Pillar of Gold''': The head of government, known as the Coordinator of Worlds (or more commonly just "Coordinator"), and all their myriad ministries and bureaus that help govern the Combine and keep it both loyal and under the Coordinator's thumb.
# '''The Pillar of Steel''': All Combine military, sometimes referred to as the "Arm of the Dragon". While nominally led by the Coordinator, most Coordinators have their Tai-Shu, or Warlords, deal with the day-to-day running of the various military ops of the Combine, specifically to allow the Coordinator to cover their ass in case their orders turn out to not work. Most of the Combine's military adhere to some form of the Bushido code, and all are expected to follow a superior's orders to the death. Given that they place an emphasis on hard and fast Battlemech assaults, as well as the open threat of death looming, it's not especially hard to get with the program. If you survive however, you'll be a capable warrior and well-respected within Draconis society, as regardless of position, military members are treated well.
# '''The Pillar of Teak''': The non-military sector of Draconis life, combined with cultural indoctrination. Basically a caste system consisting of nobles, warriors, craftspeople, common laborers, and then the vestiges of society consisting of outcasts and criminal elements. If you know anything about Imperial Japan or the Sengoku period, just assume much of Draconis society follows that because everyone who lives within their borders is the biggest fucking weeb to ever exist, to the point of openly demanding any government official or noble learn the Japanese language just to make sure they keep up to date on it.
# '''The Pillar of Ivory''': Religious and Spiritual leaders and advisory. Unsurprisingly, Shinto, Buddhism, and any collectivist philosophy does especially well within Combine space as Shiro intended it to be, and every non-eastern philosophy, and especially any individualist or egalitarian philosophy gets pretty tightly controlled.
# '''The Pillar of Jade''': The manufacturers and merchants. The Combine has historically never been especially big on resources, and the succession wars didn't do that any favors, so most of the economy is run by the state. There are independent companies, but they pale in comparison to the vast number of powerful state-backed companies that have been cut into two categories; Military and Civilian, ensuring maximum exploitation of what little the Combine has.

In general terms, the Draconis Combine could be best be described as a Feudal Fascist Empire (not unlike the Japanese Empire with a twist of state-sponsored mega corps) being authoritarian, reactionary, militaristic, nationalistic, chauvinistic (including being rather sexist) with tight cooperation between the state and corporate power blocks and a mentality that it is the highest honor to die for Coordinator and Combine. While it may be limited in scope, marginalized by the nobility, corrupt, ineffective or simply a sham, the other four successor states make at least some pretext to democratic government. Even [[The Clans]] have representative elements. The Draconis Combine does not. The Coordinator Reigns, the Nobles and Warlords rule and command on his behalf, the people obey.

This is not to say that more liberal minded individuals don't exist in Combine Space, see Theodore Kurita. But even when a reformer reaches the height of power in the Combine they would face significant resistance and push-back from entrenched conservative blocks up to and including Civil War.

== Foreign Relations ==
* [[Capellan Confederation]]: Alliance of Convenience out of mutual hatred for the Federated Suns.
* [[The Clans]]: Wary neutrality to Bad. Due to past experience from the Clan Invasion, they don’t go out of their way to prod their nest. Though they will fight tooth and nail as seen with the Nova Cat annihilation in the Kuritan civil war
* [[Federated Suns]]: Bad. The Combine's been the Federated's sun's biggest foe for three centuries and has done some pretty nasty things in that time.
* [[Lyran Commonwealth]]: Also Bad.
* [[Free Worlds League]]: Neutral to Good. Due to mutual hatred against the Lyrans historically.
* [[The Periphery]]: Ambivalently neutral. Used to bully the Outworld Alliance before it took in the Snow Ravens.

== Military ==
[[Image:DC soldiers.jpg|thumb|left|Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery Infantry: you see these guys walking down the street you best start learning japanese and to love Udon noodles]]
The Combine lives by the old ''Bushido'' code for all things, but most specially in warfare, which has been part of their success as much as it has been their downfall. They are among the most dangerous and vicious of the entire Inner Sphere's militaries, but their warfare has a fucking enormous cost to it; they prefer absolute loyalty to their superior officers, and a rigid adherence to the concepts of frontal assault warfare, often fighting to the last man and refusing to retreat even in the face of overwhelming odds. This means in the face of battle, they've often been completely outclassed by commanders who were able to adjust to what the Combine was giving them and fight back. Further, their officer corps are often subject to the same politiking as their nobility, and are often trying to cover their ass. It should say something that one guy almost 500 years into their existence would become their best general simply because he'd dare to adjust tactics against an enemy.

While this likely would've been the easiest place for the creators of Battletech to just let Gundams exist, the Draconis are more well known for creating Particle blasting speed demons and walking samurai armor mechs. They are also well-known for only using Light and Heavy-class Mechs in their warfare; seeing Medium-class Mechs as a poor compromise for what they want to do; which is to attack as fast and as hard as possible, their mechs bristling with armaments and clad in bright [[Speed Freek|red and gold]] paint, and they ''love'' their Battlemechs. To the exclusion of almost everything else. Seriously, it got to the point that it took almost 500 years for things like tanks to become widespread in their military due to years of Coordinators playing favorites with the Mechwarriors.

===== Notable Mechs=====
* '''''Charger''''' - An assault mech with the firepower of a light mech, the original CGR-1A1 model of the ''Charger'' is a commonly-cited contender for worst mech in the whole setting. For some reason originally conceived as a heavily-armored scout, the ''Charger'' is an 80-ton mech sporting the heaviest possible engine and by extension the highest top speed of any introtech mech in its weight class. However, the sheer amount of tonnage dedicated to the engine leaves it with an utterly impotent weapons package consisting of five small lasers, meaning that it is outgunned by most medium mechs and even some light mechs. The Draconis Combine ended up stuck with the overwhelming majority of ''Chargers'' at the outset of the Succession Wars, and assignment to one was commonly used as a form of punishment within the Combine military. The Mech would be improved by the Capellan Confederation at the end of the Third Succession War by downgrading the engine and freeing up space for more firepower, and the ''Charger's'' frame would be repurposed for the development of the iconic ''Hatamoto-Chi'' during the War of 3039, but the ''Charger'' itself would not be redeemed in Combine service until the Clan Invasion, where the rediscovery of extralight engines would allow for upgraded firepower without sacrificing the ''Charger's'' top speed.
* '''''Catapult K''''' - While the Catapult itself is ubiquitous throughout the Sphere, the K series has never caught on outside the Combine. This "novel" design ditches the Catapult's characteristic LRMs for a pair of PPCs, turning an aged but capable indirect fire support platform into an outdated direct fire glass cannon.
* '''''Hatamoto-Chi''''' - The signature assault mech of the Combine, which looks like a mech designed in the image of Super Shredder. Essentially two different mech designs merged into one (namely the venerable ''Thug'' and the much-maligned ''Charger''), it's a formidable, tough-as-nails all-range Assault mech with the one minor flaw of generally being rather difficult to keep heat control on.
* '''''Dragon''''' - While the ''Hatamoto-Chi'' might be the most recognizable, the ''Dragon'' and its upgrade, the ''Grand Dragon'', were unquestionably some of the DCMS' favorite mechs. It's a fast, flexible, hard to knock over, capable of carrying huge guns, and generally ubiquitous part in any Combine regiment, and well-loved by its pilots. However, for a Heavy Mech it's considered slightly undergunned due to the Combine's insistence on "light or heavy mechs only" creating what many consider an oversized medium mech for the same roles as a Medium would have, but few things in the early eras of BattleTech are as fast as the ''Dragon'' while also being as heavily armored and also still maintaining a reasonable weapons package. In the 31st century, the ''Grand Dragon'' began to replace regular ''Dragons'' due to a generally improved design as well as stronger weapons and cooling.
* '''''Gladiator''''' - The first Combine-designed BattleMech. Built under the Von Rohrs' rule, this line most famous for their role in the first Battlemech VS Battlemech combat in history, the Battle of Nox of 2475. Although both sides were equally matched in numbers and the Gladiators being better-armed than the Fedrats' Commandos, [[FAIL|they lost badly to the latter due to their faster speed and maneuverability, despite more than doubling them in weight and weaponry.]] The defeat at Nox was so humiliating and dishonorable the Gladiator's reputation was permanently tainted in the space Fish-heads' eyes, which led to them ceasing production in 2488 and the mech line nearly going extinct, with Alex Keller's highly custom version being the only known survivor by the 31st century. Curiously, the Jihad led to the Gladiator's revival as part of a retrotech-focused initiative to choke the Blakist forces on Age of War-era designs.
* '''''[[Jenner]]''''' - Their signature light Mech. A fast and light jump-capable design with respectable firepower, the Jenner is often considered one of the best Inner Sphere light mechs in the early eras of the game, often seeing success by ganging up on larger mechs and peppering them with some form of laser or heat-producing round, then letting their ''Panther'' partners swoop in to land the finishing blow.
* '''''Mauler''''': The finished monster that came out of the failed ''Daboku'' mech prototype, the ''Mauler'' is a 90-ton extremely long-range fighter whose LRM-15s, AC/2, and ER Large Lasers make it at the very least an exceptionally obnoxious armor chipper, or at worst a Mech sniper from hundreds of yards away. Thanks to its history as the reimagined ''Daboku'', it has an extremely inconsistent history, but that doesn't comfort anybody getting pelted with missiles and laserfire from four counties away. Anything that can get up close to it however has free game to add a ''Mauler'' to their kill total, as its payload suffers at close range.
* '''''Panther''''' - Their other signature light mech. Only 35 tons, this thing can actually keep pace pretty well with others in it's class and is a massive pain in the rear with its Lord's Light Particle Projector Cannon being a shockingly powerful piece of tech. It runs hot ''very'' quickly, on the other hand, and the Clan Invasion-era "upgrade" of the ''Panther'' takes this to next level, switching out the PPC for a LosTech extended range model that outputs significantly more heat - without upgrading the mech's cooling. [[FAIL|This means that the Clan Invasion-era PNT-10K cannot fire its main weapon without going at least 2 points over its heat-sinking threshold.]]
* '''''Thug''''' - An assault mech built to be successor of the Warhammer (the battlemech). Initially fielded by the Star League, but the Succession Wars put its production to a halt. Comstar however were able to keep many of them in storage. When the technology became available the Combine resume production of the mech. Its weaponry is a pair of PPCs, and a pair of SRM-6s, making it good at either long-range or short-range combat. The Combine would eventually fuse the ''Thug's'' weapons package with the ''Charger's'' frame (and a bunch of samurai cosplay) to produce the iconic ''Hatamoto-Chi''.
* '''''Von Rohrs/Hebi''''' - A short-lived 'Mech named after the usurper House Von Rohrs, originally built under the rule of Yama, the third Coordinator of that house. It was intended to replace the Gladiator after the Mech line became dishonored after the battle of Nox. After the Von Rohrs were killed off and the Kuritas returned to the throne, the 'Mech was renamed "Hebi" (Snake, often seen as a symbol of betrayal) and McAllister forbade salvaging them, which led to the line going extinct in 2518, only 8 years after their namesake house. [[EPIC FAIL|Worse, the Mechs they were intended to replace ended up outliving them by over half a millennium.]]

{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

Capellan Confederation

2023-01-09T19:17:19Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Foreign Relations */

{{Infobox 40k Nations
|name=
|image= [[Image:Capellans1.png|250px|center]]
|bgcolor= Green
|fgcolor= white
|Capital= Sian
|Official Languages= Han Chinese, Russian, Arabic, English
|Power=
|Size= 217 controlled worlds
|Head of State= Chancellor
|Head of Government=
|Governmental Structure= Maoist Feudalism
|State Religion/Ideology=
|Demographics=
|Military Force=*Capellan Confederation Armed Forces
}}
{{Topquote|Guerilla leaders spend a great deal more time in organization, instruction, agitation, and propaganda work than they do fighting, for their most important job is to win over the people.|Mao Zedong}}
In the [[Battletech]] universe, the '''Capellan Confederation''' is one of the five successor states of the Inner Sphere <s>and it's designated Punching Bag</s> which is under the de facto leadership of House Liao. It is mostly modeled after China (a mash up of Imperial and Communist) with some Russian Influence.
== Origins ==
Unlike the other states that already had ruling families who used charisma, charm, and violence to get their seals stamped onto their section of space, the Capellan Confederation's history has been marred from the beginning with near-constant shitflinging at the Inner Sphere powers and it's own neighbors, and especially the Free Worlds League. The Confederation began life as the Capellan Hegemony, getting into pissing contests with a neighbor the Sarna Supremacy over and over again, causing a number of the inner sphere powers to come down there and beat some sense into those in the Capellan Marches. Naturally, this caused quite a bit of annoyance from pretty much everybody, but especially the myriad worlds within the Marches, most notably Capella itself, which had been founded on the controversial, somewhat insane principals of one Elias Liao, who had fled Terran space after forming an alternative anarchist society and doing terrorism against “Terran Alliance corruption,” and so they banded together to keep the Inner Sphere's hands out of their respective pots, creating the Capellan Commonality.

While the myriad worlds grew closer and closer together; all noblemen feared a possible invasion from the larger powers, and it wasn't necessarily an empty threat. The Capellan Commonality was wildly corrupt and poorly organized, and was often found wanting when it came to military might. Finally, during a peacekeeping mission from the FedSun, one of Elias Liao's descendants brought all of the leaders of the Commonality together, and suggested that all of the myriad worlds of the Commonality surrender their autonomy to a single leader and single party politik, and more or less founded the Capellan Confederation within a month of this meeting, beating back the FedSun peacekeeping forces, and made sure everyone took them seriously by orbitally bombarding up their own fucking capital world of Capella; moving all the important shit to the planet of Sian. And it is there that the Capellan Confederation solidified their existence.

== House Liao ==
The Confederation's head of state is the '''Chancellor''', and that position has historically been run by House Liao. Technically it's not a hereditary post, but in practice it's firmly in Liao's pocket. While many of the other houses have had their bad seeds before eventually getting their shit together, House Liao has stood out for starting crazy, and ''staying'' crazy. Elias Liao had his third eye opened in Tibet, and that particular trait has followed it's way down the line, with nutcases, despots, and full-on basket cases that it's actually easier to list the not-crazy ones.
*'''Franco Liao''': Founder of the Confederation and its first Chancellor. Ended the corruption and instability that marred the Commonality, and moved the capital from Capella to Sian after the Davions tried to take it over, but not before evacuating and [[Exterminatus|bombing the shit out of the planet]] while the FedRat forces could only stand there and watch in horror, [[Lulz|obliterating the hell out of them and 2000 Capellans that didn't get the memo]].
*'''Candace Liao''': Retired MechWarrior, daughter of the infamously unhinged Maximilian "Mad Max" Liao and sister of the even crazier Romano. Candace saw the madness that ran on her family and sought to protect the Confederation's future from her father by seceding St. Ives and becoming a neutral ally of the FedRats during the Fourth Succession War. She also had myomer tits due to a breast cancer, which saved her life when her sister tried to have her killed. Her husband Justin wasn't so lucky, which enraged Candace so much she went all the way back to Sian to murderize Romano and her lover, AFTER killing the assassin herself. A shrewd politician with a strong love for her people, she single-handedly saved the Capellans' asses from getitng nommed by the Davions and placed her nephew Sun Tzu in charge, which would come back to haunt her in her final years.
*'''Sun Tzu Liao''': The face that appears besides "Magnificent Bastard" in Inner Sphere dictionaries. Managed to get the Capellan Confederation back on it's feet after numerous defeats suffered in the first half of the 31st century and got voted in as First Lord of the Second Star League. The thing that made him dangerous was that he was capable of playing the fool to make people underestimate him before using cunning strategies to turn the tables on his rivals. The fact many other nobles among the Great Houses didn’t pay much attention to him helped a lot.

== Society ==
On paper the Capellan Confederation is Egalitarian and Socialist. In practice it falls short of those goals. Most glaringly there is a hereditary nobility which holds the political power within the centralized apparatus of the Capellan State as well as various corporations. Beyond that, the Citizens of the Capellan Confederation do benefit from a fairly comprehensive welfare state and enjoy peaceful and comfortable lives with a comparatively high standard of living and social mobility by IS standards. The issue is that Citizenship in the Capellan Confederation is not something your born into and if you don't earn it (either by not doing well in school or being newly conquered, also you can lose it as a punishment), you're a Servitor. No, not that sort of [[Servitor]] (thank god) but part of an oppressed underclass who does the crap work for bare basic wages as the serfs of the nobility. The only consolation is that it is possible (if difficult) for servitors to earn citizenship and their kids have the same education and opportunities to earn citizenship as everyone else in the confederation. Sun-Tzu Liao added some basic provisions for servitors improving their situation, though it's still a pretty bum lot.

For awhile state propaganda was able to stem the tide of the many, many, many failures of the Succession Wars, but eventually pride amongst the citizens of the Confederation began to wane and the ruling classes attempted to keep everybody in line with tighter controls on media, food, and employment, which were all almost universally reversed under Sun-Tzu Liao, in what became his great social work known as the ''Xin Sheng'', or New Rebirth. With it, more freedoms were given to the individual and more pride of their Han Chinese heritage was instilled into the populace. This served to stem the tide of unrest, but it also led to non-asian citizens catching shit for not being Glorious Han.
== Foreign Relations ==
* [[Draconis Combine]]: Allies of Convenience due to mutual hatred of the Federated Suns.
* [[The Clans]]: Warily neutral due to a lack of Clans in their neighborhoods.
* [[Federated Suns]]: Very bad. Historically nuked their own former capital to tell the Davions to bug off.
* [[Lyran Commonwealth]]: Neutral to Bad due to the Federated Commonwealth.
* [[Free Worlds League]]: Wary Neutral to bad. Used to duke it out over the Province of Andurien. Both hated the Federated Commonwealth though.
* [[The Periphery]]: Ambivalent. Historically worked with the Taurians and Canopians against the Davions but also used to wage war with them.

== Military ==
Capellans have long suffered as the designated villains of the IS, and as villains used to lose, for a long time, they kept losing worlds, including many important industrial ones. This has forced the Capellan armed forces to make do with what they have, or go the sneaky way if they ever wanted to accomplish something. Part of the problem for them is that House Liao has historically mistrusted their military and often hamstrung it by doing all sorts of inane things to muck up the chain of command, and their officer structure meant that everyone deferred to their superior's word when on the battlefield all the way up, meaning that often the Capellan higher ranks were paralyzed if they couldn't get in touch with Central Command, and often let Mercs be general for a day. And that's just if they were lucky. If they weren't, they'd get an officer who'd come down with what is known as "Hopeless Battle Syndrome", where they will go commit a suicidal last stand to die in a blaze of glory rather than be court-martialed or disciplined for failure. It took the Resurgence Policy (Chinese: Xin Sheng) under Sun Tzu Liao for the Confederation to finally start seeing some changes for the better in their armed forces, particularly under the fierce building up under Daoshen Liao. It also helped that the Maskirovka intelligence agency’s been tasked with [[Sanguinary Priest|monitoring]] the CCAF officer corps’ mental health to reassign afflicted officers to mental rehabilitation before they [[Black Rage|exhibit symptoms]] on the battlefield.

The only real x-factors the Capellans have had over the years is their tank divisions and their warrior houses. The Armor Divisions, who have spooked the armies of the IS over and over and over again, are often the most well trained and well equipped among the entire Inner Sphere, as they were cheap, easier to put together than Mechs, and more importantly, effectively often rolled out of the factory to fight Mechs. The Warrior Houses are semi-religious elite combined-arms regiments that are trained away from the Armed Forces in seclusion until they are unleashed onto unsuspecting battlefields as the hammer of House Liao. Those who perform well are then often drawn into the Army's own elite squadrons that do mostly the same shit except with some Commissar powers; The Death Commandos. There used to employ Northwind Highlanders mercenaries, which got pawned off to the [[Republic of the Sphere]]. Due to their comparative scarcity in their ranks; the Capellans have almost exclusively used light and medium class mechs as a matter of principal due to their low cost, if they even bother to use them at all. Modern Capellan mechs developed after the resurgence are often noted for possessing advanced camouflaged armor, and thanks to some [[The Periphery|Periphery]] help have been able to put together mechs that can finally start creating meaningful gains in battle.

==== Notable Mechs ====

* '''''[[UrbanMech]]''''' - embodying the Capellan's resource deprived but scrappy nature. The Urbanmech found life in the Capellan Confederations' military not out of favoritism but necessity due to a lack of resources. In addition, the Confederation's typical use of unconventional warfare meshed well with the UrbanMech's specialization in urban guerilla warfare. The most well-known Capellan variant is the UM-R60L, which replaces the AC/10 with a horrifically deadly AC/20 (capable of [[Rape|instakilling Lights and Mediums]], and [[Anal circumference|one of the few guns that can make an Assault 'Mech shiver in fear]]), at the cost of very, ''very'' low ammo capacity.
* '''''[[Cataphract]]''''' - Starting off as a FrankenMech before being standardized, it's an example of the "[[Looted|making do]]" aspect of the Capellan military. It exists essentially as a serial production mech cobbled together from the parts of Shadow Hawk, Phoenix Hawk, and Marauder chassis that were still available from the remaining factories. Left arm from one, right arm from another, that sort of thing. While it is pretty ramshackle as a matter of design, it's got plenty of armor, and it's pair of Autocannons, an AC/5 and an LB-X AC/10, are quite dangerous, though a critical flaw is it runs out of ammo fast.
* '''''Firebee''''' - The first-ever Capellan Battlemech design, clearly inspired by the question "What if the ''Stinger'' mech was made by a cartoon supervillain?" It's a nasty little anti-vehicle Light Mech with a Large Laser, and four Maui SRM-2 launchers, with standard and special inferno missile compatibility. Sun-Zu Liao had a liking for this thing, and so he had an upgraded version put into production with the Guardian ECM Suite and Stealth Armor. Eventually got a hard upgrade in the ''Yinghuochong'', which is built on the same chassis.
* '''''Highlander''''' - While better known for their use by the [[Star League]], the Highlander is Capellan by birthright.
* '''''Huron Warrior''''' - A medium mech that greatly benefited from the Helm Memory Core. Originally meant for fire support, it was reworked as a sniper. Its Gauss Rifle can blast chunks off of other 'Mechs at extreme distances. It also has a crown in its head that resembles a Cree Okimâwastotin (Or for those who don't speak Cree, a war bonnet).
* '''''Raven''''' - A light mech which emphasizes the guerilla aspect of the Capellan military. It has the honor of being considered one of the first original designs in centuries, and was the first Electronic Warfare specialist mech developed since the Succession Wars cooled down. It doesn't do a whole lot of damage, but in fairness it isn't really intended to, being more of a support and defensive role.
* '''''Ti Ts'ang''''' - The "signature" mech of the Confederation, in that it's usually the one used in a lot of Confederation art. Developed at Sun-Tzu Liao's personal request; It's a heavy mech heavily inspired by Han Dynasty Chinese Armor, and it reflects a lot of Sun-Tzu's personal tastes in warfare; it's a medium/close-range specialist designed to be as high-tech and dangerous as the Capellans could make it, and plopping '''five''' ER-Medium Lasers, four ER-Small Lasers, and a fucking battleaxe into it sure as shit does the trick on that. And just to make sure it's a priority target, it has a TAG system integrated into it; which means it can call airstrikes down on unsuspecting heads.
* '''''Vindicator''''' - One of the Confederation's most iconic mechs. Built in the early Succession Wars the mech is designed to strike at targets at any range. Its main armament is a PPC, backed with and LRM-5 to snipe at long range. Along with Medium and Small Laser to fight at short range.
* '''''Xanthos''''' - The first ever Quadrupedal BattleMech. It might be slow and clumsy, but it packs a massive punch both at short and long ranges. When the Star League rejected them, the Liaos embraced them. They went extinct in the Second Succession War, but were revived thanks to the Helm Memory Core and continue to be used, even in the Dark Age.
* '''''Yu Huang''''' - The Command-Assault Mech of House Liao's maddened dreams come to life. It's intended to be the emperor of the battlefield, and Sun-Tzu Liao's specifications ensure it gets damn close to that; packing it with 17 tons of armor, an ER-PPC and LRM-10 missile system for long range, and [[BLAM|Two Medium Lasers, one Medium Pulse laser, and an Autocannon/20 for anything stupid enough to try fighting it at short-range.]]

{{Battletech Factions}}

[[Category: BattleTech]]

Free Worlds League

2023-01-09T19:14:05Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Foreign Relations */

{{Infobox 40k Nations
|name=
|image= [[Image:HouseMarik1.png|250px|center]]
|bgcolor= Purple
|fgcolor= LightCyan
|Capital= Atreus
|Official Languages= Most spoken human languages
|Size= Over 330 worlds
|Head of State= Captain-General
|Head of Government=
|Governmental Structure= Parliamentary Federation
|State Religion/Ideology=
|Demographics=
|Military Force=*Free Worlds League Military
}}
{{Topquote|The greatest threat to a Marik, is a Marik, glory to Marik!|Free Worlds League saying}}
In the [[Battletech]] setting, the '''Free Worlds League''' is one of the five successor states in the Inner Sphere. Of the successor states the Free Worlds League could be described as the loosest and (at least on paper) the most democratic. Even so much of the leadership has fallen de-facto to House Marik's pockets.

They are notably the only Successor State to have briefly died thanks to the Word of Blake's machinations as well as years of infighting going hot all at once, but then came back again.

== Origins ==
The Free Worlds League started life as several individual worlds and states, most prominently the Marik Commonwealth, The Federation of Oriente, and Regulan Principality, who all came together post-Terran Alliance collapse to mutually form together to face oncoming threats and hopefully spread their burgeoning state through trade rather than conquest, which was immediately set aside once they had needled their immediate neighbor; the dictatorial Stewart Commonality into open war, which thanks to their now combined forces, needed a strong leader to put them all into line. Thus began the creation of the position of Captain-General, and from then on, it was history. What would become the general borders of the Free Worlds would be solidified just before the Age of War, with the planet of Andurien being it's biggest conquest, which in hindsight would become it's biggest headache, as it would have to deal with regular incursions from the [[Capellan Confederation]] for much of it's initial existence over this one planet for the next several hundred years.

The first iteration of the Free Worlds League was completely dissolved and disbanded during the Word Of Blake Jihad; as the Captain-General at the time; Thomas Marik, was in-fact also the supreme master of the Word of Blake, and the entire extended Marik family immediately began making claims to the title, leading ultimately to the state balkanizing itself over the course of the Jihad, losing hundreds of worlds to their neighbors.

The current iteration of the Free Worlds League came into being in the 3080's as a result of the hard work of Jessica Marik, the daughter of Thomas Marik’s body double, who had long since dreamed of reforming it after it's dissolution post-Jihad, and worked hard to get the resultant individual states back under the Marik banner. She did it, but the unity of this one is much more fragmented, especially after Clanner refugees were given amnesty in the new FWL's borders.

== House Marik ==
On paper (and to a large degree in practice) the Free Worlds League is run by a Parliament whose members are mostly elected democratically as each world sees fit, though there are a few non-democratic planets. Each FWL affiliated world has a lot of autonomy in that framework. Less formally, power in the League has fallen into the office of Captain-General, the supreme commander of the Free Worlds League military. People are technically appointed as Captain-Generals by parliament. In practice, the office is the exclusive domain of House Marik and parliamentary approval is just a rubber stamp on succession.

While most Mariks are generally considered less of a major pain in the ass than other major noble houses, there is specifically one, the real Thomas Marik, that stands out as obviously the worst one as he was the head of the [[Word of Blake]]. Once he got killed, all the cadet branches of House Marik and the regional nobles began fighting amongst themselves in what was basically a “mini-Succession Wars” in League space until Jessica Marik reunified the bulk of the provinces together again with help from the Sea Fox and Spirit Cat clanners (who were seeking safe shores once Grey Monday wrecked the Republic and HPG network).

== Society ==
Life in the Free Worlds League is as diverse as it gets in the Battletech universe, simply because being in the Free Worlds League isn't exactly as enthusiastic about being an autocratic state like the other Successor States, it sees itself in a more democratic light, with no overarching pre-20th century civilization that it apes for cultural significance. Often, the traditions of larger worlds within the League like Atreus, Andurien, Oriente, or Regulus will impose themselves on immediate stellar neighbors due to proximity, but no pre-FTL societal trend is constant within the League. As a result, the people of the Free Worlds League are far more individualistic and varied than your average Inner Sphere citizen, but as a result are also way less loyal to the concept of the Free Worlds League, meaning that sustained war or much open conflict that isn't defensive is enormously unpopular to the average Free Worlder, because that may not be their thing, or more importantly, not very profitable.

Really, if there's any sort of cultural stereotype of the Free Worlds League, it's that they're all money-grubbing business types, obsessed with free markets and are often noted for having trouble understanding philosophy that doesn't involve money in an any way. The average entrepreneur in the FWL is noted for their aggression and often their keen and ferocious business-savvy, meaning industry thrives in FWL space. However, much of that money began life in a less than reputable way; piracy, gun-running, you name it, the FWL probably harbored the criminal that did it. And as a result, many Free Worlders don't really see certain kinds of crime as that big a deal. Notably, they have an open fury towards those who augment their body with bionics. While prosthesis due to injuries are okay, any other augmentics, especially non-essential ones, are considered worthy of ridicule and open violence in some places. This was part of the reason why the real Thomas Marik had to go to ComStar (and later their Blakist schismatics) once he got horrible scarred and rebuild after an accident while the body double had to take over. This did not get any better during the Word of Blake Jihad at all.
== Foreign Relations ==
* [[Draconis Combine]]: Ambivalent due to having mutual hatred of the Lyrans
* [[Capellan Confederation]]: Ambivalent to Hostile. Due to Andurien Province being a playground between both sides. But both also hated the Federated Commonwealth.
* [[The Clans]]: Warily Neutral to Bad. Took in Clan Nova Cat (& their Spirit Cat successors) and Clan Sea Fox to be member states but had an existential crisis with the Wolf Empire next door.
* [[Federated Suns]]: Neutral to Bad due to the Federated Commonwealth.
* [[Lyran Commonwealth]]: Very Bad. Due to the Federated Commonwealth and the Lyrans trying to prevent the League’s reformation
* [[The Periphery]]: Ambivalent. Hates the Marian Hegemony like everyone else due to slave raiding but has complicated relationships with the Magistry of Canopus.

== Military ==
The FWLM is a typical Inner Sphere military, split specifically into Federal and Provincal units, of which the latter were much more widespread in the league's history. While the Federal troops were 100% loyal and answerable to the Captain-General, the Provincal units were largely self-supplied, raised, and trained by their respective provinces. While this worked for a time, it inevitably led to an act that allowed Provinces to withhold their troops, and the Captain-General eventually put a stop to it when invasions began causing trouble in their borders from both sides.

The FWLM started out a combined-arms military, with some of the best naval capacity in the Inner Sphere due to the League's founding from an empire of traders. They preferred no specific type of Battlemech, armor, or aerospace fighter, choosing instead to build their units in the boring way of "whatever was best for the job at hand", allowing them to be a good middle ground for the Inner Sphere armies; just good enough to hold their own, but often too spread out and fractious throughout their history to really become major conquerors. Their elite battlemech formations were among the best of the Inner Sphere, and the most openly feudal, what with names like "Knights of the Inner Sphere".

===== Notable Mechs =====
* '''''Anzu''''' - The League's unofficial mascot mech built in the 31st century after it's reformation. It's sort of designed as a ''[[Shadow Hawk]]'' clone with more energy weapons, as well as one scary L-PPC, allowing it to become a dependable mid-range threat and a darling among League Mechwarriors.
* '''''Albatross''''' - A bizarre-looking [[beakie]] Assault mech built specifically so that the League could have something that could take out the Clan OmniMechs, since they knew that was probably going to be a big problem for them in the near future. Doesn't really have a set role in any lance, and so it's the Jack-Of-All-Trades Mech; capable of hitting from any distance and dangerous at most of them.
* '''''[[Awesome (BattleTech)|Awesome]]''''' - A mech that more than lives up to its name. Its a massive Assault Mech that's armed with 3 PPC's, and a small laser, with good amount of armor and heat sinks to keep in the battlefield for a long time; usually the posterchild for what people consider a "ZombieMech" due to it's incredible ability to take a beating.
* '''''Orion''''' - The League's staple mech from the time of the Star League all the way to the present. While it gets called a poor man's ''[[Atlas]]'', that still makes it a pretty solid mech. Has plenty of armor, and a spacious chest cavity means that ground crews adore working in this thing because it's not cram-packed with stuff it doesn't need. The mech was used by Alexander Kerensky's in the war against Amaris. The mech even has a IIC version used exclusively by Clan Wolf.
* '''''[[Yeoman (Battletech)|Yeoman]]''''' - a Heavy fire support Mech that consists of a cockpit on legs with two massive missile pods attached to it, it can be considered the FWL answer to the [[Catapult]].
* '''''Grand Titan''''' - An Assault Mech built to be the close-quarters combatant of the future, It has the rather awkward position of being associated with both the League and also the Word of Blake. Nevertheless, it owns it's role as a brawler; carrying an array of pulse lasers in large, medium, and small size, as well as an SRM and LRM system.
* '''''Patriot''''' - A mech designed to be an artillery platform as well as a command mech so that the League wouldn't lose valuable strategic minds over something as stupid as "personal honor" or some crazy bullshit like that, but turned out to be a strong enough design to do well in other roles. It's notably equipped with a guardian ECM suite designed to make sure everyone can hear whoever's jabbering over the sound of it's missile launcher/artillery round left arm blasting things to fucking death.

==TLDR==
A kitbash of the United States, France, Greece, Israel, Yugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire. Every bit as unstable as it sounds.

{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

Lyran Commonwealth

2023-01-09T19:09:58Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Foreign Relations */

{{Infobox 40k Nations
|name=
|image= [[Image:Lyrans.jpg|250px|center]]
|bgcolor= DarkBlue
|fgcolor= gold
|Capital= Tharkad
|Official Languages= German
|Power=
|Size= Roughly 300 worlds
|Head of State= Archon
|Head of Government=
|Governmental Structure= Constitutional Monarchy
|State Religion/Ideology=
|Demographics=
|Military Force=*Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces
}}
{{Topquote|One need to know very little to get by in the Lyran Commonwealth: Who to talk to, who not to talk to, and who to persuade with the appropriate number of C-Bills.|Cyril Tslio, ex-Precentor of Donegal Station}}

In the [[Battletech]] universe, the '''Lyran Commonwealth''' is one of the five successor states of the Inner Sphere ruled by House Steiner. It is typically influenced by Imperial Germany and is also notable for being stupidly rich <s>and often richly stupid</s>.
== History ==
The Commonwealth came into being through three trade empires coming together: the Protectorate of Donegal, The Federation of Skye, and the Tamar Pact. The initial charter asked for the Commonwealth to have nine Archons to rule, but the impracticality of it made it that a coup otherwise ensured that one Archon would have complete control.

== House Steiner ==
House Steiner is the traditional noble house that has held a deathgrip on the head of state position in the Lyran Commonwealth; the Archon. While the original Archon seat was held by House Marsden after the coup offed the other eight dysfunctional archons, House Marsden was replaced by House Steiner via marriage once the former’s last male died in combat with the [[Draconis Combine]]. The Commonwealth nominally is a constitutional monarchy, with The Archon and Estates General (parliament) sharing equal power, with the Archon only able to ascend with the Estates' permission, though in reality the Archon is the one in charge. The Steiners themselves are pretty chill, thankfully; only ever suspending rights or privileges in the most dire of circumstances and making sure their heirs are properly educated.

But as a very large noble house among many in the Commonwealth; they are prone to inviting other more aggressive or crazy houses into their midst or one Steiner becoming more popular than another, leading to several Steiner Civil Wars throughout the centuries.

Almost all of them will have been in a Mech by the time they hit the throne, as is tradition for the Commonwealth.

== Society ==
The Lyran Commonwealth fucking loves Germany. House Steiner loves Germany so much they decided that Space Germany needed to be as German as humanly fucking possible; the state language is German, the nobility is set up like Imperial Germany's, the army's entire nomenclature comes from German, and at every available opportunity, the classical German society is attempted to be followed.

Sounds impossible? It mostly is! As opposed to the platonic ideal of everybody in the Commonwealth being a native German displaced from earth, the reality is that the Commonwealth takes and has taken people from all ethnic backgrounds to be part of their iron fisted grasp. While you'd think they'd be at each other's throats, the Lyran's take a different approach; giving the subtle hint to all that it was the descendants of Germany that managed to lift them up from the chaos of the Star League, and bring them to the prosperity they live in now, as well as a dedicated language that they can use for trade, politics, and for leisure, uniting them all under one banner. As a result, discrimination based on race or background is basically unheard of; freedom of expression is allowed more or less uninterrupted, and for now only classism reigns as the supreme form of prejudice, and that is quite a potent form of societal control within their borders.

For you see, the Lyran Commonwealth is the single richest overall state in the entire Inner Sphere, boasting moneyed nobles out the ass and even the average commoner boasts a quality of life far and away better than that of the rest of the Inner Sphere thanks to the generous amounts of money being thrown around. Due to the sort of lassaiz-faire way in which the Steiners dictate on how member worlds govern themselves, many have a deep independent streak to the point that some consider themselves members of their homeworld first, and a Lyran second, which doesn't always end well for everybody, and occasional mini-wars are fought to put their member worlds back into line.

Also, Lyran women have a tradition for having [[Wat|glam-rocker "Jem"-style makeup for whatever reason]].
== Foreign Relations ==
* [[Draconis Combine]]: Historically bad. Were bulled constantly by the Kuritans. But not as bad due to the Clans forming a buffer.
* [[Capellan Confederation]]: Neutral to Bad from the Federated Commonwealth.
* [[The Clans]]: Very Bad. Due to the Clan Occupation Zones to the north. Though they did have friendly relationships with the Exiled Wolves.
* [[Federated Suns]]: Neutral to Historically Good due to the Federated Commonwealth. The Fed-Com Civil War put a damper on things.
* [[Free Worlds League]]: Very Bad. Tried to use Clan Wolf’s migration to keep the broken League from reforming but wound up backfiring.
* [[The Periphery]]: Ambivalent. Has a bad relationship with the Marian Hegemony and their slave raids but less hostile relationships with those afar.

== Military ==
[[File:Lyran commonwealth throneroom.jpg|thumb|left|300px|"Oh don't mind the Griffins"]]
The Lyran Commonwealth is all about living large and swinging their big, turgid moneydick around, and their warfare is no different. Their most basic and common battle tactic is to swarm the field with enormous Assault or Heavy-class Mechs and simply pound a target into dust with the combined fire of their massive death machines, to the point that any mech under 50 tons is described by commanders as "obnoxious" at best and "useless" at worst. The common in-universe joke of a scout lance for the Commonwealth being a herd of ''Atlases'' is only somewhat an exaggeration. So obsessed with their big stompy boys that the Lyran Commonwealth parks a pair of fucking ''Griffin'' BattleMechs in the throne room to guard the Archon. Each Mech regiment is supported by three regiments of armor, artillery, and infantry in what is known as a Combat team, with the Mech unit's commander being in charge of everything.

Which is where the problems start to appear, because the Lyrans have a bad habit of promoting unqualified people into the mechwarrior ranks on the basis of wealth, connections, or bloodline. These failson noblemen have no tactical expertise beyond thinking that bigger mechs are better and bigger armies are better. They can't be bothered to deal with the details of how to effectively use the forces they're given, since the Commonwealth's economy can shit out tanks and mechs like candy.

As a result, it is the Lyran Armor that usually end up winning the day. Left to their own devices with general orders to "attack", and realizing that their incompetent commanders in the mech ranks don't care about whether they actually live or not, the regular officers take it on their own initiative to save their own asses and their men by filling in the details their gloryhounding superiors can't be bothered with.

Nepotism isn't at all unique to the Lyrans (you can straight up buy your way into the officer corps in [[Magistracy of Canopus|Canopus]]), but the consequences are particularly acute here. There are many battle situations the Lyrans simply have no effective response to, especially against mech forces that run lighter, faster lances. But they generally fare much better in defensive fights, where the initiative of their supporting forces on home turf with good supply lines can compensate for the lack of coherent strategy from the top.

==== Notable Mechs ====
* '''''Alfar''''' - A properly Lyran version of a Medium battlemech, meaning it's on the heavier scale and packed to the gills with specialty weapons. While it was very good for it's time, all of the special equipment used in it's construction meant that it ultimately became too costly to repair, and the design went extinct just after the First Succession War, replaced by the designs it was intended to replace.
* '''''Barghest''''' - A heavy, hunched over quadruped Mech that was designed to strike fear in the same way the ''[[Atlas]]'' is intended to. To do that, the weight-savings gained from it's Extralight Fusion Engine is poured into it's weapon systems, a pair of ER-Large Lasers that can hit from half a horizon away and an LB Autocannon/20 for anything that gets up close. While simple, if it's autocannon ever jams, almost half of it's destructive power will go with it.
* '''''Berserker''''' - A truly Lyran Assault mech, in that it's as unga-bunga brain as possible; Having a hatchet, a pair of large pulse lasers, and a Flamer on it, just to make sure. It's also got an ER-PPC, but that's mostly used to force opponents into running or fooling them into getting them into closer range.
* '''''[[Commando]]''''' - The smallest mech the Lyrans will ever tolerate using, an honor born from centuries of reliable service in combat and the fact that it lives up to the phrase "punches above it's weight", using two separate SRM systems and a Medium Laser to give even certain heavy mechs trouble. It's pretty easy to pick off, but it's primarily a hit-and-run specialist that the Lyrans use to either open holes for the Assault Mechs to widen, or land the killing blow from all the holes opened by said Assault mechs.
* '''''Fafnir''''' - An Assault Mech, in that it is 100 tons and has legs. In practice, the ''Fafnir'' is mostly just a platform for a pair of ridiculously large Heavy Gauss Rifles, which dominate the front of the mech, and can put a pair of large projectiles straight through a mech at close-range. It has as much armor as some of the lighter mechs in the universe weigh, and really can't be too far from the supply lines, for while it's enormous guns are prodigious, it's only got a pair of Medium lasers and a pulse laser for when it's Gauss Rifles run out of ammo.
* '''''[[Griffin]]''''' - A medium mech that's been around since the Star League. Sporting a PPC and LRM-10, the mech excels as a long-range sniper mech, hitting targets from afar and avoiding close range combat. These mech have been a favorite of the Lyrans, and at least two of them stand guard in the Archon's throne room to emphasis on the Lyrans "bigger is better" mindset.
* '''''Thunder Hawk''''' - Your typical Lyran Assault Mech, in that it could flatten a city on it's own, is almost as armored as an ''Atlas'' but moves slower than most other mechs. It packs three gauss rifles and four medium lasers as it's armament, of which the Gauss Rifles are it's main threat.
* '''''Wolfhound''''' - A light mech which was designed to counter the Draconis Combines Panther mech. Armed with Large Laser and four Medium Laser the mech was prone to overheating when it fired its weapons repeatedly. The re-introduction of Star League tech help alleviant some of this problems though.
* '''''Zeus''''' - Because the rest of the Inner Sphere wasn't indulging the Lyran military in glorious close-mech combat, the armed forces requested a design that would play down to their standards, and what they got was a rugged, 80-ton hit-and-run mech, truly showing just where the priorities for the Commonwealth really are. It's able to keep up with mechs lighter than itself, and carries an AC/5, an LRM-15 for long-range, and it's signature design strengths; a Large Laser/Two Small Laser combo that was made smaller than normal to save on weight. Got upgraded to the ''Zeus X'' during the Clan invasion with more armor, guns, and internal power.
*'''''[[Hollander]]''''' - A lightweight Mech designed to be an artillery unit, it basically took a small mech and mated it with a large gauss cannon to serve as a portable fire support unit. Naturally, the Lyrans weren't too fond of the design.
*'''''Hatchetman''''' - A product of the Davion-Steiner alliance, designed by New Avalon as a successor to the [[UrbanMech]]. It's a full weight class heavier, retains the Urban's AC/10 but upgrades the laser to a pair of mediums, and carries a giant fuckoff axe. Understandably, the Lyrans adored it and replaced many of their [[UrbanMech|angry eggs]] with it.

{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

Federated Suns

2023-01-09T19:06:07Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Foreign Relations */

{{Infobox 40k Nations
|name=
|image= [[Image:FedSuns1.png|250px|center]]
|bgcolor= gold
|fgcolor= crimson
|Capital= New Avalon (Currently held by the Draconis Combine)
|Official Languages= Various
|Power=
|Size= Over 500 controlled worlds
|Head of State= First Prince
|Head of Government=
|Governmental Structure= Nominally Representative Democracy, de-facto constitutional feudal monarchy
|State Religion/Ideology=
|Demographics=
|Military Force=*Armed Forces of the Federated Suns
}}
{{Topquote|No one man can govern so vast a realm, even if that man is genius, saint, and hero all at once. And when a man of inferior or even ordinary abilities tries to exercise power over so many worlds and so many billions of people, the result is the tyranny, chaos, ignorance, greed, or hatred that we have already seen too often.|Simon Davion}}

The '''Federated Suns''' is one of the five successor states of the Inner Sphere who are led by House Davion. The Federated Suns are modeled a bit on the modern day USA and the UK, with some other imperialism thrown in there for flavor.

== Founding ==
In the [[Battletech]] universe, the Federated Suns became as they were due to the machinations of one Lucien Davion of the planet New Avalon, who was a soft-spoken idealist who made a name for himself through his charisma and his strong policy; and was well able to use New Avalon's position as regional agri-world supreme to his advantage. When shit in the Terran Hegemony went south; he began a world-hopping tour promising aid and defense to whoever joined a Pact with him. Twenty worlds did, and when Lucien was named first president, the Federated Suns was born.

== House Davion ==
The Federated Suns have typically given the title of First Prince to their ruling executive regardless of gender, and that typically has always gone to a member of House Davion thanks to the political machinations of earlier rulers. While they tend towards being pretty smart, otherwise intelligent rulers who don't have much in the way of major qualms, there are some who have caused inconceivable damage to the Inner Sphere on sheer arrogance alone.

== Society ==
The FedSun society is both tremendously helped and hindered by the sheer size of the Federation's territory in space, which is usually the largest of the Inner Sphere at any one time. People from all walks of life tend to make their home in Federation space due to constitutionally entrenched freedoms of expression, worship, personal enterprise, and political participation, with even the nobility having to watch their ass as specific rules in their constitution allows for their removal if they don't do their jobs well. Even the broke-ass hobos of the Suns will thank their lucky stars that they're not getting beaten for daring to say something against House Davion. As a result, most citizens lord this over pretty much any non-federation person who happens to wander into their space, making them exceptionally aggravating to put up with for more than a few minutes at a time due to their insistence that everybody else is just a bunch of backwards hillbillies.

This comes in to sharp focus from the outside perspective if you dig even slightly a bit below the surface; for all their talk about democracy and the hope for a better tomorrow, the Federated Suns went from constitutional republic to constitutional monarchy in a matter of a hundred years of it's foundation. It's citizenry are battered with insanely high stratification; the nobles are often wildly richer than any average dude in the Federation army could ever hope to be and will have an impossibly better standard of living; which is fine for the golden worlds near the capital world of New Avalon, but anyone out in the boondocks is probably more than fucked. And while their protections for individual freedoms are strong and often ironclad, their labor protections have famously been quite terrible; the Davions made it illegal to strike during the Succession Wars, and it has never been reinstated. These obvious disparities also extend to the education of their citizenry, which varies from world to world and is often wildly so. Most of the golden worlds of the Federation, especially ones close to one of the bigger centers of learning, will be able to go get a decent education. Everyone else will probably get a low-end trade school, if they're lucky. All of this is mostly obscured by a massively pro-military, pro-Davion society that continues to fuel the national character of a bunch of giant egotistical hypocrites.
== Foreign Relations ==
* [[Draconis Combine]]: Rabidly bad. Look at the Kentares Massacre. Though they already had bad relationships from the War of Davion Succession.
* [[Capellan Confederation]]: Bad. The Capellans were hostile from the start when they nuked their own former capital of Capella under Davion peacekeeping occupation to tell the Davions to bug off.
* [[The Clans]]: Warily Neutral to Bad. See the Clan Invasion.
* [[Lyran Commonwealth]]: Neutral to historically good. Used to be merged together until the Fed-Com Civil War.
* [[Free Worlds League]]: Neutral to historically bad due to the Federated Commonwealth’s existence.
* [[The Periphery]]: The [[Taurian Concordat]] has a massive simmering hatred against the Federated Suns. The Outworlds Alliance had an ambivalent relationship with them.

== Military ==
The AFFS has traditionally been one of the best in the Inner Sphere, due to the absurd amount of money they receive annually to upkeep the many lightyears of space between one end of their space to the other, the insistence of their First Princes having to serve before they ever actually get the job as "First Prince", and an admittedly different but rather simple characteristic of their military that sets them apart from most of the Inner Sphere; their military is just well-organized. The AFFS is on average some of the most well-equipped, and well-supplied among the Inner Sphere; as they believe in ensuring all of their troops, from the grunt to the commanding officer, should always be the most prepared. This was not always the case, however, as before the 2800's there was plenty of individual and interdivisional rivalries between the myriad corps of the Suns, but all of that changed under Melissa Davion, who noticed that replacing Battlemechs was a tall order given how badly the industrial centers of the Federation were battered after the Succession Wars, and made major changes in what became known as her "Model Army", which turned most of their combat units into what are known as Regimental Combat Teams, which are always combined-arms, and quite unlike other units at the time of it's founding, were considered permanent. While Battlemechs are obviously at the forefront, they were now always flanked by infantry, tanks and aerospace fighters, which killed most of the interdepartmental rivalries right quick when they all had to work together to win the day.

Most AFFS regiments use the typical Inner Sphere models of organization to fight, though they typically make sure that the Battlemechs are piloted by the best individual pilots within a regiment regardless of their weight class because they'd rather not engender any idiotic games of grab-ass with each other, and would prefer their Mechwarriors are good at teamwork and shit like that. Because of that, the typical FedSun Mech lance is generally lighter on average than that of their compatriots, but it's counterbalanced by the skill of the pilots and also the sheer number of lances; and using lighter mechs with highly skilled pilots, FedSun lances can rely on having superior tactical mobility against most enemies.

Of course, that doesn't mean they win every encounter they've ever been thrown into (just most of them), as their national character of "Space America" has a very nasty reputation of smacking them straight on the ass when they least expect it. This got a big wake-up call when the Jihad happened, which devastated much of the AFFS, and forced a more streamlined, modular and defensive unit setup going forward.

===== Notable Mechs =====
* '''''[[Centurion]]''''': The un-official mascot of any AFFS Lance. Put into service during the first succession war, it's been chugging along with regular updates as a perfectly competent and dangerous 'Mech, but it's almost been replaced due to the feeder mechanism to its Autocannon being a recurring issue, one that only got worse when the company that makes those parts got glassed, but post-jihad they ended up spending trillions making a massively updated version as well as the old version, just with the autocannon manufacturer switched. Newly built Dark Age models are further updated to be OmniMechs structured around an endo-steel chassis, carrying heavier equipment and swapping in different ranges of weapons, C3 and ECM depending on what the lance needs.
* '''''Enforcer''''': The ''other'' mascot of the Federated Suns' Lances. Has largely existed in force primarily due to nobody really blowing up their factories, and as such this dual-role mech has been able to see quite a bit of prominence throughout the Federated Suns throughout the years, to the point that many of the royal regiments and First Princes of the Federation have or have had one that they've used to great effect. One can imagine the pilots of ''Centurion''s and ''Enforcers'' to be pretty fierce rivals because of this. Carries a large laser and jump jets in addition to its autocannon, in contrast to the Centurion's missiles and medium lasers, giving it the much needed agility for a mech of the line. The later "Enforcer III" variants branch out from the standard AC/10 for more variety in the main cannon.
* '''''[[Rifleman]]''''': An ubiquitous anti-air heavy mech with advanced aerial targeting systems, the Rifleman became a common sight in the AFFS where the resource strain of the Succession Wars often forced it into a more generalist fire support role. Equipped with minimal armor, minimal heat sinks and a large number of long ranged weapons, the Rifleman is often considered lacking in head-to-head confrontations with other mechs. House Davion worked several times to "fix" this mech, producing the homegrown Jagermech design(all autocannons, resulting in low damage but no more heat problems) as well as occasional PPC and AC/10 anti-mech refits. Newer version available in later eras, one carries [[Dakka|twin Rotary AC/5s]], while the "III" variant carries double PPC's with double heatsinks to back them up.
* '''''[[Valkyrie (BattleTech)|Valkyrie]]''''': The signature Davion light mech. Originally meant to be SLDF but mass produced by House Davion because a fully automated factory for the things happened to be on New Avalon. The Federated Suns split these fairly evenly throughout their forces and hand them out to mercenaries too. Decently armored but rather slow for a light mech, with a focus on long range missiles at the expense of lacking punch, this mech falls into a supporting scout/harasser role. Most 3050+ refits and new models follow the "laser in right arm, missiles in torso" rule, staying more or less true to the original concept while adding ways to boost speed, range and/or accuracy.
* '''''Wolverine''''': An elder design of the Federated Suns, the Wolverine was designed as a decent middle ground between the ''Mackie'' and the ''Battleaxe'', but was put through about a million different designs before it actually worked. But when it did, it came out swinging. A versatile, mobile and venerable design that took the title of workhorse mech for the Federation for generations, though because it's been so reliable, it's also been rarely updated for modern warfare. Still, if you'd rather have your command mech not overheat from jumping somewhere or from firing once, this is definitely the better choice of mech over the ''Phoenix Hawk''.
* '''''Dervish''''': A speedy, jumping missile boat with several serious design flaws, the Federated Suns ended up with the lion's share of these and never enjoyed it. Known for splitting between short and long range launchers, never committing to one and so having mediocre firepower at either range. [[Derp|Its short range launchers only fire two missiles at a time, but have a full ton of ordnance each in their bins]]. On the flip side, having so many ammunition bins allows for various specialty munitions to be carries. The main issue with this mech would later be fixed with the introduction of MMLs(multi-missile launchers), letting it fire either class of missile from all its tubes.
* '''''Blackjack''''': Another one of House Davion's more maligned mechs, the Blackjack was initially conceived as an anti-infantry SLDF warcrimes machine and later found itself carrying small caliber autocannons and medium lasers. A sort of fire support mech that is annoying at long range and packs a punch if the enemy gets closer. Initially given garrison duty, it eventually got refit with large lasers of all varieties so that it could put out more damage, up to and including the AFFS' new armor-drilling Re-Engineered Lasers in the 32nd century. A seriously upgunned OmniMech model reverse-engineered from Clan tech would become popular throughout the Inner Sphere.
* '''''Victor''''': For when Davion wants to win a city engagement quickly and with the least amount of subtlety possible (which happens a lot more than you think) they send in their trusty Victor. While average for an assault mech weighing 80 tons and with a sprinting speed of 64/kph, this mech shakes it up a bit by mounting 4 assault grade JUMPJETS to leap across city blocks and over buildings with ease without needing to do that whole tedious "navigation" thing on foot, or if some poor fuck is in range, to put the boots to them medium style (literally) by landing on them with the dreaded Death From Above maneuver. For weapons, the Victor goes all in on close range weapons by equipping a massive Autocannon/20 made by [[What|Pontiac]] (guess mediocre sedans just aren't profitable a thousand years later), the reliable Holly 4-tube shortrange Missile Launcher and two Medium Laser cannons of...obscure origin. This weapons combo has the potential to put down almost any mech in the Medium weight category or lower in a single pull of the trigger, even some of the more lightly armored heavies aren't safe from this behemoth, though this brings us to the Victor's one true drawback. For armored protection, the Victor only has 11.5 tons of standard grade armor, and while this sounds ok to your average normie, this is a paltry amount of armor for an assault mech, especially for one that works in close range. Over the years, the Victor has been outfitted with everything ranging from Gauss Rifles to Ultra Autocannons to the new Re-Engineered Lasers, but in those years, it's never lost that big knock out punch that many in the Capellan Confederation, Draconis Combine and, most recently, the Lyran Commonwealth, have come to fear.

== Downfall and Current state ==
From the Succession Wars to the Dark Age eras in the BattleTech timeline, the Federated Suns were often used as the protagonist state in the Battletech literature, for a long time. Conversely in turn, the faction recently had to suffer for it.

After the glory days of Federated Commonwealth, a dynastic struggle between the too-focused-on-the-clans-to-see-his-own-realm-trouble Victor Steiner Davion and his will-kill-own-mother-to-gain-power sister Catherine, the two realms separated back into the Federated suns and Lyran Commonwealth, and just then, the [[Word of Blake]] started their Jihad.

Idealistic as ever, Federated Suns fully supported the new [[Republic of the Sphere]] championed armistice, and seriously reduced its military.

Its neighbors PRETENDED to reduce their militaries.

As a consequence, when the Inner Sphere heated up again, the Federated Suns was far from good fighting shape.

Worse, it came to be ruled by Caleb Davion. Of questionable sanity, limited military ability and disastrous judgement of character, Caleb's blunders led to the massive military defeat at Palmyra, resulting in his death and the enemy Kuritans and Capellans making deep inroads into the realm, to the point where the Kuritans managed to occupy New Avalon itself.

The Federated Suns last hope is young Julian Davion, a capable military commander with a suitably massive chin. Under his leadership, the remaining Federated Suns military managed to at least stop the enemy advance. Worth mentioning is that they were significantly helped in this by Republic of the Sphere, who offered a significant amount of military backup in their darkest hour.

Unfortunately, when the Republic found itself in its own darkest hour, the Federated Suns were... unable to return the favor due to still dealing with invaders. While the Federated Suns may have become the destination of choice as refuge of the remaining Republic forces after its fall (with the Free Worlds League and Lyran Commonwealth largely either ambivalent or too busy cleaning up house to accommodate ex-Republic soldiers and politicians), this failure is bound to bite them in the ass some day. The fact the Wolves' IlKhan is heir to the Steiner-Davion bloodline and already claims the Archonship makes things less likely to be calm in the future.

{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]

Draconis Combine

2023-01-09T19:02:23Z

2607:FB90:6E5D:FBC3:6DC1:328:9E64:B2B2: /* Foreign Relations */

{{Infobox 40k Nations
|name=
|image= [[Image:056305F5-09B6-4E2D-9C7F-DB74714C94E3.png|250px|center]]
|bgcolor= DarkRed
|fgcolor= white
|Capital= Luthien
|Official Languages= Japanese, Swedish
|Power=
|Size= Around 350 controlled worlds
|Head of State= Coordinator of Worlds
|Head of Government=
|Governmental Structure=Militarized Feudal Fascist Empire
|State Religion/Ideology=
|Demographics=
|Military Force=*Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery
*Draconis Combine Admiralty
}}
{{Topquote|Always preserve the dragon and its magic will keep you strong.|Shiro Kurita}}

In the [[Battletech]] setting, the '''Draconis Combine''' is one of the five successor states of the Inner Sphere who are led by <s>The Rightful Rulers of the Galaxy</s> House Kurita. They are modeled to a large degree after Japan, with bits taken from the Sengoku Jidai, the Tokugawa Shogunate and Imperial Japan 1930-1945.

== Origins ==

The Combine was formed from the work of the legendary Shiro Kurita, a nobleman who was raised in an exceptionally traditional household, which held to even 17th century Japanese thinking and manners. Shiro, as well as his brother Urizen, were power hungry and destined to hold control; with Shiro using all the political games in the book to gain power on the planet of New Samarkand, and his brother quickly becoming his top military advisor. Eventually, he was able to create an alliance with a neighboring planet in Galedon V to help strong-arm a Mercantile alliance into helping them build a merchant fleet. By 2319, they'd built a burgeoning empire that had swiftly proven itself against most of it's neighboring foes, and Shiro crowned the alliance by it's new name, the Draconis Combine, after a region of space it once bordered and then completely subsumed, which it has been ever since.

== House Kurita ==
Since the Combine's founding, the Combine's Coordinators have largely come from House Kurita, aside from a two hundred year period where only tangentially related bloodlines got their turn, only to give up the Chrysanthemum Throne willingly as the Kuritas married themselves back onto the throne, to the delight of everybody.

Their general character is a bit hard to pin down aside from their imperious, expansionist rhetoric. While most have been perfectly competent and generally dull characters on the galactic stage, those Kurita Coordinators who have distinguished themselves to the larger Inner Sphere community did so in huge ways. This is largely because of the Combine's insistence on keeping the mystique of the position as the autocrat and more or less god figure and the raising of a nobility; meaning that if the Combine suffered any sort of setback, that all fell at their feet, and repeated failure often ended in assassination from the overeager military or aggrieved nobles, or seppuku from the shame of some especially great failure. As a result, much of the Coordinator's job is managing not just the armed forces, but the expectations and fall guys so that they can cover their own ass; often by ensuring that their actual spoken orders are exceptionally vague, to the point of being Haiku in certain circumstances.

Chances are if you're seeing a Kurita's name more than once, it's because they're either exceptionally adept leaders and conquerors, or exceptionally insane dictators.

==== Notable Kurita Coordinators ====
* '''Shiro Kurita''' - Founder and creator of the Combine along with his brother Urizen. Usually considered one of the top 3 Coordinators if not the best one. Flew a dope custom ''Sabre'' AeroSpace Fighter as a hobby.
* '''The Von Rohrs Bloodline''' - An illegitimate child of one of the earlier Kuritas by the name of Nihongi came to hate his Kurita bloodline after the Coordinator at the time killed his dad, and hatched a plot to take over the Combine from within. Of course, thanks to the politics of the time, his dad got axed before he ever got a chance, and he decided to just execute Parker Kurita, the last mainline member of Shiro's line, and ended up the sole remaining heir. Naturally quite stunned and terrified by having accidentally painted the largest target on his back possible, Nihongi secluded himself and several of his successors, while never once trying to actually better the Combine in any way, causing much of it's major issues from the Rasalhague league at the time. The House was fully wiped out once McAllister took over.
* '''Martin McAllister''' - A Rasalhague noble directly descended from Shiro Kurita, who married into the Sorenson family. Previously distinguished as a DCMS strategist and warrior, he inevitably was the man responsible for the deposement and annihilation of the Van Rohrs, and once again put the bloodline of the Kuritas back on the throne. Died young, however.
* '''Siriwan Kurita, the Dragon Lady''' - Martin's daughter, who lost her mother at a young age. While the Kurita's especially conservative ideas on whether or not women got to be on the throne was a bit of an obstacle, Martin suggested she find a distant cousin and marry up that way, and marry she did until her spouse died of "mysterious causes", and she became Regent while guiding her infant child who would inevitably become Coordinator when he became a man. She ended up being a fantastic and exceptionally smart Coordinator who kept the warfare to a minimum while reigning absolute for almost four decades, only giving up power to her kid who died under a similar set of "Mysterious causes" as well as his heir, causing her to end up Coordinator again. While she enjoyed the gig, the nobility was starting to get wise to the fact that she almost certainly had a hand in her spouse/child's deaths, and she at long last abdicated to her granddaughter after two years. She is the only person in the family to have been Coordinator three separate times thanks to the quirks in the line of succession.
* '''Urizen Kurita II''' - The Star League's ailing health needed to be nudged along by somebody, and that somebody was this guy, at least within the confines of the Combine.
* '''Takiro Kurita''' - Previously sort of a monk-like figure when he took the job, he dissuaded any doubt that he would be a capable leader of the Combine's armed forces by surviving an assassination attempt by the ISF, torturing the men to find out who paid them, then killing the two men who performed the act and their male heirs. Ruled through the twilight of the Star League, and begged his son, Minoru, to treat the situation carefully on his deathbed.
* '''Minoru Kurita''' - Minoru, Takiro's son, ignored his dying father's wishes and basically began the Succession Wars on his own, and as a result more or less created the first bad backslide of humanity into [[LosTech]]. Got boom-headshot'd by a Federated Suns Sniper during the First Succession War.
* '''Jinjiro Kurita''' - The son of Minoru. While starting off his childhood as a decent kid, the death of his mother who was a concubine caught up in political infighting traumatized him and made him… [[That Guy|off]] despite his tactical savviness. After hearing his dad had been killed, he made the very normal and obvious decision in that situation, and ordered a planet-wide scouring of Kentares IV, the planet he had died on, ending up killing '''52 Million people''' to the point that he was fed up with guns involvement, and just began hacking people down with Katanas himself. Surprisingly, he didn't turn out to be the most stable individual; as he started the Second Succession War based on terrible information, and was constantly plagued by psychotic episodes regarding the [[Clan Wolverine#Minnesota Tribe|Minnesota Tribe]] once they appeared, finally going straight over the edge when somebody sent him a doll of a Star League Officer past his security detail. This made him permanently lose his mind and he hung himself in solitary confinement. He's the main reason the Fedrats despise the Kuritas.
* '''Takashi Kurita''' - Coordinator during the Third Succession War. Unlike the previous two Coordinators, Takashi was not a complete raving lunatic and/or glory-hound...at first. While he had some diplomatic traits, he was still an expansionist and a brutal driver of his armies through his kid, and had a fierce rivalry with Wolf's Dragoons that continued up to his dying day. To his anger, his kid ended up being pretty non-traditional when it came to warfare but also wildly successful; and ultimately made Combine tactics look hilariously out of date. THEN he begins his spiral into being a complete raving lunatic and glory hound until he basically gets locked in place by his son who wanted to protect his grandmother, gets a medical treatment that cures him of being nuts, but it only came too late as he found out that he'd been played into weakening either the Combine or strengthening the legend of the Dragoons, and chose to commit Seppuku with his son at his side.
* '''Theodore Kurita''' - The greatest Coordinator-General of the Combine, bar none. His mother's only child, she lavished him with love and care and his family made good and goddamn sure he was set up for success in life, and he hit the ground running as the commander of a Penal legion that he turned into an incredible fighting force, making enormous changes to the way the Combine fought, and distinguished himself as able to defend and attack during both the War of 3039 and also the Clan Invasion, using tactics almost counter to what Bushido demanded. His father hated that, but he was inevitably humbled by Teddy's genius and his own familial love. When he was crowned Coordinator, he immediately made getting rid of the Clans a #1 priority, and began recruiting from the ranks of Women and Criminals to bolster the Combine's ranks, and successfully convinced the Inner Sphere to help him go fuck up Clan Smoke Jaguar, then was named First Lord of the rebuilt Star League. Had plenty of enemies from the ''Kokuryu-Kai'', or Black Dragon Collective, who were hardliners who thought his reforms were detrimental to the Combine, and spent a lot of his downtime fighting them off, especially during the Jihad.
* '''Yori Kurita''' - The second woman to be Coordinator. She only ever got to the position in 32nd century because of a series of unrelated mishaps that got her promoted from "unimportant minor noble" to "Queen of the Dragon" in very short order. While there were some initial grumblings, what with her initial bringing to the court having been done by a Warlord who openly wasn't a fan of the last few guys to take the throne, she pretty quickly made herself a competent and ruthless Coordinator, including finally...''finally'' getting one over on the Federated Suns, to the point that the Combine took their capital under her watch. Granted, her ascension to the throne involved overthrowing the mainline Kurita's in a coup and crippling the Combine in a civil war that flanderized them back to their pre-Theodore-era lunatic selves which pissed a lot of people the fuck off out of universe.

== Society ==
The Combine's society is, as stated above, influenced greatly by Feudal and Imperial Japan, and is separated largely into what is called the "Five Pillars" of Draconis society, each with it's own symbolic meaning, which largely helps people within those pillars define themselves and define their worldview. They are:

# '''The Pillar of Gold''': The head of government, known as the Coordinator of Worlds (or more commonly just "Coordinator"), and all their myriad ministries and bureaus that help govern the Combine and keep it both loyal and under the Coordinator's thumb.
# '''The Pillar of Steel''': All Combine military, sometimes referred to as the "Arm of the Dragon". While nominally led by the Coordinator, most Coordinators have their Tai-Shu, or Warlords, deal with the day-to-day running of the various military ops of the Combine, specifically to allow the Coordinator to cover their ass in case their orders turn out to not work. Most of the Combine's military adhere to some form of the Bushido code, and all are expected to follow a superior's orders to the death. Given that they place an emphasis on hard and fast Battlemech assaults, as well as the open threat of death looming, it's not especially hard to get with the program. If you survive however, you'll be a capable warrior and well-respected within Draconis society, as regardless of position, military members are treated well.
# '''The Pillar of Teak''': The non-military sector of Draconis life, combined with cultural indoctrination. Basically a caste system consisting of nobles, warriors, craftspeople, common laborers, and then the vestiges of society consisting of outcasts and criminal elements. If you know anything about Imperial Japan or the Sengoku period, just assume much of Draconis society follows that because everyone who lives within their borders is the biggest fucking weeb to ever exist, to the point of openly demanding any government official or noble learn the Japanese language just to make sure they keep up to date on it.
# '''The Pillar of Ivory''': Religious and Spiritual leaders and advisory. Unsurprisingly, Shinto, Buddhism, and any collectivist philosophy does especially well within Combine space as Shiro intended it to be, and every non-eastern philosophy, and especially any individualist or egalitarian philosophy gets pretty tightly controlled.
# '''The Pillar of Jade''': The manufacturers and merchants. The Combine has historically never been especially big on resources, and the succession wars didn't do that any favors, so most of the economy is run by the state. There are independent companies, but they pale in comparison to the vast number of powerful state-backed companies that have been cut into two categories; Military and Civilian, ensuring maximum exploitation of what little the Combine has.

In general terms, the Draconis Combine could be best be described as a Feudal Fascist Empire (not unlike the Japanese Empire with a twist of state-sponsored mega corps) being authoritarian, reactionary, militaristic, nationalistic, chauvinistic (including being rather sexist) with tight cooperation between the state and corporate power blocks and a mentality that it is the highest honor to die for Coordinator and Combine. While it may be limited in scope, marginalized by the nobility, corrupt, ineffective or simply a sham, the other four successor states make at least some pretext to democratic government. Even [[The Clans]] have representative elements. The Draconis Combine does not. The Coordinator Reigns, the Nobles and Warlords rule and command on his behalf, the people obey.

This is not to say that more liberal minded individuals don't exist in Combine Space, see Theodore Kurita. But even when a reformer reaches the height of power in the Combine they would face significant resistance and push-back from entrenched conservative blocks up to and including Civil War.

== Foreign Relations ==
* [[Capellan Confederation]]: Alliance of Convenience out of mutual hatred for the Federated Suns.
* [[The Clans]]: Wary neutrality to Bad. Due to past experience from the Clan Invasion, they don’t go out of their way to prod their nest. Though they will fight tooth and nail as seen with the Nova Cat annihilation in the Kuritan civil war
* [[Federated Suns]]: Bad. The Combine's been the Federated's sun's biggest foe for three centuries and has done some pretty nasty things in that time.
* [[Lyran Commonwealth]]: Also Bad.
* [[Free Worlds League]]: Neutral to Good. Due to mutual hatred against the Lyrans historically.
* [[The Periphery]]: Neutral. Used to bully the Outworld Alliance before it took in the Snow Ravens.

== Military ==
[[Image:DC soldiers.jpg|thumb|left|Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery Infantry: you see these guys walking down the street you best start learning japanese and to love Udon noodles]]
The Combine lives by the old ''Bushido'' code for all things, but most specially in warfare, which has been part of their success as much as it has been their downfall. They are among the most dangerous and vicious of the entire Inner Sphere's militaries, but their warfare has a fucking enormous cost to it; they prefer absolute loyalty to their superior officers, and a rigid adherence to the concepts of frontal assault warfare, often fighting to the last man and refusing to retreat even in the face of overwhelming odds. This means in the face of battle, they've often been completely outclassed by commanders who were able to adjust to what the Combine was giving them and fight back. Further, their officer corps are often subject to the same politiking as their nobility, and are often trying to cover their ass. It should say something that one guy almost 500 years into their existence would become their best general simply because he'd dare to adjust tactics against an enemy.

While this likely would've been the easiest place for the creators of Battletech to just let Gundams exist, the Draconis are more well known for creating Particle blasting speed demons and walking samurai armor mechs. They are also well-known for only using Light and Heavy-class Mechs in their warfare; seeing Medium-class Mechs as a poor compromise for what they want to do; which is to attack as fast and as hard as possible, their mechs bristling with armaments and clad in bright [[Speed Freek|red and gold]] paint, and they ''love'' their Battlemechs. To the exclusion of almost everything else. Seriously, it got to the point that it took almost 500 years for things like tanks to become widespread in their military due to years of Coordinators playing favorites with the Mechwarriors.

===== Notable Mechs=====
* '''''Charger''''' - An assault mech with the firepower of a light mech, the original CGR-1A1 model of the ''Charger'' is a commonly-cited contender for worst mech in the whole setting. For some reason originally conceived as a heavily-armored scout, the ''Charger'' is an 80-ton mech sporting the heaviest possible engine and by extension the highest top speed of any introtech mech in its weight class. However, the sheer amount of tonnage dedicated to the engine leaves it with an utterly impotent weapons package consisting of five small lasers, meaning that it is outgunned by most medium mechs and even some light mechs. The Draconis Combine ended up stuck with the overwhelming majority of ''Chargers'' at the outset of the Succession Wars, and assignment to one was commonly used as a form of punishment within the Combine military. The Mech would be improved by the Capellan Confederation at the end of the Third Succession War by downgrading the engine and freeing up space for more firepower, and the ''Charger's'' frame would be repurposed for the development of the iconic ''Hatamoto-Chi'' during the War of 3039, but the ''Charger'' itself would not be redeemed in Combine service until the Clan Invasion, where the rediscovery of extralight engines would allow for upgraded firepower without sacrificing the ''Charger's'' top speed.
* '''''Catapult K''''' - While the Catapult itself is ubiquitous throughout the Sphere, the K series has never caught on outside the Combine. This "novel" design ditches the Catapult's characteristic LRMs for a pair of PPCs, turning an aged but capable indirect fire support platform into an outdated direct fire glass cannon.
* '''''Hatamoto-Chi''''' - The signature assault mech of the Combine, which looks like a mech designed in the image of Super Shredder. Essentially two different mech designs merged into one (namely the venerable ''Thug'' and the much-maligned ''Charger''), it's a formidable, tough-as-nails all-range Assault mech with the one minor flaw of generally being rather difficult to keep heat control on.
* '''''Dragon''''' - While the ''Hatamoto-Chi'' might be the most recognizable, the ''Dragon'' and its upgrade, the ''Grand Dragon'', were unquestionably some of the DCMS' favorite mechs. It's a fast, flexible, hard to knock over, capable of carrying huge guns, and generally ubiquitous part in any Combine regiment, and well-loved by its pilots. However, for a Heavy Mech it's considered slightly undergunned due to the Combine's insistence on "light or heavy mechs only" creating what many consider an oversized medium mech for the same roles as a Medium would have, but few things in the early eras of BattleTech are as fast as the ''Dragon'' while also being as heavily armored and also still maintaining a reasonable weapons package. In the 31st century, the ''Grand Dragon'' began to replace regular ''Dragons'' due to a generally improved design as well as stronger weapons and cooling.
* '''''Gladiator''''' - The first Combine-designed BattleMech. Built under the Von Rohrs' rule, this line most famous for their role in the first Battlemech VS Battlemech combat in history, the Battle of Nox of 2475. Although both sides were equally matched in numbers and the Gladiators being better-armed than the Fedrats' Commandos, [[FAIL|they lost badly to the latter due to their faster speed and maneuverability, despite more than doubling them in weight and weaponry.]] The defeat at Nox was so humiliating and dishonorable the Gladiator's reputation was permanently tainted in the space Fish-heads' eyes, which led to them ceasing production in 2488 and the mech line nearly going extinct, with Alex Keller's highly custom version being the only known survivor by the 31st century. Curiously, the Jihad led to the Gladiator's revival as part of a retrotech-focused initiative to choke the Blakist forces on Age of War-era designs.
* '''''[[Jenner]]''''' - Their signature light Mech. A fast and light jump-capable design with respectable firepower, the Jenner is often considered one of the best Inner Sphere light mechs in the early eras of the game, often seeing success by ganging up on larger mechs and peppering them with some form of laser or heat-producing round, then letting their ''Panther'' partners swoop in to land the finishing blow.
* '''''Mauler''''': The finished monster that came out of the failed ''Daboku'' mech prototype, the ''Mauler'' is a 90-ton extremely long-range fighter whose LRM-15s, AC/2, and ER Large Lasers make it at the very least an exceptionally obnoxious armor chipper, or at worst a Mech sniper from hundreds of yards away. Thanks to its history as the reimagined ''Daboku'', it has an extremely inconsistent history, but that doesn't comfort anybody getting pelted with missiles and laserfire from four counties away. Anything that can get up close to it however has free game to add a ''Mauler'' to their kill total, as its payload suffers at close range.
* '''''Panther''''' - Their other signature light mech. Only 35 tons, this thing can actually keep pace pretty well with others in it's class and is a massive pain in the rear with its Lord's Light Particle Projector Cannon being a shockingly powerful piece of tech. It runs hot ''very'' quickly, on the other hand, and the Clan Invasion-era "upgrade" of the ''Panther'' takes this to next level, switching out the PPC for a LosTech extended range model that outputs significantly more heat - without upgrading the mech's cooling. [[FAIL|This means that the Clan Invasion-era PNT-10K cannot fire its main weapon without going at least 2 points over its heat-sinking threshold.]]
* '''''Thug''''' - An assault mech built to be successor of the Warhammer (the battlemech). Initially fielded by the Star League, but the Succession Wars put its production to a halt. Comstar however were able to keep many of them in storage. When the technology became available the Combine resume production of the mech. Its weaponry is a pair of PPCs, and a pair of SRM-6s, making it good at either long-range or short-range combat. The Combine would eventually fuse the ''Thug's'' weapons package with the ''Charger's'' frame (and a bunch of samurai cosplay) to produce the iconic ''Hatamoto-Chi''.
* '''''Von Rohrs/Hebi''''' - A short-lived 'Mech named after the usurper House Von Rohrs, originally built under the rule of Yama, the third Coordinator of that house. It was intended to replace the Gladiator after the Mech line became dishonored after the battle of Nox. After the Von Rohrs were killed off and the Kuritas returned to the throne, the 'Mech was renamed "Hebi" (Snake, often seen as a symbol of betrayal) and McAllister forbade salvaging them, which led to the line going extinct in 2518, only 8 years after their namesake house. [[EPIC FAIL|Worse, the Mechs they were intended to replace ended up outliving them by over half a millennium.]]

{{Battletech Factions}}
[[Category: BattleTech]]