Editing BattleTech (section)

====[[Lyran Commonwealth]]====
[[File:Steiner Assault.jpg|350px|right|thumb|A typical scene of a Lyran Archon wondering why their cousin has failed to relieve the Commonwealth alongside a bloody frontline against their enemies. They're likely either at a ball dance or planning a coup.]]
Space Germany with some Space Scotland and Space Scandinavia kicking around, the Lyran Commonwealth is the largest successor state and owns the most resource-rich planets in the Inner Sphere, making them an industrial and economic powerhouse. Their government was supposed to be modeled on ancient Athens, led by a council of nine Archons, but this did not work out ''at all'', and eventually Archon Robert Marsden decided he'd had enough of this shit and overthrew the other Archons in a military coup. The Marsdens were eventually replaced by the Steiners via marriage, who have ruled the Commonwealth to this day.

The Lyrans are rich. Really, really absurdly rich. The only reason they haven't conquered the Inner Sphere yet is that they prefer to put the relatives of rich businessmen in charge of their army rather than, y'know, actual soldiers, meaning a significant amount of Lyran officers are terrible at their job. There is at least one recorded case of the Lyran military starting a major interstellar war ''by accident''. Fortunately, since they're so rich, they're able to make up for their ludicrous incompetence with the biggest and heaviest weapons in the Inner Sphere. The joke goes that a typical Steiner scout lance consists of  four 100-ton '''''Atlas''''' 'Mechs (imagine a scout-recon team composed entirely of [[Warlord Battle Titan|Warlord Titans]] and you'll get the idea). Steiner forces tend to be big and slow, barely able to outmaneuver enemy fortresses. Of course, once they (eventually) get into range, you can kiss that fortress goodbye... And God-forbid you run into the rare Steiner commander who knows what they're doing. Ask the Clans at Tukayyid how that went for them.

Late in the Third Succession War, Archon Katrina Steiner shocked the entire Inner Sphere by actually calling for a peace treaty. Only Hanse Davion was at all interested, and he wound up marrying Katrina's daughter Melissa and uniting the two countries into one massive empire, the Federated Commonwealth (see above). Predictably, this Beauty-and-the-Geek romance started out exceedingly awesome then epically failed and it's back to single life for the too-pretty Steiners. They recently tried to have Clan Wolf migrate through their coreward territory to keep the Free Worlds League from reforming during the Dark Age while holding the transported civilian castes as insurance. The plan backfired with the Free Worlds League still reforming and Clan Wolf taking much of the coreward and middle territory in the Lyran Commonwealth to form the Wolf Empire. This, on top of a massive amount of civil unrest means the Lyrans are too busy with damage control from Wolf and Jade Falcon invasions along with internal rebellions to be a threat to anyone. The moral of the story is: don’t try to manipulate badasses who nearly conquered everyone without trying. They will fuck you up for it. Also, trying to hold civilians hostage against a culture that thinks civilians are barely human at all is pointless. It tends to go like "Okay, I'll kill a bunch of your people and conquer chunks of your territory". You threaten to kill the civilians and your enemy is totally incapable of understanding why they should care when they treat them as replaceable subjects instead of irreplaceable citizens. Come the rise of the ilClan on Terra and there’s a sudden power vacuum where the Jade Falcon occupation zone to the North use to be. This led to a massive Balkan-style disintegration of the said region alongside the Lyran’s northern provinces; many of resulting statelets are very ticked off at the Steiners for leaving them to rot. While Jade Falcons are barely around in the region, holdout territories and other Clans like the Hell’s Horses and Ghost Bears are eyeing the new buffer zone cautiously before seeking new planets to annex.