Battle Tech / Tropes P to Z

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P

• Path of Inspiration: Pre Reformation ComStar and the Word of Blake. They were particularly fond of indoctrinating inhabitants from worlds that had regressed to pre-Industrial Revolution tech levels by amazing them with "divine" space age machines.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Prominent among many factions; there are codes of conduct for war but break the rules bad enough and you can expect to be treated in kind. The Word of Blake being blown to kingdom come is probably the best example.
  • Mercenaries tend to be unkind to other mercenaries who commit war crimes or betray their employers; to the point that the Mercenary Review and Bonding Commission (MRBC) will put out bounties on them. If you get kicked out of the commission you are considered a pirate and a criminal rather than a soldier; and pirates are considered free game by everyone.
  • Pull too many dirty tricks (or any at all beyond the mid 3050s) and the Clans will get annoyed enough to simply throw duels and honor out the window and turn their Super Soldiers and advanced weapons on you at their full potential. The Clans also punish piracy with battlefield executions and don't apply honor to criminals.
  • The fear this trope in the form of mutually assured destruction through Lost Technology was the only thing that kept the Great Houses from attacking jumpships during the late Succession Wars.
• The Peter Principle: The Clans' way of promotion relies heavily on personal combat skills, which leads to many higher ranked warriors who can beat their subordinates in combat but cannot effectively lead said subordinates in battles. Indeed, in Historical: Operation Klondike (which chronicles the birth of the Clans), one interviewee (a retired Star League sergeant turned bar owner) criticized this method, referring to lower-level SLDF commanders who could shoot straight but "[C]ouldn't lead themselves out of a well-lit parking lot." It took the failure of Operation Revival for the Clans to begin fixing this.
• Pillars of Moral Character: House Kurita's Order of the Five Pillars. Naturally.
• Pirate Girl: Morgan Fletcher, Suzy "One-Eye" Morgaine-Ryan and Paula "Lady Death" Trevaine.
• Planet Baron: Barons are common in the game, as the Successor Lords commonly reward someone who's done a valuable service to their realm by appointing them baron of a planet. If they're lucky, they'll get put in charge of a planet that's got a valuable resource like a battlemech factory. If they're unlucky they'll get named baron of an uninhabited ice ball on the fringes of the Successor State's territory. Other nobles often rule their own planets as well, though in this case it's hereditary while the title of baron does not transfer to the original individual's heirs.
• Planet Terra: Terra is the common name for both the planet of humanity's origin and its star system, with the actual star being referred to as Sol. The term has influenced the names of some of the states that come to rule the region of space containing Terra, such as the Terran Hegemony. Interestingly, the switch in terminology seems to have occurred some time after humanity began exploring the stars, as the first extra-solar planet to be colonized by humans received the name New Earth rather than New Terra.
• Planetville: Played dead straight. Except for the local capital (with its attendant spaceport) and the occasional outlying settlement or three, planets in most BattleTech fiction might as well be completely uninhabited.
  • This is to some extent an Acceptable Break from Reality, since it helps prop up the illusion that the fate of an entire world could in fact be decided by the relatively small-scale battles played out at the actual gaming table.
  • It is also a not-immediately-obvious, but very logical, result of the Amaris Coup and Civil War and First and Second Succession Wars. There used to be a lot of planets with very high populations, mech armies in the tens of thousands or higher, abundant universities and cities all around the planet. After a century of warfare with incredibly powerful weapons of mass destruction, there aren't so many of those planets anymore, and many of the surviving planets were reduced to Planetvilles by sheer violence, and struggle to rebuild even in the modern setting.
  • Averted by the most prominent worlds, which have more realistic populations (billions) and spread out infrastructure. The historical battles that take place here also tend to be suitably large. Smaller worlds could just be a single colony; those examples would be justified.
  • Also, the "limited warfare" doctrines most factions use means 24 'Mechs duking it out on an empty plain far from any population centers or useful infrastructure is preferable for all parties.
• Plasma Cannon: Uses a laser to heat a block of plastic into plasma and fires it at a target. Also comes in the smaller plasma rifle that can be used by Battlesuits.
• Police State: The Capellan Confederation has fallen back on these policies as it is losing ground to its enemies for most of the timeline; though its only really bad when the current Chancellor is the insane variety of Liao. The majority of the other factions temporarily go into this in times of crisis.
• Politically Correct History: Used in-universe. The Star League is generally considered to be golden age of mankind by just about everyone in the 31st century, while in actuality it was far from it. Sure, there was relative peace and a high technology level, but speak out about independence one iota and the SLDF would appear in-system to remind you who the boss was - with 'Mechs.
  • Various source books emphasize that, while Inner Sphere and Clan peoples remember the Star League's rule as 300 years of peace and development fondly, the Periphery states were forced to join after they were brutalized in the Reunification War and never really got over that. These 'Territorial States' were poorly treated, overtaxed, and systematically abused until the collapse of the League. It eventually came back to haunt the League, as Stefan Amaris was a Periphery lord.
  • There's also the little matter of never-ending shadow wars (using 'bandits') between what would become the Successor States, a civil war in the Free Worlds League, and a couple of border wars, though these smaller conflicts were absolute peanuts compared to the Succession Wars that started when the Star League fell - particularly the first two, which saw the unrestrained use of WMDs.
• Portmanteau:
  • The Timber Wolf's Inner Sphere reporting name Mad Cat came to be when Precentor-Martial Focht was analyzing the blackbox data from Phelan Kell's 'Mech. The targeting system, not having data on the Timber Wolf, couldn't decide if it was seeing a Marauder (MAD) or a Catapult (CAT), since the Timber Wolf had visual similarities to both, resulting in the targeting system constantly switching between MAD and CAT.
  • Used commonly to refer to various bits of technology. In the case of vehicles such as spaceships and 'Mechs, the first part of the word denotes a specific purpose - DropShip, WarShip, JumpShip, BattleMech, WorkMech, AggroMech, etc.
  • While the Clans view traditional contractions as practically blasphemous, they make extensive use of portmanteaus in their language. Notable examples include batchall (battle challenge), quiaff and quineg (query affirmative and negative respectively), and sibko (sibling c[k]ompany). Others include free- and trueborn, as well as their vulgar derivatives freebirth and trashborn. Even the Clan epithet stravag is said to have been derived from two words meaning "independent" and "birthing".
• Powered Armor: From simple powered suits for special forces troopers to one-ton suits capable of taking on 'Mechs in numbers, and even larger suits up to two tons. The best-known example is Clan Elemental battle armor, which surprised Inner Sphere militaries during its first appearance on account of being so tough for such a small suit.
• Power Pincers: Some mechs had large claws that could be used to attack opponents, such as other mechs. One example was the CTP-005 Clytemestra (in the magazine BattleTechnology #21) which had two Solaris Arms Mark IV BattleClaws.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The main reason the Inner Sphere gave up total warfare and Weapons of Mass Destruction after the First and Second Succession Wars. Defeating your enemies simply isn't possible when your technological base is being blasted back to the Industrial Age, your civilians are all dead and unable to contribute to the war effort and the worlds you want to conquer end up as depopulated piles of wreckage. Centuries long stalemates aren't exactly fun but even the most ambitious House Lord realizes that you can't rule all of humanity if spacefaring civilization comes to an end.
• Praetorian Guard: The Chancellors of the Capellan Confederation and the Coordinators of the Draconis Combine have the Death Commandos and Otomo respectively. The other Great Houses don't have dedicated units for this role but the current House Lord's former military command often plays this role. The various Khans in the Clans have Keshik units that they personally command in battle.
  • Bodyguarding a Badass: Most faction leaders at least have some military training and, in the cases of the Combine, the Federated Suns and the Clans, are often among the most highly skilled warriors themselves.
• Private Military Contractors: Many, many mercenary armies work for each of the Houses; some even own their own worlds. Units like the Northwind Highlanders, Eridani Light Horse, Kell Hounds, Gray Death Legion, and Wolf's Dragoons show how successful merc units can ultimately become, weilding power and influence equalling or surpassing some Periphery states, and that's not even an exhaustive list of the powerful and storied merc companies in the Inner Sphere.
  • Notably, the game designers (and fanbase) seem to really love mercenaries. Whole sourcebooks are dedicated to the logistics and economics of running mercenary units, several novels include, or are entirely from the point of view of, mercenary characters, and about half the video games cast your Player Character as a mercenary, including MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries, MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, and the BattleTech computer game by Harebrained Schemes. MechWarrior Online also includes support for playing a mercenary. Even MegaMek, the unofficial port of tabletop rules to computer, provides support for playing a mercenary unit, generating contracts and dealing with economic and logistical issues. If there's such a thing as a "default setting" for the game, it's being a mercenary. In fact, the first version of Combat Manual: Mercenaries, a sourcebook for Alpha Strike, caused some small controversy amongst the fans when rules were not included allowing fans to make their own mercenary formations, and the devs acceded, making a snap edit to the book to include them.
• Professional Killer: Many, from the Bounty Hunter to the Jarnfolk assassins.
• Proud Merchant Race: The Lyran Commonwealth is generally described as a nation of merchants first, politicians second, and warriors a distant third. The Free Worlds League likewise is a mercantile nation (when they aren't busy killing each other) and an industrial powerhouse, which allowed them to become the largest arms maker in the Inner Sphere after the Lyran Commonwealth was attacked by the Clans. Clan Diamond Shark combines their love of money with their love of combat, much to the chagrin of the other Clans.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Clans' Warrior Caste - in a half-twist, they are the enemies for once. The Invading Clans who settled down in Inner Sphere are gradually changing to the Proud Soldier Race Guy sub-type, whether they want to admit it or not, at least when dealing with the Inner Sphere "barbarians". The Hell's Horses are the only Clan that provides a rather interesting mix of both the Warrior and Soldier sub-types because, even after the Great Exodus from Terra, they still ascribe to the centuries-old philosophy of combined arms warfare, whom the other Clans consider "hopelessly obsolete" in a field dominated by Humongous Mecha.
  • The Clans end up being a deconstruction of this trope, first because it turns out that behind all the Cultural Posturing, they're every bit as prone to political bickering and infighting as the Inner Sphere, and second because their hidebound adherence to a heavily ritualized form of warfare makes it easy for a clever strategist to manipulate them into giving themselves crippling handicaps^note Best exemplified in the Battle of Tukayyid, in which ComStar challenged the hitherto unstoppable Clans to a Trial of Possession for control of Terra. The Clans accepted, because the challenge was made within their rules and they believed ComStar to be a pushover, and then immediately started bidding among themselves for drop order and prestige targets, with the Smoke Jaguars winning by committing the least amount of forces, and the other Clans (except Wolf) following suit. ComStar committed twelve armies, and then exploited the various battlefields by using "dishonorable" tactics like ambushes, artillery, supply raids, hit-and-runs, and goading the Clans into making stupid attacks for reasons of honor. The Clan invasion was stopped because the Clans were too obsessed with honor to fight effectively.
  • The soldiers of the heavily militaristic Federated Suns and Draconis Combine, based on Anglo-French knights and Japanese samurai respectively, tend towards this as well, in a Soldier Versus Warrior way (Suns being Soldiers and Combine being Warriors).
  • Exemplified by Clan Smoke Jaguar, who represent the worst excesses of the Clan's brutality and contempt for those not born to the Warrior Caste. They're also the tragic perpetrators of a grand case of Dramatic Irony as their founder, Franklin Osis, had rediscovered his youthful pacifism in his twilight years and wished to temper the ruthless savagery of his Warriors with pursuits beyond the martial. Unfortunately, he was followed by a succession of short-sighted and vicious Khans that enshrined those beliefs he had come to regret, resulting in a Clan that was hated and despised by their ostensible allies, notorious for committing wanton slaughter and a seemingly endless list of atrocities. When their crimes caught up to them during Operation BULLDOG and Operation SERPENT, the rest of the Clans were all too happy to abandon the Jaguars to their doom.
• Put on a Bus: An interesting case, as the bus putting actually happened in the backstory and is integral to the setting at large, before the then-current timeline in the game started. The example, of course, would be Alexander Kerensky and the Star League Defense Forces. It didn't last long because:
  • The Bus Came Back: And they throw the entire Inner Sphere into chaos when they return as the Clans.
  • Inverse are some Mechs are no longer seen or in use as the factories producing them were destroyed or production of them were discontinued altogether.
• Putting the Band Back Together: At the climax of the Jihad, a number of internal and external pressures caused the League to completely dissolve in 3079, becoming a hodgepodge collection of independent worlds and multi-planet minor states that would war amongst each other but band together temporarily to fight off bigger threats. This status quo remained for sixty years, until in the late 3130s Jessica Marik was able to begin the long task of reassembling the League. Most of these former member states and worlds reunited in 3139 but Regulus continued to spar with the League until subdued in 3148, and as of June 3152 Andurien is still fiercely independent and shows no inclination to rejoin the League.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • Stefan Amaris is defeated and Terra is liberated but the Terran Hegemony is mortally wounded. Without it to mediate, the Successor States once again war over who will lead the Star League. General Aleksandr Kerensky was Terra's only hope but he and his army left the Inner Sphere rather than get caught up in the squabbles of the Great Houses. The Hegemony was finally finished off by the Great Houses' land grabs and ComStar's takeover of Terra.
  • The Jade Falcons came out victorious over the Wolves during the Refusal War, but thanks to some strategic victories by the Wolves as well as a successful repelling of a concentrated assault on the Kell Hounds and the splinter offshoot Clan Wolf-In-Exile (comprised of the surviving original Warden members of the Clan), the Falcons were ultimately in no position to resume the invasion of the Inner Sphere, and were forced to absorb the remaining Wolves in order to re-bolster their strength. This didn't last long either, as treachery by the Falcon leadership in the battle that was Khan Ulric Kerensky's last was revealed and Clan Wolf reasserted itself as a Crusader faction thanks to newly appointed Khan Vladimir Ward, who was the sole witness of the Falcons' dishonorable acts during the war and ultimately killed their two highest ranked members responsible in Trials against them.

R

• Ragnarök Proofing: Properly maintained Mechs and Jumpdrives that are centuries old and still work far better than their more recently-made counterparts.
• Ramming Always Works: The game's charge mechanics can lead to some...interesting results, depending on the unit being used. The aptly titled Charger BattleMech can deal a frightening amount of damage, mostly as a factor of mass and distance traveled. Given that the Charger is 80 tons and can move 86 kph on clear ground, its ramming attacks can be devastating (64 damage points to the target, while the maximum damage it can take as a result of its attack is often just 10 points).
  • Subverted in the rules for aerospace combat, though, where ramming your craft into another isn't just tricky in and of itself but is one of the few times the rules apply a sort of morale check in the form of a (difficult) roll to determine whether your pilot/crew is actually crazy enough to go through with it or chickens out at the last moment.
    • During the Clan invasion, a mortally wounded Rasalhague aerospace pilot named Tyra Miraborg disabled the thrust safeties on her half-smashed 65-ton fighter and flew head-on into the bridge of the Clan flagship. Not only did this cripple the warship her squadron otherwise couldn't scratch, it ejected the commander of the overall invasion into space and brought the Clan advance to a screeching halt. The Clans were highly impressed by this, with even the victimized Clan deciding to rename a new class of assault craft in her honor. Her act was even immortalized as a verse in their poetic history, The Remembrance.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Everyone from unit commanders to faction leaders are more likely than not to have their own personal BattleMech and be quite willing to use it in combat. For the Inner Sphere factions, this typically culminates in Royals Who Actually Do Something.
• Realpolitik: With a few notable exceptions, like the undeniably evil Amaris the Usurper and a handful of insane Capellan chancellors, there really are no good guys or bad guys among the various political leaders. They're just looking to take care of their people, which sometimes means stepping all over someone else.
• Real Robot: 'Mechs average a bit more resilient than usual for the genre, but they are still gritty metal-and-grease war machines that get banged up and blasted to pieces all the time.
  • Justified in backstory. Most of the more fragile units from the Star League era didn't survive the Succession Wars, or were rebuilt using simpler, more resilient technology.
  • This is also why early Battletech leaned so hard on the Macross and Dougram designs - they were a perfect fit for the feel that Weisman and Babcock were going for in their initial pitch, much moreso than something like Gundam or any Super Robot.
• Recoiled Across the Room: Any 'Mech less than 100 tons attempting to move and fire a Heavy Gauss Rifle in the same turn must check for falling down. See Chest Blaster above for a truly ridiculous variation.
• Recycled In Space: At first glance, most of the Successor States look like medieval or 16th-18th century nations, though they are actually more complex. Also applies to other factions.
  • House Davion: Great Britain/France IN SPACE
  • House Steiner: (West) Germany IN SPACE
  • House Marik: USA/Yugoslavia IN SPACE
  • House Liao: Imperial/Communist China/Soviet Union IN SPACE
    • St. Ives Compact: Taiwan IN SPACE
  • House Kurita: Imperial Japan IN SPACE (deliberate design by its founder)
  • Free Rasalhague Republic: Scandinavia IN SPACE
  • ComStar: Medieval Catholic Church IN SPACE
  • Taurian Concordat: Kingdom of Asturias / Israel IN SPACE
  • Magistracy of Canopus: Las Vegas / Atlantic City IN SPACE
  • Outworlds Alliance: Amish/Mennonites IN SPACE
  • Marian Hegemony: Republican/Imperial Rome IN SPACE (deliberate design by its founder)
  • Tortuga Dominions: Pirates of the Caribbean IN SPACE
  • Nuevo Castile: Reconquista Spain IN SPACE (until Clan Goliath Scorpion takes over)
  • Mostly averted with the Clans, which were deliberately designed (both in-universe and in real life) as a new society, but they do use Mongol terminology and initially burst upon the Inner Sphere much as the Mongol horde did to medieval Europe.
• Remember the New Guy?: Interstellar Expeditions, a large organization dedicated to investigating mysteries throughout the Inner Sphere and Periphery, were introduced in a sourcebook covering the Jihad era with the group having a substantial role in locating the Word of Blake's hidden worlds. However their in-game history goes all the way back to the Third Succession War.
  • The Free Guilds, service providers in Clan society who belong to no particular Clan. Aside from a couple of throwaway mentions in early products^note the Jade Falcon and Warriors of Kerensky sourcebooks, published 1992 and 2000 respectively they made no appearance, to the point where some fans thought they were simply an Early-Installment Weirdness error. From 2021 onwards the Free Guilds have suddenly become a lowly but influential and ever-present part of Clan society, appearing in a number of novels and sourcebooks.
• The Remnant:
  • At least half of understrength Word of Blake elite Shadow Divisions were unaccounted for by the end of Jihad, who are rumored to have retreated to their hidden worlds to lick their wounds.
  • A popular in-universe theory is that in the former Rim Worlds Republic space there is a RWR remnant with hidden worlds bigger than other ex-RWR mini-states.
  • There is a small, but stubborn faction of Republic of the Sphere military that refused to retreat behind the fortress-republic and opted to stay and defend their homes and the ideals of the republic. They call themselves the "Remnant".
  • The mysterious Minnesota Tribe, who appeared in the Periphery, cut their way across the Inner Sphere and disappeared are believed to have been the survivors of Clan Wolverine following their abjuration. (Confirmed by Word of God but In-Universe no one know this.)
• Renegade Splinter Faction: The Word of Blake to ComStar
• Reporting Names: Each of the Clan BattleMechs were given such names by the Inner Sphere. For example, the Clans' Timber Wolf is still widely known as the Mad Cat^note Supposedly because when first encountered, an Inner Sphere targeting computer tried to identify the Timber Wolf as a Marauder (MAD) and a Catapult (CAT) at the same time, as the profile of the Timber Wolf has elements of both.
  • Some of these are better than others, and the mere mention of an Inner Sphere reporting name in the presence of a Clan supporter can cause arguments. Just to make it worse, the Vulture is the only Mech that ever went by three names. It was also called Hagetaka, which is Japanese for Vulture, in the Draconis Combine. To the Clans, it's the Mad Dog.
  • The Mauler is a FedCom reporting name for a Draconis Combine 'mech, back when it was so secret the other IS houses only had rumors of its existence. The 'Mech's prototypical name was Daboku (bruise), but the original prototypes were marked failures. While the newest models were superior and reasonably effective, the Draconis Combine used the FedCom reporting name to avoid the embarrassment of the Daboku's history. Before that, related models that (visually) called back to the Mauler went by Na-No-Kami (the Japanese god of earthquakes) and Linesman.
    • A similar story exists for the Wolf Trap BattleMech. Designed by the Draconis Combine, its original name was Tora (tiger), but it was quickly given the FedCom reporting name Wolf Trap in a hasty effort to make it not seem Draconian in origin, as the 'Mech was branded a failure.
  • An subverted case is the Ebon Jaguar, which was made sometime in battle of Luthien by Clan Smoke Jaguar. It was named the Cauldron Born by the Inner Sphere, and the Clans also call it Cauldron Born, because it was so new they didn't get the name Smoke Jaguar made.
  • This can occasionally result in cross cultural confusion too, as is the case with calling a 'Mech a Viper. If a Clanner is speaking, they're referring to a 40-ton urban raider known to the Inner Sphere as a Dragonfly. If you're listening to a Spheroid, they're discussing a 75-ton frontline brawler called a Black Python by its creators.
• Retcon: Certain early Mechs were derived from Macross and this caused a longstanding legal headache for the game designers once BattleTech began to pick up steam. The designs were removed from the game, and fans took to calling these designs "Unseen". With rights to the original artwork still not forthcoming, eventually the mechs were simply redesigned.
  • Word of God says this is officially NOT a retcon — the original designs still exist in universe, they just can't be seen in Real Life. The Project Phoenix redesigns are just that — revamped designs of the old machines meant to reflect the new styling of the 3060s. The debate over whether CGL ought to just retcon once and for all the old designs into the new designs is a cause of a lot of Broken Base on the official forums. CGL, for their part is not dipping their toes into that water. Yet.
    • "Yet" has kind-sorta happened. On July 24, 2015, Catalyst announced that they were going to redesign the Unseen. The already-released designs shown here show that these minis are going to go as close as legally possible as they can to the Unseen to replace them wherever an Unseen would be used (mostly pre-3067/Project Phoenix instinces of the Unseen). Further, Word of God claims it as a genuine retcon, as the newly-minted designs completely in-universe replace the original Macross/Dougram/Crusher Joe art that can no longer be used.
  • Confusing the issue further, Catalyst has the rights to use, and does use, the artwork for the 'Mechs taken from all sources not Macross - specifically from Fang of the Sun Dougram and Crusher Joe. The Thunderbolt, Shadow Hawk, Battlemaster, and others have reappeared in Real Life.
    • Catalyst, however, has officially said they will not exercise whatever rights they do have to that artwork, out of fear that someday it might come back to bite them legally (the Macross situation having made everyone understandably paranoid). The official stance of CGL is that if it wasn't made "in house" by FASA, Fan Pro or CGL directly (this also rules out bespoke designs like the Studio Nue redesigns for the Japanese version of BattleTech that became the IIC Clan 'mechs), they will not touch it with a ten-foot pole.
  • Just to complicate matters further, rumor has it that Catalyst and Topps are trying to sidestep the issue altogether by designing new artwork and models for the Unseen designs, debuting an updated Warhammer◊ design at GenCon 2015, to considerable interest from fans and a minimum of legal fuss thus far from Harmony Gold.
  • A more standard, narrative-based example is the situation regarding 'Mech production. Initially, in Battledroids and VERY early BTech, there was ZERO production, just spare parts to fight over which placed a higher emphasis on the Schizo Tech and Scavenger World themes. A fairly early retcon created working factories which allows scrapped 'Mechs to be replaced, but without making them numerous either, preserving to a lesser degree the sense of scarcity.
  • Similarly, the fact that the Inner Sphere had finally started to recover some lost Star League technologies on a useful scale beginning about a decade before the Clan invasion... was only introduced to the universe after the first novels about said invasion had already been written. This makes several viewpoint characters from said novel sound oddly ignorant on the subject of the invaders' technology in retrospect.
  • There is Battletech animated series. However, it deviated far enough from the source material (not necessarily the mechs themselves, but rather the characterization of certain important-to-the-universe people) that it has been declared propaganda: it still exists in-universe, but is widely viewed as at best Very Loosely Based on a True Story, and at worst as an attempt to make certain parties look better than they are.
• Revenge by Proxy: One of the many ways in which some of the more oppressive Great Houses of the Inner Sphere (such as Kurita) violated human rights.
  • Pre-Schism ComStar and the Word of Blake also used this as a mean of intimidation. The latter often on a planetary scale.
• Riddle for the Ages: Jinjiro Kurita, one of more unstable Coordinators of the Draconis Combine and the perpetrator of the infamous Kentares Massacre during the First Succession War, went off the deep end when he received a box that made it through layers of security. The contents were a single doll dressed in a Star League uniform. After nearly killing the two guards who had been sent to check on him, Jinjiro spent the final four years of his life locked in a soundproof room screaming in terror until he finally hanged himself with his own clothes. Centuries later, historians remain baffled by what Jinjiro saw in the doll as well as who sent it.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: All over the place. Be it mercenary commands getting into conflicts with their employer's regular forces, line units running into trouble with local leaders who feel threatened by their presence, rival commanders jockeying for position and influence (though certain factions, the Clans in particular, encourage this to an extent), business interests and military necessity clashing, or conflicting ideological and regional allegiances, in the 31st Century the enemy doesn't always fly a different flag.
  • The Free Worlds League is the best example. The main weakness of the otherwise solid FWLM is that units from different regions distrust each other and are often taking orders from regional leaders who have goals that don't line up with the commands coming from House Marik.
  • The Word of Blake had no less than five different factions on its ruling Conclave. Furthermore, during the Jihad, Precentors Apollyon and Cameron St. Jamais (who commanded the Word's elite Manei Domini and regular WoB Militia respectively) despised each other, to the point that the Shadow Divisions attacked Militia held worlds even while Stone's Coalition was beginning to go on the offensive.
• Ring Out: It is possible to knock enemy units off of the map by knocking them into an adjacent hex when they're right on the edge; game rules often treat this as "in retreat" or similar.
  • In-universe, this is a perfectly legitimate way to win many Clan trials; most of these are held in a predetermined battle area called a Circle of Equals. A warrior who leaves the Circle either due to his own actions or those of his opponent automatically loses the contest.
• Rite-of-Passage Name Change: One of these is at the heart of the Clans' Trial of Bloodright, the winner of which is awarded the privilege of using their Bloodname as a surname. Only Bloodnamed warriors are eligible for positions in Clan leadership, and a Bloodname is also a requirement for a warrior's genes to be used in the Clan breeding program.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: How the Absorption of Clan Widowmaker went down after Nicholas Kerensky was killed. The results were... not pretty.
  • The rallying cry Clan Smoke Jaguar must die! had shades of this as well.
  • Early in the First Succession War, the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine was assassinated shortly after nearly conquering the Davion-held world Kentares IV. His son and successor decided the entire planet needed to die. He ordered his troops to kill every man, woman and child on the planet. This predictably caused a strong response in House Davion's troops, turning the tide in the war.
    • It also caused another, directly aimed at House Kurita — the Eridani Light Horse were repulsed by the massacre, and declared their mercenary contract null and void due to Kurita's violations of the laws of war. The governor of the planet they were based out of responded by killing all of the Eridani Light Horse's families and dependents. This was a grave miscalculation on Kurita's part — the unit sought out every representative of the Kurita government and military on the planet and systematically killed them in revenge. When Kurita reinforcements arrived in the system, they promptly learned about the massacre and left.
    • Wolf's Dragoons also got in on this during both the Marik Civil War and the events surrounding the aptly-named planet of Misery. Given both their skills and considering their eventual origins, this proved to be a bad thing for the parties they were seeking revenge against.
    • The Dragoons had another big one when Blakist sponsored mercenaries attacked Outreach and killed Jaime Wolf, among other atrocities. They proceeded to enact "Condition Feral" - they give every ally one chance to stand down, and kill every hostile without asking or accepting surrender, in an action explicitly compared to a Clan Trial of Annihilation.
  • The Clans have a socially accepted version of this, the aforementioned Trial of Annihilation. Normally a badly tainted group or personage is Abjured, exiled in other words. If they are considered truly beyond the pale, however, Annihilation is proposed. An Annihilated Clanner is killed, as are all those descended from them, and then all those killed are unpersoned. Like all Clan Trials it is by combat and it's in theory possible to win...but this has only occurred a handful of times in Clan history. The mere proposal of Annihilation usually means all the political bridges have been burned; the vote for the trial determines the odds on the field, and 100 to 1 or worse is the norm.
  • The Blakist nuclear and biological attacks on Clan Ghost Bear civilians made things personal. The warriors of the Bears - infamous among the Clans for being slow to act - threw out all the Clan rules of warfare and responded with an Inner-Sphere style campaign of massive bombardments and savage brutality. Even forces which would have had a mutual enmity with the Word of Blake were caught up by their fury. They eventually calmed down and sided with the growing coalition against the Blakists.
  • Operation REVIVAL was fully intended to be one of these, to punish the Great Houses for their petty squabbling and arrogance that had destroyed the Star League. In fact, one of the prizes the Invader Clans were bidding for was to claim the honor of getting the invasion corridor through the Draconis Combine, as Kurita had precipitated the First Succession War and thus the Clans viewed them with the same level of contempt as they viewed Stefan Amaris.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Like ancient and medieval kings back on Earth, royalty and other leaders are expected to inspire the people by leading their troops in combat, or at least have combat experience. Does not apply to actual heads of state, usually, but if the excrement is well and truly all over the fan, it happens. Ian Davion, Hanse's Davion's older brother and First Prince before him, died in his Atlas' cockpit, while Hanse and Takashi Kurita both mounted up (and scored several kills each) in defense of their capital worlds.
  • You can't be appointed First Prince of the Federated Suns without spending five years on the front lines as a member of the Federated Suns military. This particular point becomes a big issue for the younger sibling of the First Prince, who stages a very artful coup but never has particularly much legitimacy because she never did any military service. Cue vicious Civil War.^note Katherine wasn't actually in line for leadership, despite being the second-oldest of Hanse and Melissa's children. Peter Steiner-Davion was the real spare, and serving out the required military service even after Victor ended up running the Federated Commonwealth. It's not really clear why Katherine never went into the military to get into the line of succession, but given her personality, it seems likely she was just never interested in properly earning whatever power she wanted.
  • Lampshaded in MechWarrior 4: Vengeance, where the protagonist is from a ducal family, seeking to restore legal rule to his planet (and the final battle is with his cousin), and after one of his missions, a lancemate actually says "I guess you're not one of those royals who let the rest of us do the heavy lifting."
• Royally Screwed Up: The Camerons of the Terran Hegemony, the Liaos of the Capellan Confederation, and the Mariks of the Free Worlds League to a certain extent. The other great houses also have had their examples throughout the ages, but those are the most prominent.
  • The Camerons were prone to excesses, and occasional bouts of Magnificent Bastardry. This actually managed to be a boon to their nation, until Richard was betrayed by his Treacherous Advisor.
  • The Liaos have a serious genetic predisposition to being batshit fucking insane. As in "self-mutilation to show your loyalty" and "kill a few thousand people because I'm convinced a handful are traitors" and "I'm convinced I can kill you with the power of my mind" kinds of insane. The ones that aren't insane are shrewd, competant leaders. The ones that are insane are shrewd, terrifying megalomaniacs.
  • The Mariks are known to two major traits: Being largely ineffective on the throne, and killing each other to take the throne. The most effective Marik leader in recent memory turned out to not actually be a Marik.
  • While most of the Steiners are skilled, and occasionally brilliant leaders; the family does have a sporadic history of psychological instability ranging from mild irrationality to megalomania. These cases are not as common as in Houses Liao or Marik but when one of them gets on the throne the Commonwealth usually suffers for it.
  • Other royal families also had problems with internal strife and political wrangling at each other, but usually not to the ridiculous extent the Liaos and Mariks would display. The Davions and Kuritas generally see infighting of a political and cultural nature rather than being rooted in mental illness.
• Rule of Cool: The setting would not exist without this.

S

• Salt the Earth: The Cobalt-Laced nukes, used in early Succession Wars and late Jihad.
  • Another way this occurred was through destroying or cutting off a world's access to food and especially water. Many worlds that relied upon imports or terraforming quite literally died because of this during the Succession Wars. Preventing this trope (along with Lost Technology) is the number one reason why nearly every faction in the setting has rejected total warfare.
• Scary Black Man: Franklin Osis, the first Khan of Clan Smoke Jaguar. Lincoln Osis, the ilKhan who saw the Great Refusal end the Clan Invasion once and for all, was also one. Leo Showers, Lincoln's predecessor who oversaw the initial invasion of the Inner Sphere, was yet another example. Indeed, this seems to be Smoke Jaguar's stock in trade.
• Scavenger World: Much of the Inner Sphere, although it was scaled back before too long from all military production being lost in the Succession Wars to a lot, in the name of selling new content.
  • The same applied to the Pentagon worlds before and during Operation Klondike.
• Schizo Tech: Some League technology has been retained, but much has been lost and has to be reinvented. For example, compact fusion reactors and neurointerface technology exists in the setting, but targeting computers weigh several tons and are less capable than WWII-era analog ones.
  • Targeting computers weigh so much because it's not just a computer, but more precise servos for weapon mounts, better sensors, and the like. A Targeting Computer weighs a variable amount based on the combined weight of weapons on the unit, since it needs to tie into all of them to be effective.
• The Scottish Trope: The Not-Named Clan Wolverine. Carried to the point that even referring to the animal, regardless of context, is highly frowned upon in the Clans... and comparing a Clanner to said animal is nothing short of a mortal insult.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Pretty much how IlKhan Andrews started up the initial Reavings that would plunge the Clan Homeworlds into all out war. He even got away with killing another Khan before he had a chance to defend himself. His taint doctrine had no precedence in Clan law and only served to allow the Homeworld based Clans to attempt to weaken their Invader rivals. Once the strongest of these allies, the Star Adders, got what they wanted they pointed out that Andrews' Steel Vipers had also been "tainted" and Annihilated them under their own doctrine.
  • In general, while the ilKhan is beholden to Clan law and the will of the Grand Council, the whole point of an ilKhan is to point the Clans in the same direction in wartime, or other periods of strife affecting the Clans as a whole. As such, they have a fairly broad range to invoke this trope. ilKhan Nicholas Kerensky most of all, since he was still laying the groundwork of what would become Clan society, had no problem making up rules, laws, and Trials on the spot as needed to keep the Clans functioning.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: General Kerensky and the majority of the SLDF fled known space once they realized that the only other option was to fight those they had sworn to protect.
  • Much earlier, after a grinding civil war with the outer systems led to a political upheaval, the 23rd century Terran Alliance completely pulled out of all systems more than a single hyperspace jump (30 light years or so) away from Earth. Not all the systems involved appreciated the maneuver.
  • In the leadup to the Wars of Reaving, most of the original Invader Clans saw what was coming and abandoned their homeworld holdings, fleeing to their Inner Sphere Occupation Zones or merging with Spheroid nations to survive. Of special note was Clan Ghost Bear, who covertly evacuated almost their entire civillian population to the Inner Sphere in massive Leviathan-class ships before any of their rival Clans noticed.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:
  • First Lord Jonathan Cameron was plagued by visions of "rough, coarse men from the Periphery" conquering Terra and destroying human civilization. To that end, he invested a large chunk of the Star League's budget in a vast expansion of the SLDF, including the development of automated Space Defense Systems around key Hegemony worlds, including Terra itself, to keep them safe from any hostile invaders. This would backfire on the Inner Sphere in two ways:
    • The space Defense Systems would be co-opted by Stephan Amaris and his Rim Worlds Republic forces during their takeover of the League, and turned against the SLDF during their war to liberate the Hegemony. Even once Terra was liberated and Amaris removed from power, the damage done to the Star League would prove irreparable. The League would soon dissolve, with the worlds of the Terran Hegemony either being conquered by neighboring states or claimed by Comstar.
    • Following the conclusion of the Amaris Civil War, over 80% of the surviving SLDF units would elect to leave the Inner Sphere rather than risk becoming embroiled in the impending Succession Wars. Their descendents would return centuries later as the invading Clans, with the goal of conquering Terra and reshaping civilization in their image.
  • ComStar's Explorer Corps was formed after the then Primus had nightmares about invading monsters from outside the Inner Sphere that bore alarming resemblance to the animals the Clans named themselves after. Said Explorer Corps were what instigated the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere when one of their ships accidentally discovered the Smoke Jaguar homeworld.
• Self-Healing Phlebotinum: The Clans use a biological agent called HarJel in their Elemental Battle Armors. If the suit is damaged, HarJel acts like a sealing agent and also sterilizes suffered wounds and numbs the pain of the wearer. It is also used to instantly seal ruptured hulls of spaceships. 'Mechs can make use of it in similar situations, and combining it with underwater maneuvering units and functionally submersible weapons makes them capable underwater combatants. The secret behind its mass-production is closely guarded by one Clan and thus the product is highly valued throughout Clan Space and the Inner Sphere.
• Series Mascot: The Mad Cat/Timber Wolf is the series iconic design. The Atlas and Warhammer(replaced by the Battlemaster) are usually the Inner Sphere and Succession Wars mascots.
• Secret Police: The ISF of the Combine, ComStar and the Word of Blake's ROM, The Free Worlds League's (comically inept) SAFE, the various Clan Watches, the Federated Sun's MI6, the Confederation's Maskirovka, and the Commonwealth's LIC (though their LOKI department goes a step further, and Heimdall goes beyond ''that'').
• Seppuku: Brought back by the Draconis Combine.
  • Clan Fire Mandrill warriors also practice this, being their founder was from the Draconis Combine himself.
• Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: As with many tabletop games, this trope is in full force here. Long range weapons in BattleTech rarely have a maximum range that exceeds ~25 hexes, and each hex is ~30 meters long. Most weapons have much shorter maximum ranges, and their effective range is even shorter than that. Apparently the tech level makes giant robots practical, but it can't arm them with anything that goes farther than half a kilometer.
  • This has been repeatedly called out, and repeatedly stated to exist for game balance. In real-world, all of the weapons would have ranges measuring "to the horizon", save possibly Lasers, as those would suffer diffraction. The designers have also directly said that it was for playability as well, as to model accurate ranges would force players into needing 12 or more maps end-to-end, and that it took away the "face-to-face" dueling romance of the game and instead making it a sniper contest. After all, most players don't have the wherewithal to rent out a basketball court every week for a game.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: In the right hands, even lower-damage LBX autocannons can tear shit up with cluster munitions.
• Shoulders of Doom: On the Atlas, pictured here◊. Quite appropriate given the name.
  • The Akuma, produced by the Draconis Combine, shares a similar shoulder-based design as the Atlas, though its shoulders are less prominent than its cousin.
  • For the Shoulder Cannon variant, the missile racks of the Mad Cat's silhouette are probably the most famous. The Awesome and the Mauler get in on the action with the Vertical Mecha Fins variant.
• Shout-Out: lots of them, from various sources.
  • A recent sourcebook includes a news report by Kiva Cooper, on a battle where a 'Mech falls onto a Pop TV building.
  • Several famous mercenary units referenced popular culture. Examples included The Fighting Urukhai and Team Banzai, led by the mysterious "Dr. B. Banzai." (Team Banzai was integrated enough into the setting once upon a time to play at least a bit part in the Warrior novels. A certain watermelon even managed to become plot relevant for just one crucial moment.)
  • Wolf Dragoons also got in the act with its old Zeta company pre-misery mostly in having names of some of its members of that part of the Dragoons taken from a certain universe that goes by a U.C timeline
  • A small one: in the book Crusader Clans, there's a Clan Star Adder unit whose unit sobriquet is "The Answer." Their official designation? The 42nd Adder Cavaliers.
  • A small one to Monty Python's Life of Brian in Interstellar Players 3: Interstellar Expeditions:
  A citizen of the Inner Sphere may ask, "What did the Clans ever do for us?" "Well," a citizen of the Barrens might answer, "the sanitation, the medicine, education, viniculture, public order, irrigation, roads, the freshwater system, public health, oh and peace."
  • The entry for the Black Knight heavy mech in Technical Readout: 3039 is absolutely full of references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. First, it says that the mech debuted with the 3rd Heavy Assault Regiment, a Star League unit nicknamed "The Pythons." Then it says that people who fought it had to "literally dismember their foe" to stop it. And finally, for good measure, there's this sentence in the mech's profile:
    "In a one-on-one battle with another heavy BattleMech - assuming equally skilled MechWarriors - conventional wisdom is that the Black Knight will always triumph."
  • One of Jihad Sourcebooks says that there is an in-universe Very Loosely Based on a True Story tv-series about The Bounty Hunter and his team. It is basically The A-Team IN BATTLETECH!
  • In Technical Readout 3055, an upgrade to the Spider Mech is created. Its name? The Venom. Hmm...
  • Also in Technical Redaout 3055 was a new mech named the Grand Titan, which was noted due to the artwork resembling a certain red and and blue robot. When new artwork was created for the revised Technical Readout 3055 Upgrade, the Grand Titan had "Roll Out◊" stenciled on one shoulder.
  • The Explorer Corps cites a fictional book titled I Want to Believe, written by a Piper Anderson.
  • The adventure module Empires Aflame set in an Alternate Universe has a character - Delvin Stone - sport a goatee beard just like a certain Mirror Universe Vulcan on Star Trek: The Original Series.
  • Experimental Technical Readout: Royal Fantasy Tournament is a 'Mech tournament full of custom mechs patterned and named after Disney princesses (also the Beast, Aladdin, and Leia). Their pilots were all named after said characters' voice actresses/actors, and had some suspicious parallels in their backstories.
  • The Expanded Universe novel Betrayal of Ideals chronicles the story of the ill-fated Clan Wolverine. Prominent within the story is their warriors' habit of invoking their Clan's name as a battlecry. Yep, "Wolverines!"
  • The cover for The Periphery Sourcebook looks similar to the scene of Luke camped on the planet Dagobah.
  • Technical Readout: Vehicle Annex features the popular Buster and Powerman industrialmechs. The Buster is the product of the Bluth Corporation, which was eventually decimated when its founder, George Bluth, was indicted on multiple counts of treason, embezzlement, and theft. The Powerman was created by its chief rival, Sitwell Corporation.
  • Anastasias Focht's early crackpot theory about the Clans being aliens who self-evolve by absorbing other organisms' DNA bears an uncanny resemblance to the Invid of Genesis Climber MOSPEADA (which doubles as a Mythology Gag since it was made into the last season of Robo Tech, the first segment of which had provided half the 'Mechs for the first edition).
  • While Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Fang of the Sun Dougram and Crusher Joe were the only anime that had designs officially licensed, a few other 'Mechs take some design cues from various 1980s anime besides. Most notably, the iconic Atlas' classic artwork cribs heavily from Armored Trooper VOTOMS' Scopedog (specifically the Red Shoulder Custom version), with its domed head, rounded shoulder armor, missile pods mounted on the side of its torso and an AC-20 resembling the Scopedog's rifle (although torso-mounted rather than handheld). The original sourcebook drawing is even posed the same way as the Scopedog's main model sheet illustration. The Vindicator also bears a strong resemblance to the Walker Galliar from Xabungle, apart from lacking Galliar's Combining Mecha gimmick, replacing its massive turbofan with a Jet Pack and having a PPC for an arm.
    • The Hatamoto-Chi and Hunchback IIC, meanwhile, bear an uncanny resemblance to the Gundam and Guncannon, respectively.
  • In the intro story of the sourcebook Second Succession War (which deals with the death of ComStar founder Jerome Blake from the POV of his successor Conrad Toyama), part of the narration talks about the last minutes of Blake's life. It says that one of the last things Blake did before going to sleep for the last time was listen to a song by "someone named Eric Clapton," describing the song as "about spurned love, with a long guitar and piano coda." Yep - the last song Blake ever heard was "Layla."
    • And speaking of that intro story, it has two men discussing how to prepare for After the End by setting up a front religion to preserve knowlege after the collapse of an interstellar empire. Rather than Jerome Blake and Conrad Toyama, are we sure this isn't Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick?
  • The "Operation: KLONDIKE" sourcebook features, as one of the writings from the time Nicholas Kerensky was coming up with the foundation of the Clans, the notation that "This may have all happened before, but it doesn't have to happen again."
  • The iconic Urbanmech is made by a company called Orguss Industries.
  • The Battlemech Manual has a few scatterd among the flavor text of various weapon profiles.
    • Under Rotary Autocannons, "It costs 72,000 C-Bills to fire this marvel of Davion engineering for 10 seconds".
    • Gauss Rifles features the tagline, "This Machine Kills Clanners".
    • Lasers have the slightly more obtuse, "Red or blue: it's still half the battle."
  • Handbook: House Marik features a sidebar with an excerpt from a biopic of the last moments of Duke Harlan Allison's life. His final words are "Today is a good day. To die."
  • One of the pilot profile cards for the Goshawk details a prideful and eccentric Jade Falcon mechwarrior assigned to the Dark Wing Cluster named Drake. Despite his overbearing personality and numerous egotistical faults, Drake is a man with an ironclad sense of duty and justice, especially when it comes to his responsiblity to protect civilians. Of note, he has taken a young civilian girl as a bondwoman when his unit failed to prevent the collateral damage which claimed her parents lives. Further sealing the resemblance is his almost supernatural ability to maneuver through dense terrain under Night Fighting conditions, his notable quote of "I am the terror, that jumps in the night!" and his penchant for purple capes.
• Single-Biome Planet:
  • Averted by pretty much every planet with a breathable atmosphere (which is pretty much all the ones people bothered settling). Even Tharkad, which is infamous for its cold due to being in the middle of an ice age,^note Its arctic circle extends down to the 30th parallel north - to put that in perspective, if that were true on Earth, all the United States (except southern Texas, southern Louisiana and most of Florida), all of Europe, and the northern tip of Africa would be Arctic territory is still noted to have an equatorial tropical band.
  • Still somewhat played straight by the presence of Planetville as a trope, though - while the planets have multiple biomes, the actual inhabited areas of a planet tend to define its "biome" in the zeitgeist, even in-universe.
• Sins of Our Fathers: Present in many factions; mostly in reaction to criminal activity or dereliction of duty. Ranges from political and social marginalization (Houses Davion, Steiner and Marik), labor camps, pressure to commit suicide or outright execution (Houses Kurita and Liao) to demotion/exile/execution for warriors and sterilization for civilians (the Clans).
  • Indeed, the Clan Trial of Annihilation takes this up to eleven. Should the guilty party be convicted not only are they executed, but anyone related to them is put to death (if in the warrior caste, and this includes children still in training or even still unborn) or sterilized and sentenced to a life of hard labor (if in the civilian castes). Afterwards, if someone so much as mentions the names of the Annihilated, that alone is grounds for censure. It should be noted that Annihilations are only carried out well after the Clans see the Godzilla Threshold crossed and it requires every bloodnamed warrior in the Clans (thousands of people, apart from those who are targeted) to vote in favor to even commence the Trial.
• Skull for a Head: The Atlas, the archetypal 100 ton mech, was deliberately designed as such.
• Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: Played straight gameplay wise for balance reasons, but in-universe averted to high hell. Using nukes (or just about any weaoons of mass destruction) is the quickest way to get everyone to stop shooting each other and start shooting at you.
  • Reunification War states that only the biggest ones (like city busters) were not stated for balance reasons. Even the smaller tactical nukes, orbital strikes, radiological bombs and nerve gas weapons will destroy anything unfortunate enough to be caught anywhere near ground zero and will severely damage things further outside it. The Wars of Reaving also saw weaponized viruses with a 100% lethality rate against units at the wargame level and player characters at the RPG level.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: The Taurian Concordat's animosity to the Federated Suns, and the Inner Sphere as a whole, began when they stumbled across and liberated a slave labor colony on the Davion-held world of Tentativa in 2360, convincing them of the curelty and barbarism lurking beneath the Great Houses' thin veneer of civlity.
  • While made very wealthy by the practice, the Rim Worlds Republic's tradition of helot-style slavery bit them in the ass when the SLDF came looking for a little vengeance against Stefan Amaris' erstwhile realm. Massive uprisings tore through the Republic as slaves avenged themselves on their former owners, and many signed up to bolster the ranks of their liberators. Many historical accounts vilify the Republic for the despicable practice, and it is often pointed to as a reason why, no matter the crimes of House Cameron or the Hegemony as a whole, Amaris and the Republic would always be the greater evil.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Clan Wolverine more or less exists solely in background material for the setting, but their fleeing survivors suddenly appearing in and blasting their way across the Inner Sphere as the Minnesota Tribe is noted in-universe as directly leading to the Second Succession War, which was when the Sphere began its technological regression in earnest. Their appearance also led to ComStar theorizing they may have been connected to the disappeared SLDF, and organizing the project Outbound Light, whose own unexpected arrival on the planet Huntress spooked the Clans into rallying around Smoke Jaguar's plans to invade the Inner Sphere. And the story of The Not-Named Clan and their Annihilation is a psychological wound on the Clans that never fully heals, a societal bogeyman they fear on a primal level. The whole point of the Inner Sphere's Great Refusal was to Annihilate another Clan (Smoke Jaguar) to basically poke that wound with a big needle and say "You sure you want to keep screwing with us?"
• Smug Super: Trueborn Clanners are not exactly humble about their superior breeding and training; to say nothing of their tendency towards Cultural Posturing. Even the friendlier ones (who respect skilled freeborns and honorable Spheroids) are usually characterized as being confident well past the point of arrogance. To make things worse certain Clans, particularly the Falcons, Jaguars, Vipers, Ravens and Wolves, are considered prideful by Clan standards.
  • The Word of Blake's Manei Domini looked down on ordinary humans as "frails" and saw themselves as enlightened and closer to the Master's vision for humanity. Unlike the Clans, who recognize strength and are willing to swallow their pride if you beat them bad enough, the Domini have a tendency to throw tantrums if they lose; usually with massed WMD deployment.
• Sniping the Cockpit: Largely averted. While head hits will hurt a 'Mech's pilot and may knock him or her out (and the head is usually the weakest spot on the whole giant armored war machine, period), actually aiming for the head is almost impossible unless the pilot is already unconscious or the reactor has shut down. Even then it's hard enough to pull off that it's more often a finishing move executed at point-blank range than anything else.
  • Any hit on a 'Mech still has a one-in-thirty six chance of landing on the head, so this trope is still in play, if unable to be Invoked. The "Punch Location Table" only includes the upper sections: Right, Left, and Center Torso, Right and Left Arms, and Head, so a punch has a one-in-six chance of hitting the head. The Partial Cover rules used to apply a to-hit penalty, but roll on the Punch table if you did hit, making it far easier to headshot enemy 'Mechs standing behind Level 1 hills or buildings. This has been changed to rolling on the regular hit table, and if you hit the leg behind cover, you hit the cover instead (i.e., you miss).
• Social Darwinist: The Clans: see Designer Babies. Ironically, real Darwinism bit them on the ass when they tried to retake the Inner Sphere. While the Clans had spent the last couple centuries honing their skills in ritualized honor-bound combat, the Inner Sphere had been fighting wars practically nonstop.
  • Whilst the Clanners might have the upper hand in an organized fight, the Inner Sphere were more than able and willing to employ tactics that the haughty Clan Warriors would see as cowardly. Or to put it simply, the Inner Sphere warriors and commanders were all versed in the art of Combat Pragmatism, quite happily exploiting the rigid Honor Before Reason of the Clans.
  • The Clans got wise to it eventually, though. Nowadays Clan forces are permitted to flatly refuse any batchalls (challenges) from Inner Sphere forces without any loss of honor, if the Sphere challenge is blatantly intended to use the system to put the Clanners at a disadvantage.
  • The Clans are essentially a case study in why Social Darwinism is something Charles Darwin himself detested: it doesn't work on natural selection, and instead of increasing diversity, it selects for arbitrary traits that may or may not be beneficial and decreases diversity.
• Soldier vs. Warrior:
  • MechWarriors themselves went from one side of the dichotomy to another as the game evolved. The first editions of Battletech (the 3025 start) was essentially set in an After the End Scavenger World where 'mechs were rarer than available pilots and MechWarriors equalled medieval knights; most Great Houses' MechWarriors followed chivalric codes (especially the Draconis Combine), and mercenary orders were more akin to knightly orders or Knights Errant, with 'mech battles taking on a ritualistic, duel-like nature thanks to the Honours of War. As the game evolved more into Military Science Fiction, Inner Sphere MechWarriors became Soldiers; one aspect of a combined arms warfare strategy who took on military ranks and fought with a modern military hierarchy. It was at this point, of course, the Clans came along to take on the Warrior role by having followed the early MechWarrior duel codes to an n-th degree.
  • Post-Invasion, those of the Inner Sphere are usually presented as Soldiers and the Clans usually as Warriors: The Clans are warriors who fight for individual glory, honor, and the right to have their genes added to the next generation, and operate on Asskicking Leads to Leadership. Clanner battles are basically honor duels. But since the failure of Operation REVIVAL, where their own honor was used against them, they slowly started to lean towards the Soldiers, and by the Dark Ages they use zelbringen against the Inner Sphere only when it gives them advantage.
  • Interestingly, the Hell's Horses are the only Clan that leans heavily on the Soldier side (though they still uphold strong Warrior traditions) because of their centuries-old philosophy of combined arms warfare which favors the effective, tried-and-true mixed deployment of infantry and armored vehicles with their BattleMechs operating as support units rather than front-line units. This is considered rather peculiar among the other Warrior-minded Clans because ever since the development of the BattleMech, they thought it would obsolete the old combined arms approach to warfare and derided the Hell's Horses as being doomed to fail with their "obsolescent" philosophy. The aforementioned failure of Operation REVIVAL proved that the Hell's Horses were smart enough to uphold their philosophy, even though the Horses themselves did not participate in that mission. Inner Sphere combined arms forces, particularly the Federated Commonwealth's Regimental Combat Teams (a regiment of BattleMechs, three regiments of combat vehicles, five of infanty, two wings of AeroSpace fighters, and a batallion of artillery, with other assets like engineers and marines assigned as needed, and all trained and drilled to work together with maximum efficiency) proved capable of wrecking the Clans when they deployed 'Mechs, maybe backed up with Elementals and/or fighters. Infantry Swarm attacks, artillery bombardment, and strafing runs from fighters were all great ways to curb the tech advantage the Clans enjoyed.
  • The Inner Sphere factions have been fighting wars for the past four hundred years, giving it all they got and employing ambushes and artillery and other "dishonorable" tactics, as well as promoting their officers for tactical, strategic, logistical, and administrative ability rather than beating the others into submission. On the other hand, the sizable portion of military elite of the two most militarized Inner Sphere factions, Federated Suns and Draconis Combine, have a rather old-fashioned ideas on how the military should fight that lean on the Warrior side, such as only allowing the noble families to own mechs in the former and the preference for melee where long range should have been preferable for the latter.
  • Certain Home Clans wanting to remain Warriors as certain Invader Clans learned (through harsh experience in the Inner Sphere) to be Soldiers pretty much set the stage for the Wars of Reaving, in which Clans "tainted" by the Inner Sphere were violently removed from Clan space.
• Space Age Stasis: Over two hundred years went by during the Succession Wars, during which almost no new technology was created, and huge amounts of existing technology was destroyed, or hidden.
  • Though the Clans did not experience this stasis, and thanks to the Grey Death data core and salvaged Clan tech the Inner Sphere has been moving out of it in fits and stops - though the Word of Blake sure isn't helping.
• Space Cossacks: There are descendant Clans of the old Star League's military who went into exile following the League's collapse. They are an interesting example as by the beginning of the main storyline they have become the dominant power in their own space and hold many systems of their own. Their warrior culture is enforced rather than necessary.
• Space Fighter: Aerospace Fighters.
  • Space Plane: They are also capable of operating in atmosphere. Hence the name "Aerospace".
• Space-Filling Empire: There are a number of smaller states around the Inner Sphere, but most of it is controlled by the five Successor States.
• Space Nomads: The 32nd century version of Clan Sea Fox becomes this, acting in trading fleets known as Khanates (based around an ArcShip), with smaller accompanying Aimags; though they do have some planetary holdings (primarily enclaves on planets controlled by other factions).
• Space Pirates: Firmly Type 1. A serious problem in the Periphery, where they raid isolated worlds and recharging Jumpships for technology, trade goods and slaves.
• The Spartan Way: The Clans. The first book of the Legend of the Jade Phoenix trilogy goes into much detail about Clan warrior training, and while Clan Jade Falcon is certainly one of the stricter Clans, it's the best look at how it works. A Trueborn sibko starts with 100 infants, who are trained towards being warriors from the moment it's possible to start doing so. By the time their in their early teens and starting what most militaries would consider boot camp, about a dozen of them remain, the others having washed out or died prior. By the time it comes to the Trial of Position, their final test to attain warrior rank, only two are left, and only one of those succeeds in the Trial. The Clans' approach to training can best be summed up as "Sink or Swim — now let me fill your pockets with rocks."
• Spheroid Dropship: The Trope Namer. See here◊ for an example.
• Spider Tank: Quadrupedal mechs do exist, though they're uncommon and generally less effective than the bipedal kind. In gameplay terms, as long as they manage to actually keep all four legs (which isn't as easy as it sounds), they're both more stable and can execute a special 'sidestep' maneuver...but lacking arms and the ability to torso twist, they have less room to spare for weapons than their bipedal cousins even when they can load the exact same tonnage as well as fairly large blind spots from which they can be attacked while being unable to return fire at all.
• Spoiler Title: Much of the suspense of the final battle of the Dark Age era, to determine which Clan would finally claim the title of ilClan, was more or less instantly spoiled by the title of Hour of the Wolf.
• Standard Sci-Fi Army: Mecha may dominate the battlefield, but there still plenty of room for tanks, infantry, and power armor.
• Standard Sci-Fi History: Set during the Interregnum following the collapse of the Star League.
• State Sec: The most (in)famous examples are probably the Draconis Combine's Internal Security Force and the Capellan Maskirovka. (The CapCon also notably adds the Death Commandos, a comparatively small but fanatical and elite soldier/intelligence/bodyguard force that explicitly answers to the Chancellor alone.) There's also the Lyran Commonwealth's Loki, whose raison d'etre includes "state terrorism" among other things; however, with the Lyrans generally portrayed as a bit more mindful of such things as human rights, less tends to be made of that unless it's to emphasize how much of a villain the current Archon happens to be.
• Stone Wall: While many mechs are heavily armoured, the most triumphant example is undoubtedly the aptly-named Great Turtle. It's a quadrupedal mech, which means it can mount more armour than a biped, and weighs 100 tons, giving it the maximum armour potential of any mech outside Superheavy designs. It mounts the maximum possible amount of armour, but what really makes the Great Turtle this trope is the type of armour it mounts; Hardened Armour, which reduces all damage taken by half. On top of that is the fact that its cockpit is torso-mounted, meaning it can keep fighting even if its head gets blown off. The downside is its low mobility and relative lack of weapons, although the former is mostly offset by its Jump Jets.
• Stop Worshipping Me: If Jerome Blake could see what ComStar became after his death, his reaction would be this. He was a secular man, and ComStar took on its quasi-religious trappings under the guidance of Blake's successor, Conrad Toyama.^note However, according to the "true" story presented in Second Succession War, his actual reaction would have been All According to Plan. He would have been utterly horrified, however, by the Word of Blake and the atrocities they committed in his name.
• Strategic Asset Capture Mechanic: The game has many rules for creating scenarios where one or both sides are trying to capture an objective. Often this will involve using infantry or battle armor to infiltrate a building while the rest of your units protect it.
• Subspace Ansible: The Hyperpulse Generator (HPG) is the standard means of interstellar communication. It basically hyperspace-jumps a radio wave to its destination up to 50 light-years away, bypassing the need for null-gravity jump points that jump ships need since radio waves have no mass. During the Succession Wars, they were deemed so crucial that they became the purview of an (ostensiblly) neutral faction called ComStar, who established a universal currency using HPG transmission time as the backing commodity (The C-Bill). A second, less-known form is the "Black Box" radios, which were backburner experiments during the Star League's time (and predate the HPG, but the latter proved more practical), but made practical by secret scientific endeavors by the Federated Suns and used to subvert an interdiction against them by ComStar during the Fourth Succession War. They work more like conventional radios, broadcasting their signal outwardly in all directions in hyperspace, where anyone with another black box can pick up the signal.
• Sub System Damage: Each section of BattleMechs and other vehicles have their own Hit Points. Once armor is stripped away, there is the distinct possibility of inflicting a Critical Hit that destroys a specific internal component in the 'Mech, with various effects. On top of that, losing a limb means losing every weapon, ammo bin, heatsink, and subsystem inside it. More strict simulation-like rules allow for critical hits to be scored at other major body parts of a 'mech, like the actuators that govern mobility (crippling the motion of the affected limb, and crippled hand actuators can cause a 'mech to drop whatever it is holding), the gyro (which controls the 'mech's ability to balance and thus toppling the mech due to loss of stability), and the the engine (Engines take up critical hit slots, and landing crits on the first 2 slots induces a heat regulation penalty, while the third forces a safety shutdown; some engine crits can result in the safety failing and the engine exploding as a result).
• Succession Crisis: The Succession Wars, with five Successor States with claims on the title of the First Lord of Star League, lasting 400 years through four separate wars. The Successor States themselves occasionally have successions crises of their own, most notably the FedCom Civil War.
• Super-Soldier: Clan Mecha/Fighter Pilots and Battle Armor Troopers.
  • Clan fighter pilots subvert the Super-Soldier trope. Despite being genetically engineered to be better pilots, and having better equipment, they consistently lose to Inner Sphere pilots^note at the speeds AeroSpace engagements take place, Clan range superiority counts for a lot less. Clan aerospace inferiority arguably cost them the Invasion at the Battle of Radstat. Bjorn Jorgensson, the Ghost Bear khan for much of the 3050s and 3060s was of the MechWarrior phenotype who got a "second chance" trial of position after he flunked out of being a MechWarrior (which he was bred for). That he is Khan shows he is just as capable a fighter pilot warrior than those specifically bred for it (though getting assigned a monstrous Khirgiz fighter because his body size borders on "small Elemental" and it was the only cockpit he could fit in also helped).
  • Elementals, meanwhile, take the trope and run with it. They're pretty much Space Marines minus the extra organs and plus the possibility to be female (with an even chance of being a Brawn Hilda or an Amazonian Beauty).
  • The Manei Domini are cyborgs originally designed to (hopefully) defeat the Clans, this would also make them Super Soldiers.

T

• Take That!: Ladies and Gentlemen, we present to you, the Super Carrier Enterprise.^note It's not necessarily a Take That! to Star Trek as the wiki page notes that it was named after the long line of Real Life Terran aircraft carriers called Enterprise, but it still could be. Which also doubles as a "Take that" against projects in real life also becoming ruined by people tacking on more and more requirements to get what they want as well out of a new vehicle design. When the ship had her first sail after almost five years of development the engineers wondered why the massive abomination couldn't haul herself out of the dock and why her thrusters failed to work in conjunction together. The Enterprise had to be tugged out of the dock in front of the entire Navy and was quickly abandoned soon after.
• Tangled Family Tree: The Great Houses have quite a set of lineages. A particularly conspicuous knot for four of the five Great Houses focuses around Victor Davion. His parentage includes his father, First Prince Hanse "The Fox" Davion, and his mother, Melissa Steiner, daughter of the illustrious Archon Katrina Steiner. His immediate progeny includes a son, Kitsune Kurita, with Omiko Kurita, and three children with his eventual wife, Isis Marik, daughter of the "Real" Thomas Marik. Victor has sired children with both a daughter of the family that is his maternal ancestral enemy (Steiner vs Marik), and with a daughter of the family that is his paternal ancestral enemy (Davion vs Kurita).
• Tanks for Nothing: Averted. Ton for ton, tanks are generally inferior to comparable BattleMechs, but they are still far from help- or useless. See also Tank Goodness below.
• Tank Goodness: 'Mechs may be the 'kings of the battlefield'... but you would be well-advised not to tell a Demolisher, Alacorn Mark VII or Shrek PPC Carrier that to its face. Tanks are typically cheaper and far more numerous than 'Mechs, and quantity has a quality all its own. And those that do equal a 'Mech's pricetag are dangerous in themselves.
  • There's even an in-universe training scenario that highlights Tank Goodness. Called the Scorpion's nest, it involves an absurdly high number of Scorpion tanks continuously ambushing the testee until the testee loses. In-game, one is far more likely to see the Savannah Master swarm, with equally absurdly high numbers of an even worse unit. Played properly, either of those "crap" unit swarms can topple Dropships. Even Assault 'mech groups don't want to face an opposing Dropship.
  • Players who underestimate ground vehicles are quickly relieved of the notion after their first Demolisher encounter. An 80 ton tank with a heavy armor shell and dual Autocannon-20s that cost less than a 35-ton 'Mech, the Demolisher can easily be hidden in a hull-down ambush and roll up alongside a 'Mech to deliver a crippling one-two punch.
  • Clan Hell's Horse and their unwilling splinter cousins of Stone Lion are the only Clans that believe in this.
• Tank-Tread Mecha: 'Mechs can equip treads on their lower legs. This allows them to use walking/running or tracked movement, the chief advantage of this is that while using the treads they're much more stable over rubble and broken up terrain, though they're not as fast. It also allowed the mech to negate most of the penalties of leg damage as long as both tracks were still intact. The game also features Quadvees, which are quadruped mechs that have tank treads (or in one case wheels) mounted on their legs that they can swap between walking/running mode and driving mode, without the speed penalties that standard tread-mounting mechs have and with a few other bonuses as a tradeoff for a few more limitations.
• Technology Marches On: In-Universe. The official line is that humanity either ran out of most of its good ideas, or started hitting some of the serious limitations of physics and practicality, before the 22nd century, and spent most of the next several centuries refining existing technologies; the Star League era saw some rather spectacular technology begin to take shape, but then it all fell apart. Thanks to scarce resources on some worlds though, 20th-century tech is the usual standard, with internal combustion engines, radio, and CD-ROMs.
• Telephone Polearm: If your 'Mech has hands, you can pick up and use almost anything as a improvised club-this can include pieces of other 'mechs, whole trees, or whatever else you can get your giant metal mits on.
• Terraform: The technology exists, but only Mars and Venus have undergone the standard sci-fi total transformation, and since habitable, if not comfortable, worlds are common in Inner Sphere, the Mars/Venus treatment is considered to be cost ineffective. Most other examples are minor touch ups to the already habitable worlds.
• That Was the Last Entry: Magazine BattleTechnology #21 article "What Now, Mechwarrior?", scenario "King of the Hill". The diary of a Pathfinder (scout for mecha forces) ends with "I sure will be glad when this mission is over and I can get off this dustball. At least the Sarge says he doesn't expect the enemy to..." It was found after a hard-fought battle.
• The Thunderdome: Solaris VII's many combat arenas - originally battlemech testing grounds, they soon evolved into venues to showcase 'mech designs to potential buyers, and from there into the sites of publicly broadcast gladiator-style contests, complete with betting, prize money, and a championship system.
• Tiered by Size: Mechs are classed as either Ultralight (10-15 tons), Light (20-35 tons), Medium (40-55 tons), Heavy (60-75 tons), Assault (80-100 tons), and Superheavy (or sometimes 'Colossal') (105+ tons) based on their maximum tonnage. These designations are only descriptive, as the rules for 'Mech construction are based on tonnage rather than category. In general, heavier 'Mechs may carry more weapons and armor but are generally slower due to engine efficiencies favoring lighter designs.
• Time Skip: When MechWarrior: Dark Age was introduced in 2002, the main storyline (retitled Classic BattleTech was wrapping up the FedCom Civil War. The Dark Age timeframe, however, was set in the 3130's, completely skipping almost 70 years of history, including the Word of Blake Jihad. The Dark Age line has since been discontinued and the main line has caught up with it. Also thematically the events between 3085 (first years of the Republic of the Sphere) and 3132 (Blackout) serve only as an interlude between the aftermath of Jihad and the proper start of the Dark Age.
• Transforming Mecha: Early versions of the game featured Land-Air 'Mechs, which could transform Macross-style into aircraft. (The results were predictably Awesome, but Impractical.) This was one of the places where the real trouble lay with the Macross 'Mechs, so they began to be phased out in the early '90s. Nevertheless, optional rules still exist for them.
  • Hilariously, some of the associated novels mention these very aircraft - and then ridicule them for failing miserably every time someone tried to design one.
    • It got so bad that FASA finally put in the fluff that there was one, and only one, factory by 3050 capable of producing LAMs. Clan Nova Cat, who had captured the world, had a typically Clanner loathing of LAMs (and the fact that they had very different phenotypes for aerospace pilots and Mechwarriors didn't help) and razed the factory to the ground.
  • The 3085 Technical Readout has updated LAM designs; they look much less ridiculous than the original ones, but still look like they'd topple over in a light breeze.
  • In the Dark Age there are QuadVee prototypes, the four-legged battlemechs that can change between all-terrain leg-mode or road-friendly tread mode.
• Transformation Is a Free Action: Averted for Land-Air Mechs - they are most vulnerable when transforming, as getting hit when doing so could jam the transformation or cause the machine to crash if converting from fighter mode.
• Transhuman Treachery:
  • The Word of Blake's Manei Domini are an embodiment this. Clan warriors don't quite fit, as they are more "peak human" for the most part (aside from the occasional hardcore extremist who takes Enhanced Imaging implants). For the most part, cybernetics in Clan society are for compensation from injury or organ failure, and their notions of superiority because of the manner of their birth is all too human.
  • The Free Worlds League has an unpleasant history with this; it's why any kind of cybernetic implant, even lost limb replacement, is looked down upon. It's also why the Word of Blake lost their only real ally state in the Inner Sphere.
• Trial by Combat: Present in the Combine and one of the key pillars of Clan society, who have seven official ones all referred to as 'Trials'. These are the Trials of Position, Bloodright, Grievance, Refusal, Possession, Absorption, and Annihilation. There are unofficial ones as well (such as the Trial of Reaving), but they are mostly variants on the seven sanctioned by Kerensky.
• Tripod Terror: The Super-Heavy Three-Legged Mechs. Unable to replicate the Blakist bipedal 150-ton Omega, The Republican R&D decided to use the Blakist research material to circumvent the "Useless-beyond-100-ton" problem by adding the third leg, and managed to create the 125-ton Poseidon class and the 135-ton Ares class. While slow as hell, the third leg also allows them to change direction much quicker without losing much speed.

U

• Ungrateful Bastard: It burns Vlad Ward up that the man responsible for rescuing him after the clan flagship took a kamikaze attack to the bridge was the freeborn bondsman he disdainfully sneered at so often: Phelan Kell. When Vlad flaunted the fact that he claimed Phelan's fancy belt buckle as isorla, Phelan just countered by reminding him of the scar across Vlad's face from the incident with a slow face slash gesture.
  • One of the first acts of the Star League Council after the liberation of Terra was to strip General Kerensky (the man who led the Star League Defense Forces against Stefan Amaris's coup while the Council Lords sat out the war in their home realms) of his title of Protector of the Star League. They would have gladly removed him as Commanding General of the SLDF, but they knew the troops would have openly rebelled against such an order.
• United Space of America: Soundly averted. Because the American planetary colonies were the first ones settled, they were also closest to Earth and thus subjected to the most horrific bombardments in the 400-year long interstellar civil war. Little American culture survives in the 31st century save for the tequila-drinking Texans of the Capellan March, the Americans and Israelis on the Southwest Worlds of the Free Worlds League, and the far-flung Amish planet of Home.
  • That said, the League is often compared to the USA when it's not described as Space Yugoslavia (a distinction which becomes less significant with each passing year).
• Un-person: Many of the harshest punishments in Clan society involve some form of this, from deletion of a Bloodnamed warrior's genes from their Clan's pool, to their erasure from Clan lore, all the way to the elimination of entire Bloodlines, Bloodnames, or (in the case of the the Not-Named Clan) entire Clans.
• Unreliable Canon: Not as a whole, but some information is explicitly presented as "Canon Rumor" — the in-universe equivalent of conspiracy theories and alternate interpretations of widely-known canon events. The Interstellar Players sourcebooks frequently reference them, and just about anything related to the Word of Blake Jihad tends to have rumors and half-truths thrown into the mix as well.
• Unreliable Narrator: Every book, from the TROs to the Sourcebooks, (except for the novels) is explicitly written as an in-universe book. Originally, this was done just for flavor, as a way to create immersion. It has practical considerations as well. The way canon works in BT is that the most recent books trump any previous material. This makes doing a Retcon or even a subtle Rewrite much easier; the older material is simply considered to be in error. It also allowed the BT writers to correct a lot of incorrect and inaccurate information in the earliest books, simply by calling the ComStar-induced errors or possibly even misinformation.
  • At first, now the sourcebook writer seem to have developed a fetish for purposely giving out misinformation in the new releases. That's right, there's every possibility in the world that that brand new sourcebook in your hands is lying to you.
  • The misinformation took on a weird new meta-level when the developers revealed a new 200-ton Omega "superheavy" 'Mech as an April Fool's joke to the players. Then at the end of the Jihad storyline, guess what one of the Word of Blake's new experimental weapons turned out to be? The joke's on you, heretics.
• Unusual Hiring Practices: An infantry soldier or vehicle crewmember who managed to capture an enemy Battlemech intact (or at least in a fixable position) will often be offered the option to becoming the mech's next pilot.
• Unusual Weapon Mounting: Players are encouraged to throw weapons anywhere they want to.
  • Leg mounted weapons
  • Cockpit mounted weapons - or in the case of the Atlas, Eye Beams.
  • The Orion◊ and Perseus◊ have a rocket launcher for a shoulder.
  • The original Battlemech, the Mackie, has a cannon mounted on the crotch◊, which shoots lasers.
  • Rear-mounted weapons. Not a favorite of most players (many of whom will, if given a "canon" design that sports these, happily flip them around into the forward arc first chance they get), but at least in principle any weapon that can be mounted in a torso or leg can be installed in the same location to fire at targets behind the 'Mech instead.
  • Some 'Mechs move the cockpit from the head into the (comparably) better-protected torso, and then stuff the head with weaponry. One experimental Quickdraw turns this head-gun into a PPC turret.
  • Speaking of which: yes, 'Mechs can carry turrets, although not every design whose artwork suggests it should actually does so by the rules. In addition to turning a 'Mech's head into a full turret as described above, shoulder-mounted turrets and special tank-style "quad" turrets for four-legged 'Mechs also exist.
• Unwanted False Faith: Jerome Blake was just a bureaucrat who wanted to keep humanity's technology from being destroyed or misused; he most certainly did not want his subordinates to attempt to drive humanity into a Dark Age so they could remake the Inner Sphere in his "vision". Aleksandr Kerensky, while a career soldier, sought to lead his followers away from the eternal conflicts of the Inner Sphere and would most likely have disapproved of the warrior based Clans that came to see him as a Moses like figure. However both men were dead before their words were twisted, by Blake's successor Conrad Toyama and Kerensky's son Nicolas no less, so they couldn't exactly do much to prevent it.
• Urban Warfare: Still a nightmare in 31st century. The Urbanmech, as the name suggests, is a light mech designed to fight in the cities.
• Used Future: Some mechs and dropships have probably never been properly repainted and replated in centuries.
• The Usurper: Amaris is the most infamous example but there are plenty of others; such as Katherine Steiner-Davion and the Von Rohrs dynasty in the Draconis Combine.
• Uterine Replicator: The preferred way of creating new Clan warriors. See Designer Babies above.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Nicholas Kerensky seems to have been doing this when he created the Clans.
  • This also seems to have been Devlin Stone's approach in building The Republic of the Sphere, especially with the revelation that he was responsible for the HPG network crash
  • Ian Cameron had this mindset as he was building the Star League; he wanted humanity united at any cost. While the League did herald 250 years of relative peace, technological advancement and economic propensity the Reunification War against the Periphery was the deadliest and most brutal conflict in history until the First Succession War broke out.

V

• Verbal Tic: Clanners, much like a certain Star Trek android, don't use contractions in their regular speech. Specific cultural terminology aside, the Clans revere the form of English that was the official state language of the Star League and consider contractions to be disrespectful to it and the Star League by proxy.
• Vertical Mecha Fins: Crops up occasionally. One of the main highlights of the Awesome◊'s design.
  • The Awesome had Vertical Mecha Fins roughly a decade before Evangelion was released.
• Vestigial Empire: After the Blackout, many factions started rushing towards the Republic of the Sphere in the ensuing chaos. Consequently, the Fortress Republic protocol was enacted, leaving the main Republic as only Prefecture X (the systems surrounding Earth), while anything outside The Wall was abandoned, becoming the Republic Remnant.
• Vibro Weapon: Exist at the mech level and, more commonly, as personal melee weapons. While a vibro weapon is capable of penetrating most personal armor the advantage is somewhat offset by the fact that the weapons run out of power quickly and make a very unstealthly humming noise.
• Victor Steals Insignia: It's sometimes noted in fiction that capturing the battle standard of a particularly prestigious unit is often a mark of pride for the forces that do so. Having proof that you faced a force like Wolf's Dragoons, one of the Sword of Light regiments, or a khan's Keshik (Honor Guard) in battle and emerged victorious gives one quite the rep.
• A Villain Named Khan: The leaders of the Clans are known as Khans, the second -in-command of a Clan is known as saKhan and the leader of all the Clans (when such a thing is necessary) is the ilKhan or "Khan of Khans".
• Vindicated by History: In-Universe, Doctors Kearny and Fuchida developed the theory that would lead to the invention of faster than light travel. They were ridiculed by their peers and their careers were effectively destroyed; the fruits of their work were only produced long after both men were dead.

W

• Walking Tank: The majority of Clan 'Mechs and post-Clan Invasion Inner Sphere mechs are Walking Tanks, but most Succession Wars era 'Mechs are more humanoid.
  • The Goliath deserves a special mention, as it manages to take this trope to its literal extreme.
• War Is Glorious: If you ask the Federated Suns, the Clans, or the Draconis Combine anyway. The Suns' belief in this trope was a major sticking point during their union with the Commonwealth; whose position was that war should serve economic and political goals, no more no less.
• The Warlord
  • Out in the Periphery, there are numerous "pirate kingdoms" and bands composed of deserters, former mercenaries, and mechwarriors who have set themselves up as the warlord of their little corner of space. The Clans have problems from the bandit "Dark Caste", Clanners who were cast out of Clan society and who raid Clan worlds. Many are run by warlords who were former Clan warriors themselves.
  • Played with by the Draconis Combine. Their military has the rank of Warlord. A Warlord (or Tai-shu) has absolute say over what happens in their district of the Combine, only the Coordinator has more power. But in times of peace they let the district governors or Shogun make most of the decisions. However, one Warlord Greig Samsonov ticked off almost every part of this trope. His vendetta against Wolf's Dragoons caused him to abuse his position and cost him his life.
• The War of Earthly Aggression: Several throughout Inner Sphere history. The Outer Reaches Rebellion in the Terran Alliance era. The Campaigns of Persuasion in the Terran Hegemony era, and the Reunification Wars of the Star League.
• We Will All Be History Buffs in the Future: Lampshaded in a publication of in-universe conspiracies; one tract is about how crazy it is that so many things reference the 20th Century, which was over 1000 years ago…and there are only a few references to say, the 29th Century, only 200 years before.
• Weapon for Intimidation: 'Mechs as a whole lend themselves to this trope, but some are more notable than others.
  • On one end of the scale is the Arbiter, a light 'Mech with a number of cosmetic enhancements that make it look much heavier and more dangerous than it actually is, primarily used as a deterrent against pirates.
  • On the other end is the Atlas, a hundred-ton walking harbinger of death and destruction designed to evoke terror as a means of psychological warfare to complement its already impressive raw firepower.
  General Aleksandr Kerensky, Defining what the Atlas will be: A 'Mech as powerful as possible, as impenetrable as possible, and as ugly and foreboding as conceivable, so that fear itself will be our ally.
• Weaponized Car: The Star League-era Rotunda scout car, which is a combat vehicle disguised as a luxury sports car or other civilian vehicles, and is armed with a large laser... and an SRM-2 missile rack. Amusingly, its official gameplay stats give it a canonical weight of twenty tons... fairly light as BT combat vehicles go, to be sure, but by civilian road and traffic standards?
• Weaponized Exhaust: Dropship liftoffs are capable of destroying anything near them.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Each Successor State has no shortage of competing noble families and sub-factions vying for position. The Free Worlds League has this more so than most, with numerous free planets and alliances fighting each other for most of its' history.
  • The tripartite Concord of Kapteyn during the Fourth Succession War. Given how the Capellan Confederation had crippled the Free Worlds League by instigating a civil war just over a decade earlier, the League's ruler Janos Marik was understandably willing to abandon his enemy-turned-'ally' to the Federated Suns' overwhelming offensive. Only when the League's other partner (the Draconis Combine) pushed for it did they mount a half-assed and ineffective attack on the Lyrans.
    • Just to emphasize his displeasure at having to aid the Capellans, Marik's aid to them included one ship's worth of military supplies recovered from his treasonous brother's stronghold after the civil war. The supplies had Capellan ID codes so Marik thoughtfully returned them in their hour of need.
  • The Clans are this by design, each Clan is its own faction in a loose alliance with the other Clans, frequently fighting over planets and resources and making and breaking alliances between themselves. This was one of the reasons the Inner Sphere invasion failed.
  • Clan Fire Mandrill is even more factionalized their rivals, being divided into many smaller sub-Clans called kindraa based on inter-Bloodname alliances who fight each other more than they do the other Clans.
• We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: All over the place, as you can see from the title itself, and even sometimes in contexts where there's an existing non-CamelCase word. For some of the many examples, the series is called BattleTech, the signature Humongous Mecha are called BattleMechs, similar machines designed for peaceful, non-military use are called IndustrialMechs, the pilots of BattleMechs are called MechWarriors, ships capable of Faster-Than-Light Travel are called JumpShips, ships that aren't are called DropShips, ships designed to fight each other are called WarShips.
• We Have Reserves: The main danger to the Clans from Inner Sphere units. A Clan cluster is 35 to 45 'Mechs, about the size of an Inner Sphere battalion. The Inner Sphere typically throws multiple regiments of 3+ battalions each at a Cluster.
  • Early in the invasion, the tech gap meant that most Inner Sphere forces considered that they'd require a 2-to-1 advantage over Clan forces to simply reach parity, and both sides would end up mauled into worthlessness during the actual battle. For any chance of a decisive victory, Inner Sphere forces needed to vastly outnumber the Clanners.
    • This was a deliberate choice, a company of 12 3025-tech Inner Sphere mechs was supposed to be a match for a star of 5 Clan Mechs,
• Wham Sourcebook: The Wars of Reaving, full stop. By the end of the book, seven of the Clans have been Abjured (stricken from the Clan records as though they never existed) by the remaining Clans in the Clan homeworlds, though they still exist in exile; four other Clans have been Annihilated or Absorbed; one new Clan has been created from the half of one of the Abjured Clans that wasn't Abjured; as far as the four remaining Homeworld Clans know, the Kerensky bloodline - the bloodline of their society's founder - has been utterly destroyed (they're wrong, thanks to Khan Vlad Ward's foresight); the Homeworld Clans are set to resume an invasion of the Inner Sphere once they've spent several decades recovering from all this chaos; and most if not all of the main Clan characters that Battletech readers have followed for over 20 years (among them Vlad Ward and Marthe Pryde) are dead.
• Wild Mass Guessing: Three recent sourcebooks full of what amounts to canon WMG. Its up to the individual GM to decide what's actually true.
• Wretched Hive: Many independent planets in the Periphery are ruled by pirate bands and are havens for violence and other illegal activities. One example is Port Krin, where it is described as unhealthy to walk around without body armor.

X-Z

• Yellow Peril: Most of the Capellan Confederation's Chancellors, and the Draconis Combine at times. All depictions of Stefan Amaris show him as a bald asian with a fu manchu as well.
• Your Size May Vary: Official artwork tends to be a bit inconsistent about how big various 'Mechs are, both in relation to each other and to real-world things like tanks, buildings and people. It seems Catalyst (or whoever happens to be holding the license) like to be cagey about this, as while various pieces of spinoff media will occasionally give figures for a 'Mech's size (the most accepted one for the Atlas being 18 meters, similar to other iconic giant robots such as Mazinger Z or the Mobile Suit Gundam) they are conspicuously absent from any official stats in the tabletop game.
• Zee Rust: Mostly averted, but comes into play just occasionally, normally in the earlier novels that were released in the late 80's. One mention is when a character in the Warrior Trilogy is amazed that the Lostech data core they discovered might contain literally hundreds of KILOBYTES of information on lost drive technology. That's got to be at least 3 word documents!

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