Editing Succession Wars (section)

=== First Succession War ===
Almost from the minute Kerensky and the SLDF fucked off into the Deep Periphery, all the Successor States braced for what they knew was inevitable conflict. Knowing that becoming First Lord would inevitably mean they could run their opponents off the map forever, all five Successor States waited with baited breath at the opportunity to actively begin the violence, and wouldn't you know it, the [[Draconis Combine]] started the whole damn thing as Minoru Kurita decided to kick things off. Openly declaring the Draconis Coordinator to have claim to the seat of the First Lord, he also asserted that any refusal to recognize the claim would be met with total war.

What happened next is that the Inner Sphere basically warcrime'd itself for 34 uninterrupted years. Biological, Nuclear, and Chemical warfare were rampant, and billions of lives were lost in senseless battles to claim long disputed systems and further territory over what was ultimately petty grudges; to the point that worlds that could produce clean drinking water were as valuable as they were when they were first discovered. It got so bad at one point that the [[Mercenaries (Battletech)|Mercs]], who were already a huge part of everybody's battleplans, basically had to start reigning in the violence themselves by forcefully refusing any contract that involved a breaking of "[[Ares Convention|The Conventions]]" that was offered to them, usually by doing just as much damage for the other side the old fashioned way as they might've for the offer. By the end of the war, grand full-scale invasions and geneva convention-violating battlefields gave way to simple skirmishes and raids to stop each other from producing more Mechs and other vital military equipment.

This is also where the Kentares Massacre happened; wherein Minoru Kurita got his brain ventilated by a sniper, and his deeply unstable child Jinjiro basically decided that everyone on that planet had to die as quickly and painfully as possible as penance for this action. To make matters worse, any Draconis Combine soldier who protested was killed alongside the civilians themselves; often with a katana as Jinjiro figured it would waste less ammo. The local ComStar representatives, deeply concerned by Jinjiro's openly genocidal nature, broadcast the whole thing to the entire Inner Sphere. They got killed by Jinjiro too, but made sure that even if everybody was picking a fight with everyone else, they definitely had an undisputed "bad guy" now. After a series of FedSun counterattacks to liberate worlds picked up early on by the Combine, pretty much everybody was exhausted and now very resource-poor, and eventually most fronts just ceased being fronts at all, with everybody deciding to call it quits and come back when they were ready for next time.