YMMV / BattleTech

• YMMV.Battle Tech 2018

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Aleksandr Kerensky: Definitive (and only) Big Good of the BattleTech universe, whose every decision came out of superlative wisdom? Flawed man who made a few mistakes, some of them glaring? Or ultimately a coward who fled the problems of the Inner Sphere he himself was partly responsible for, only to bring those problems with him, resulting in the near-destruction of everyone who followed him and the formation of the Clans? While almost every single person in the BT universe regards Aleksandr Kerensky as a near saint who could do no wrong, there's a segment of the fanbase who considers the Exodus, and to a lesser extent his refusal to seize the throne of the Star League when it was apparent no one else would be able to without massive bloody warfare, extremely stupid decisions that only created more death and destruction in the long run. Even in-universe, the Clan Invasion would cause many Spheroids to reevaluate Kerensky's legacy as the truth behind the Clans' origins became more widely known.
    • Even before that. It is mentioned that Kerensky hunted down and executed various people in the Rim Worlds Republic and later Hegemony for merely having the name Amaris, having various people killed for an at best distant blood relation to the Usuper. He also put Amaris entire personal family against the wall after the war, including very likely several children for the crimes of their (grand)father. This massive Purge, in addition to his fanatical loyality to the Star League, a State build on 100 Million deaths in the reunification war, makes one wonder if Kerensky was actually the hero he is revered as, or just another Amos Forlough who just happened to have the Moral Luck of being pitted against Stefan Amaris.
  • Nicholas Kerensky was either a driven visionary or a figure of evil, and there's plenty of evidence for both. Did he genuinely have a vison of a better society in which civilians and infrastructure were spared the horror and suffering of endless warfare, and the sacrifices which brought it about were a fair price (or, at worst, absolutely necessary)? Or was he a megalomanical sociopath who wanted to reshape humanity in his own image so he would be revered like unto a god by all who lived in his utopia, then killed everyone who improved on his vision in his own lifetime rather than admit it might be flawed? Again, there's plenty of evidence to support both interpretations.
    • For that matter, the people who followed Nicholas and became the Clans. Were they really buying his grand vision because they felt it was a better way, were they won over by his charisma and impassioned words? Or were they just so sick and tired of fighting and conflict and total war that any option at all to end it seemed like pure genius?
  • The same can also be said for Sara McEvedy and Clan Wolverine. Innocent victims of Nicholas' manipulations, a powder-keg waiting to go off or power-hungry monsters who merely were caught out before they could act? Betrayal of Ideals puts them somewhere in between powder-keg and innocent victim.
  • The Clans themselves, for that matter, particularly their warrior caste. A society that seeks to avoid the endless, horrifically destructive Forever War that consumed entire planetary populations in the Inner Sphere by confining warfare to rule-bound Trials to keep civilians safe, or a nonsensical group of Blood Knight fools who think War Is Glorious, rewrote their own history, and have anyone not a warrior^note And even then, often only if they're in a particular genetic makeup firmly under their boot-heel? It's hard to classify them one way or the other as different Clans take different approaches to their non-warrior castes, even before the invasion, and the other castes got virtually no screen-time to show whether civilian life in Clan space is particularly different from the Inner Sphere. Complicating matters is the casual disregard Clanner warriors have for human life and the recorded incidents of them executing or spacing bondsmen who weren't seen as "useful."
  • In-universe, this applies to Hanse Davion and Katrina Steiner: they're awesome leaders if you lived in the states that became the Federated Commonwealth. Not so much if you were in one of the three neighboring states that got curbstomped in the process of them carving out a territorial bridge between their realms. (And then later generations of the FedCom/FedSuns and Lyran Alliance can have an argument: were they well-meaning, competent rulers whose children/grandchildren then tore apart the realm they worked so hard to build with their own petty failings, or did Hanse & Katrina unintentionally set Victor & Katherine up to fail from the start due to decisions made before Kath, in particular, was ever even born? And does this, in a way, make them ultimately responsible for the Jihad?)
  • Sun Tzu Liao: Scheming, opportunistic weasel of a ruler, or brilliant political tactician? He took advantage of every possible opening and opportunity to advance his goals and the standing of his nation and reversed centuries of decline for the Capellan Confederation. This came at the cost of countless political and strategic manipulations that cost millions if not billions of lives.
  • In the Inner Sphere, House Cameron and the Star League are held up as the pinnacle of human achievement, having presided over an unprecedented era of unity, peace, prosperity, and technological advancement that has never been matched since; they are the shining beacon that every Successor State aspires to reach. The Periphery states, which were at best considered second-class members and at worst suffered from outright genocide at the hands of the SLDF, have a rather less rosy opinion.
• Arc Fatigue: When the BattleTech license transferred to FanPro a significant number of new material focused on the year 3067, during the end of FedCom Civil War and the start of Jihad. Another arc that has run too long is the Dark Age era, not helped when its development outside of the novels was put on hold until the Jihad arc was finished.
  • Handbook House Kurita, the last sourcebook set in 3067, was finally released in April 2015 meaning that single game year has lasted over 15 years of real time.
• Awesome Music: From the Animated Adaptation. While there is indeed much about the show worthy of critique, the intro song is epic. Youtuber SidAlpha even used a metal remix of it as his own outro song.
• Broken Base: The Double Heat Sinks. Either you think that they unbalanced the game in favor of energy weapons or you think that they made the energy weapons viable. And whatever group you belong to, it is almost universally agreed that trying to fix Double Heat Sinks would cause more problems than it solves.
  • The Jihad and Dark Age both tend to cause this as well. Not to mention the way the Dark Age ended and the ilClan Era (the 'present day') began.
    • The ilClan Era sourcebook Dominions Divided caused some stir and accusations of real life intruding into the setting, due to the Rasalhague Dominion plotline centering on a very contentious referendum between two bitterly opposed factions.
  • The Clans and their techbase, either they are the symbol of everything that is wrong with BattleTech outside of the 3025/Succession Wars era (with at most a dash of Technical Readout 2750 thrown in for "the crazy Lostech"), or their arrival was the point when BattleTech grew the beard.
  • As mentioned, the Unseen. Should they stay that way, keeping the iconic look the fans love even if it can't be shown anymore? Should they be redesigned to match the series' overall Art Evolution? Are the Phoenix Redesigns a good start, good enough to be the new designs of all Unseen, or just plain bad?
  • Relatedly, the Project Phoenix redesigns. Were they excellent new takes on old favorites, or did they fail to retain enough recognizable design elements to be clearly new versions of the old chassis? Before the new retconned redesigns, some wanted the Project Phoenix art to replace the Unseen art across the board, others felt the Phoenix designs weren't good enough (or outright bad) to do so.
  • Land-Air 'Mechs. Either they are horribly broken and a vestige of the franchise's anime origins that needs to be left in the '80s, or they are the ultimate pinnacle of the game, hobbled by designers who just want to get rid of them. It says a lot that discussion of Land-Air 'Mechs were officially banned on the official forums for a period, because they attracted nothing but flame wars.
• Complete Monster: In a franchise that runs on Grey-and-Gray Morality, a few characters are pure evil:
  • Star League Defense Force Major General Amos "Baby-Killer" Forlough is the reason the Periphery nations, especially the Taurian Concordat, nurse a grudge against the Star League up to the present. A pedantic perfectionist, Forlough favored quick, decisive victories, and grew enraged when his enemies—and even his own forces—prevented this. Deciding the best way to achieve quick, decisive victories was to attack civilian populations instead of military targets, Forlough enacted literal decimation, executing ten percent of the population of any planet that resisted him. Low morale among his own troops was treated by killing said troops. His campaigns saw rampant use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons—one of the latter mutated into a super-virus that killed millions—as well as orbital bombardment. Even when warfare got remotely conventional, Amos ordered his troops to indiscriminately destroy anything of value.
  • Stefan Amaris is responsible for the setting's Forever War for the next 300 years and counting. Worming his way into the confidence of young Richard Cameron, Amaris encouraged the young man's ambition. Richard soon stoked the Periphery nations into revolt with punishing taxes, and Amaris secretly funded the Periphery in order to tie down the bulk of the Star League Defense Force in police actions, offering his own Rim Worlds Republic troops to man empty SLDF garrisons. Amaris brought Richard an exquisite laser pistol as a gift, which Amaris used to shoot Richard in the head, then kill the entire Cameron family, leaving their bodies locked in the throne room to rot, and soon declared the Terran Hegemony was now the Amaris Empire. Amaris squeezed his population mercilessly, and his troops committed atrocities unmatched to the present. He turned his back on the Periphery allies who had set up his victory, with even his own Rim Worlds Republic left at the mercy of Aleksandr Kerensky and the SLDF with whatever troops and commanders Amaris hadn't brought to the Hegemony with him. When Aleksandr Kerensky led the Star League Defense Force in retaking the Hegemony planet by planet, Amaris pulled his forces back to focus defense on Terra, nuking the planets behind him just to stall the SLDF by forcing them to tend to the nuked populations. The Rim Worlds Republic collapsed after the SLDF conquered it, and the entirety of House Amaris was wiped out either deliberately or through vigilante lynchings.
  • Khan Jason Karrige of Clan Widowmaker holds an unspecified grudge against Khan Sarah McEvedy and by extension Clan Wolverine. Helped by the fact that Clan Wolverine is making themselves "the nail that sticks up farthest," Karrige formed an anti-Wolverine cabal in the Grand Council, slipped spies into Clan Wolverine, and "manipulated" Nicholas Kerensky into forming the Clan Watch, something Nicholas had wanted to do anyway. Karrige had two of his warriors steal a nuclear warhead from a cache and smuggle it into the Wolverine city of Great Hope. Nicholas decreed a Trial of Absorption on Clan Wolverine, and as Karrige and his Widowmakers marched on Great Hope, supervised by Nicholas himself, Karrige detonated the nuke, killing hundreds of thousands of Wolverine civilians and the two Widowmakers who'd smuggled it in to make it look as though the Wolverines had been desperately trying to kill the ilKhan.
  • Katherine "Katrina" Steiner-Davion is a sociopathic, Manipulative Bitch who gets what she wants through a combination of blinding charm and ruthless assassination. She has her own mother killed via a bomb that maims and kills several others, and deftly yet subtly frames Victor for it, taking advantage of Victor's lack of political savvy to become his regent over the Lyran half of the Federated Commonwealth, then outright secedes over the Chaos March debacle. When Victor goes off to fight the Clans with Operation BULLDOG, Katherine manipulates opinion polls to crush the confidence of Yvonne Steiner-Davion, her little sister and Victor's regent. When her youngest brother, Arthur Steiner-Davion, speaks out against her, she assassinates him, sparking the FedCom Civil War. She assassinates Omi Kurita, daughter of the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine, just because she was Victor's lover and Katherine wanted to hurt Victor to buy some breathing room. Katherine was eventually dethroned and sentenced to life imprisonment until Vlad Ward of Clan Wolf demanded her release to him. She made a son using Clan breeding technology and her and Victor's genetic material, intended to be the instrument of her vengeance on the Inner Sphere. This son killed her himself when he learned how vile she really was.
  • The Dancing Joker, aka "Noble Thayer", is the most famous alias of the Inner Sphere's most skilled and sought-after virtuoso assassin. He first makes a splash by killing Melissa Steiner with a bomb that wounds and maims many others including Morgan Kell, and kills many more, including Morgan's wife Salome. He later sets up shop on Zurich, where he takes up the Dancing Joker nickname as he leads an insurgency against Xu Ning's Capellan-backed government during the Chaos March debacle. Dancing Joker sets up his lover, Cathy Hanney, to be captured and tortured for information by Xu Ning's forces as just another step in his plan to topple the regime, because he figures "overthrow planetary government" looks good on a resume. Against all the horrors of war seen in the BattleTech universe, the Dancing Joker still manages to stand out for the sheer depth of his utter lack of any human emotion or morality, even if he's incredibly good at faking those things.
• Designated Hero: One interpretation of Hanse Davion's character is that he got a few hundred million people killed to impress his hot eighteen year-old Nordic wife and to get payback against the man who tried to kidnap him and put a doppelganger on his throne. However in the novel Warrior: Coupe Hanse salutes Max Liao on the doppelganger ploy itself but tears him a new one for utterly ruining the doppelganger - his memories, his personality, everything that made him an individual. Hanse decided that a ruler capable of justifying such inhumanity needed breaking.
  • The closer you look at Natasha Kerensky, the less you see a Fiery Redhead who is good at what she does and much more someone who is at best a Blood Knight, and at worst a Sociopathic Soldier (though to be fair, she would have been a type 4 after her lover was killed in cold blood) — the accounts are legion of epic (and lethal) bar fights that The Black Widow and her Black Widow Company engaged in out of sheer boredom and for the fun of it. Another account concerns a member of Wolf's Dragoons admitting that he had leaked information that made its way to House Kurita, information that contributed to the Pyrrhic Victory that the Dragoons endured on Misery. Natasha cold-bloodedly killed him, just as Jamie Wolf was about to slap the man. When Wolf called her on her murder, her response was to quote words used by Nicholas Kerensky to justify the complete annihilation of an entire Clan.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Oddly enough, the UrbanMech seems to be both this and the Butt-Monkey at the same time. Even more ironically, it has a Clan variant too!
  Tex Talks BattleTech: You see, the UrbanMech is like a pug. Derpy, small, and full of character.
  • The UrbanMech actually reached the point of becoming a high-level stretch goal for the Kickstarter, and included having a plush, stuffed UrbanMech made as an add-on! The best part of this is that it was a joke by fans that Catalyst ran with!
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Fans of Battletech's style of mecha vs fans of anime-style mecha (ironic considering some of BattleTech's original designs were from Fang of the Sun Dougram and Super Dimension Fortress Macross). The rivalry really has two levels:
    • The BattleTech fans who prefer its Real Robot approach over the Super Robot approach of most anime, which tends to be fairly mild and depend on which kind of visual aesthetic you prefer, though there may be severe annoyance at people who don't even realize "western" mecha exist in the form of the BattleMech.
    • The deeper, utter hate for things like Robotech (Harmony Gold's frankestein anime made with Macross, Southern Cross and MOSPEADA), not due to any failures or shortcomings of the series itself, but because of the extensive legal troubles between BattleTech and the copyright holder of the series Robotech is made of and former holder of the Macross franchise outside Japan, Harmony Gold. Many BattleTech fans simply can't stomach the idea of lining the pockets of the company that has caused them such woe for decades now (though with the legal issues largely being settled, that attitude may be slowly changing).
  • Between BattleTech and Warhammer40k, which may be friendly or deeply vitriolic depending on the specific fans in question. Some BT fans are highly annoyed that despite Games Workshop's occasional Crack is Cheaper business practices, 40k gets the lion's share of the attention in the sci-fi tabletop wargames community, while BattleTech languished in obscurity for the best part of twenty years, until the 2018 computer game and the Clan Invasion Kickstarter have started to slowly change that situation. It gets worse when you try to debate the merits and flaws of the games and their settings to determine which is "better."
    • After the drama surrounding Games Workshop's copyright policies in 2021, the relationship is pretty much Friendly Fandoms nowadays — although that's probably because a lot of 40k players started getting into BattleTech as a means of boycotting Games Workshop.
• Fan Nickname: The fan nickname for the phenomena of exploding fusion reactors is "Stackpoling", from author Michael Stackpole, who included a couple of spectacular reactor explosions in his BattleTech novels, again out of Rule of Cool.
• Fridge Brilliance: in the animated series, the majority of the Jade Falcon forces become more and more erratic as the series proceeds. One could blame it on their frequent defeats by ‘inferior’ Inner Sphere warriors, but this would be compounded far more by the fact that Enhanced Imaging implants have deleterious long term effects on the implantee’s minds.
• Friendly Fandoms: While there's still some bad blood among older fans towards Macross and Robotech over the whole Unseen debacle, other segments of all three fandoms are likely to commiserate with one another over how all three have been Screwed by the Lawyers due to the insanely complicated ownership and licensing disputes.
• Game-Breaker: There are some 'Mech designs that are rather tedious to fight against. A most notorious example was the Clan pulse laser/targeting computer combo that practically guaranteed hitting your target. Land-Air-mechs in hybrid mode were practically unhittable. Under Solaris rules (extreme close combat for arena battles), multiple machine guns could reduce a 'Mech into scrap metal in short order, without generating any heat points. In most gaming groups, those things were countered by house rules forbidding the use of such designs.
  • Before the new rules removed the bonus for them, Rotary Autocannons found themselves mated to Targeting Computers quite a bit. The ability to put up to 30 points of damage on a targeted location, or even at a hit bonus, proved to be overwhelming, and as of the Total Warfare rules, rotary and Ultra autocannons at anything beyond single fire mode can no longer make an aimed shot, nor can pulse lasers. They still get the standard fire targeting bonus, though.
  • The Light Gauss Rifle, as its name implies, is a smaller version of the original model that has greater range and more ammo but deals less damage. While most heavy and assault Mechs and the heavier vehicles would rather carry bigger weaponry, put this weapon on a lighter Mech or vehicle chassis such as mediums or a few lights and with the right configurations, they can turn into extremely annoying adversaries that can easily utilize hit-and run and/or pop-and-snipe tactics, giving those who pilot the heavier models a major headache when encountering them.
  • Most Clantech counts, but four of their weapons stand out in particular:
    • Clan ER PPC's not only have the extended range of their Inner Sphere counterparts but also deal an additional five points of damage, meaning they can take an enemy mech's head off in one shot. This effectively makes them a much lighter and smaller Gauss Rifle that doesn't require ammo or explode when shot. Certain Mechs like the Marauder IIC and the Warhawk both in their default configuration are equipped with multitudes of the ER PPC, which can easily ravage other opposing units from afar, with the latter equipped with a Targeting Computer to make it even more frighteningly accurate.
    • Clan LRM's weigh half as much as their Inner Sphere variants and unlike the latter also have no minimum range, making them deadly in any situation and only get meaner with alternate ammo.
    • Clan ER Medium Lasers are basically Inner Sphere Large Lasers that fit in the space of a conventional medium laser and cause 2/3rds of the heat.
    • Clan Large Pulse Lasers have double the range of those fielded by the Inner Sphere and, yet again, also deal more damage^note In the eyes of many players, this makes the Clan Large Pulse a completely different weapon, filling a completely different tactical role on the battlefield and in a unit loadout, than the Inner Sphere Large Pulse. Combined with the enhanced accuracy of Pulse Lasers this turns mechs that mount more than one into long-distance murder machines like the Rifleman IIC. They are also the same size and mass of a clan ER PPC, allowing even non-OmniMechs mounting either to be easily customized for either game-breaker gun.
• Genre Turning Point: In the mid-1980s, the game popularised science fiction in Wargaming, which had until then been dominated by historical games, and along with Warhammer, which did the same for fantasy, brought a new generation into the hobby.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Germans love BattleTech. It's the primary overseas market, to the point where several novels were published first (or exclusively) in German.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The whole legal problems with Harmony Gold become even worse when you consider FASA and Battletech wouldn't even exist if a salesman wasn't offloading worthless Macross and Southern Cross mecha to anyone who'd buy them, and the founder of everything, Jordan Weisman, based his entire early concept on those very mecha, unaware that the very reason they were going so cheaply would cause decades of legal issues, with most of those early designs needing to be redesigned or cut altogether.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Also straddling alongside Harsher in Hindsight, the Tesla Pod mechwarrior Simulator/Training Pods, over the last couple decades, have slowly become Lostech themselves, as plenty of core components have become obsolete and fallen out of production. Admittedly there have been attempts to refurbish/modernize them, but they still have been cannibalized for parts, and some of the oldest pods have developed "quirks" just like real Ancestral BattleMechs would. The attempts to refurbish them also follows an amusing inverse of BattleMechs in the Inner Sphere. As Star League technology got harder and harder to come by, 'Mechs utilizing advanced tech where refitted to use older, more robust systems that were still in production — Gauss Rifles for Autocannons, Double Heat Sinks for regular heat sinks, etc. With the Tesla Pods, since their old parts aren't being made anymore, they're being refitted with new, modern, higher-tech parts that are being made — CRT monitors for LED screens and such.
  • Backstory material published in the 1990s has one Boris Johnson as the British Prime Minister in 2014, who laid the ideological foundations of a new economic alliance of Western states. This little bit of the BattleTech timeline takes on a different hue in real life after Brexit.
• Hype Backlash: ilClan is a more impartial, bird's eye recounting of the events already covered by Hour of the Wolf novel that was released half a year earlier, and doesn't go much beyond that into what happened in the rest of the Inner Sphere during the timeframe or after. By itself there is nothing wrong with that, especially with it tuning down the Clan Wolf bias of the novel, but as a long-awaited conclusion to the Dark Age era that was delayed and delayed for nearly 8 years it was underwhelming.
• LGBT Fanbase: With the resurgence of the franchise, a surprising number of LGBT fans have flocked to the game. So much so that in 2023 a group organized an unofficial Fiction Anthology called "Queer Tales of the Inner Sphere". Catalyst Game Labs gave the project their unofficial blessing, and Michael Stackpole wrote the foreword to the anthology.
• Magnificent Bastard: Owing to the setting running on Grey-and-Grey Morality and the prevalence of chessmasters in the highest ranks of military and government, most anyone in the setting who is magnificent is also a bastard (at least, to the people they've demonstrated their magnificence against). Some of the standouts are:
  • Sarah McEvedy served under Aleksander Kerensky in the Star League Defense Force before following his son Nicholas on the Second Exodus, proving her skills to become Khan of Clan Wolverine. She led her Wolverines exceptionally in both war and peacetime, though she had to bend several of Nicholas' ideals to do so. As the other Clans, threatened by Wolverine's success, arrayed against her, Sarah learned Nicholas would allow events to unfold, sacrificing her Clan to cement his new society. Sarah concocted a plan to evacuate the bulk of Clan Wolverine from Clan space, though she opted to leave behind many who were insufficiently loyal. After her presumed death, her saKhan followed her plan, jumping the Wolverine flotilla out of Clan space, but not directly back along the Exodus Road. Instead, they waited for Nicholas' pursuit force to launch, and traveled behind their pursuers in a mostly-successful attempt to evade them.
  • Hanse Davion started the Fourth Succession War at his wedding reception by offering his bride the Capellan Confederation as a wedding present, and delivered on half that with a blitzkrieg attack and having moles as two of the top three men in the Maskirovka. Hanse bartered the life of Joshua Marik, son of Free Worlds League leader Thomas Marik, offering to have Joshua transported to the New Avalon Institute of Science to treat his leukemia in exchange for the League producing badly-needed upgrade kits for forces fighting the Clans. Hanse also made a non-aggression pact with Theodore Kurita, promising not to send his troops into Combine space while the Clans remained a threat, and when Luthien itself came under attack, sent the Kell Hounds and Wolf's Dragoons mercenary units not to attack Luthien, but to defend it. Because he promised he wouldn't send his troops.
  • Ulric Kerensky is a staunch Warden, and takes every opportunity to sabotage the Crusader agenda, while being exceptionally good at making it not look like he's doing that. Forced to join the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere, Ulric advances his Clan Wolf harder and faster than any other, forcing the Crusader Clans to lag behind or overextend themselves trying to keep up. He is promoted to ilKhan in a bid to both swing the leadership of Clan Wolf towards Crusader and nullify his ability to push his Warden agenda, and blunts both thrusts. First, he short-circuits his Crusader rival's attempt to become Khan of Clan Wolf, promoting fellow Warden Natasha Kerensky instead. Second, he "accidentally" lets slip to ComStar that the true goal of the invasion is Terra, resulting in the Battle and Truce of Tukayyid. After six more years, his Crusader rivals finally oust him as ilKhan, only for Ulric to turn the Trial of Refusal into the Refusal War, pitting the Crusaders of Clan Wolf against Clan Jade Falcon (banking on old Clan rivalries superseding Crusader like-mindedness) and mauling both so badly the Clans are forced to stall their invasion plans for a few more years.
  • Sun-Tzu Liao paints himself an insane fool, both to survive his actually insane mother and encourage others to underestimate him. He drops the act upon ascending to the Celestial Throne of the Capellan Confederation, arranging a marriage to Thomas Marik's daughter Isis to apply political pressure to the Federated Commonwealth^note Which is implied to have caused Hanse Davion's fatal heart attack. He indirectly sparks the Chaos March debacle by thinking it would be a good idea to accuse Victor Steiner-Davion of having replaced Joshua Marik with a body double, only for the plot to reveal Victor had actually done it. Ruthlessly leveraging every advantage available to him, whether from his own plots or attempts by rivals to leverage him against their rivals, Sun-Tzu Liao goes down in history as one of the most famous and beloved Chancellors, restoring power and pride to a people Hanse Davion had all but broken.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Urbanmechs, and mechwarriors who pilot them effectively in battle, are considered to be incredibly dangerous to the point where the MWO side of the fandom loves to think of it fondly as the "30-ton Assault Mech". It helps that the Urbie is one of the few light mechs that can wield the heavier Autocannons, and has one of the thickest coats of armor that a light mech could physically mount. And yes, there is a special and canon build of the Urbie that was refitted to mount a nuclear capable missile launcher.
    Tex Talks Battletech: The UM-AIV replaces all weaponry with an Arrow IV and an ER Medium Laser. It also squeezes the pilot into a modified smaller trashcan cockpit something-or-other and can barely carry ten rounds of ammunition. But hey, it's now walking artillery for city fighting, because why not?
  • Kai Allard-Liao is generally considered by the fandom to be one of the most skilled mechwarriors in all eras of the series, even capable of schooling the finest Trueborn Clanner mechwarriors and earning their respect.
• Memetic Mutation: There are some memes that have endured in the fandom.
  • Battletech Armor is made of vampires and the autocannon shells contain holy water. ^ExplanationA discussion on a BT thread in Spacebattles resulted in this meme about the eccentricities of how the ablative armor works in the BT universe.
  • MAGIC BUSHIDO HANDS ^ExplanationA mocking term some fans use to disparage Draconis Combine and in particular Kurita eccentricities that was spawned by omake sections written for Davion & Davion (Deceased).
  • Steiner Scout Lance ^ExplanationA running joke about how the Lyrans love using full lances of Heavy/Assault mechs for almost everything, including scouting.
  • Similarly, referring to some of the solid light 'Mechs in the Steiner lineup, like the 25-ton Commando, as "Lyran Battle Armor." ^ExplanationBattle Armor is BattleTech speak for Powered Armor, the heaviest suits of which weigh only 2 tons, but Lyran memetic love of heavy units casts their idea of "battle armor" as full-fledged light 'Mechs.
  • As seen in Ensemble Dark Horse, Memetic Badass, and Rescued from the Scrappy Heap, the UrbanMech is severely meme-worthy. In part because it looks like R2-D2 or a trashcan, in part because it's a light 'Mech that can be outrun by assault 'Mechs, in part because it's a light 'Mech that has a thick coat of armor and wields a BFG, and in part because all these factors contribute to it being the most Difficult, but Awesome 'Mech one can choose to pilot.
  • "You dare to refuse my Batchall?!" ^Explanation In the animated series, this os Nicolai Malthus' narmtastic response to Andrew Steiner dismissing his declaration of war as a joke. A "Batchall" is the Clan's formal means of declaring a trial by combat. This also happens to be the very first scene in the entire series.
  • Where's the model(s)? ^ExplanationWhen Palladium Books released their ill-fated Robotech Tactics RPG, the Battletech fandom moved quickly to snatch up the new supply of "Unseen" models left behind. on the r/Battletech subreddit, any posting of Robotech models is inevitably followed by a comment from someone complaining that they can't see them, or wondering why the OP posted a picture of an empty map/terrain.
  • They Attacked MY HOME PLANET!
• Moral Event Horizon: Given the type of setting Battletech is it should come as no surprise that it's been crossed by a fair few people.
  • Stefan Amaris not only killed off the entire Cameron family - even the children! - but also held a member of the Kurita family hostage before eventually murdering them too and lying about them being alive and still a hostage to keep the Draconis Combine from helping Aleksandr Kerensky and his forces retake the Star League. This resulted in the SLDF taking longer to remove the Usurper, who routinely ordered atrocities such as the massacre of entire cities as well as the murder of senior religious figures and desecration of holy sites such as the Vatican, the Wailing Wall, and Mecca. Furthermore, he was content to order the more fanatical loyalists of his Rim World Army to commit war crimes and break out nuclear and chemical weapons, rendering many worlds uninhabitable as a consequence; centuries later, the Clans that descended from the Exodus Fleet still abhor him to the point that a Clanner who was able to present the head of one of the few surviving Amaris descendants to the Khans was lauded for their kill.
  • Jinjiro Kurita crossed this line almost as soon as he inherited the title of Coordinator with three words: "Kill them all." Meaning slaughter the entire populace of Kentares IV. When one of the generals present asked for clarification, Jinjiro had him killed. Ninety percent of the planet's population, Fifty-two million people, were murdered by Draconis Combine soldiers with their swords over the next five months, which Jinjiro had recorded so he could watch the massacres whenever he pleased. Many of his own soldiers not too hopped up on propaganda and jingoism to take perverse pride in following such a "difficult" order were Driven to Suicide before, during, and after the atrocity. ComStar members on the planet were so horrified they broke their neutrality and smuggled video of the atrocity out to the rest of the Inner Sphere, and the previously-losing Federated Suns were galvanized by what went down in history as the single largest war crime in Human history.
  • Comstar's Word of Blake operatives, in particular the ones who carried out Operation HOLY SHROUD, are universally hated for making the crapsack state of the Inner Sphere even worse by killing brilliant scientists and engineers who tried to improve the standards of living for the rest of human space, not just the ones who were trying to make better weapons of war. These "Wobbies" are considered to be acceptable targets for random violence and death by most fans.
  • During the Reunification Wars, General Amos Forlough, also known to some Periphery peoples as "The Butcher", pole-vaulted over the Horizon by ordering his soldiers to murder one-tenth of the population of any planet that resisted, made gratuitous use of nuclear and biochemical weapons alongside conventional orbital bombardment to bring worlds to heel, and on several occasions committed outright genocide when faced with particularly stiff resistance. His actions were enough to spur the Federated Suns into preemptively annexing several Periphery territories around the Outback in an effort to keep them from experiencing his brutality, although the Taurians were not pleased to have the Suns take over several of their worlds in this fashion even for such a reason; in addition, the repercussions of his actions forever soured the Periphery States to the Star League, and eventually led to several of them secretly cooperating with Stephan Amaris to lure the SLDF away from Terra as part of his coup.
• Popular Game Variant: The game tends to be fairly firm in its ruleset, though there are a few recurring types of house rules that turn up.
  • Relaxed restrictions on wheeled vehicles, allowing them to enter rough ground at a movement penalty rather than cutting them off entirely.
  • Ultra autocannon unjam rules similar to the rotary autocannon unjam rules.
  • Relaxed restrictions on Land-Air 'Mech construction rules. Normally the Land-Air 'Mech unit class is not permitted to use highly desirable weight-saving technologies that would permit them some relevance in 3050-onwards (ostensibly as a balancing measure, but mostly to keep the notoriously litigious Harmony Gold from honking out another lawsuit). Fans of Land-Air 'Mechs tend to ignore these restrictions so that the class is not fully relegated to obsolescence.
  • Anti-infantry rules for PPCs, which are canonically charged particle weapons with an explosive impact. This allows PPC-armed 'Mechs such as the Awesome to sweep away pesky infantry with ease rather than constantly firing its main battery at a single infantry platoon for several rounds on end just to be rid of it.
  • Headshot ejection rules. Normally headshots that decapitate a 'Mech instantly kill the pilot. Some tables permit a roll for ejection chance to save the pilot. Very common for games where pilots are actual characters in the infantry-scale Mechwarrior RPG played alongside the tabletop wargame.
  • Reactor explosions occurring if a fusion engine suffers three critical hits in one turn; normally this would cause an instant shutdown of the reactor and count as the (salvageable) destruction of the unit, but some tables use the cinematic reactor explosion option based on the Expanded Universe novels. This house rule is unique in that it has a universally accepted name: Stackpoling, based on author Michael Stackpole, who was fond of writing reactor explosions into the various battles in his novels, far more often than 'Mechs should explode normally. Recent rulebooks in fact have made this Ascended Fanon, as they now include official, but optional (and with a big "this is not how fusion reactors work in-universe, but we all love big explosions, so who are we to tell you not to?" disclaimer) rules for this kind of event.
  • There's also "Cinematic Battletech" which doubles all weapon damage (except for shots that strike the head) and forces all critical hit rolls to add +1 to the result (meaning greater odds for critical damage). This makes the game much more dramatic in the 3025 timeframe and frighteningly lethal in any era after 3050 (a Gauss rifle will stove in most medium 'Mechs on a single center torso hit!).
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap / Lethal Joke Character: The faster-playing adaptation Alpha Strike has had this effect on a lot of units that were thought of as useless in normal BattleTech, as their usefulness grows exponentially in the faster-paced play environment.
  • The UM-R60 UrbanMech is the very definition of a Lethal Joke Character. It's a light mech that looks like a trash can and is constantly derided by those not in the know as a slow, useless piece of scrap. In fact it is the slowest mech every made, tied for that honor with an Assault mech. But the UrbanMech by default mounts an AC-10, which can kill light and medium mechs with one lucky shot, and while it's not fast, it excels in urban fighting (imagine that), where it can use it's jump jets to gain a height advantage, launch a surprise attack, and scamper off before anyone can retaliate. It's also very hard to hit because it's so damn small. And it's incredibly modifiable: you can strip the AC-10 and put on an AC-20 (the UM-R60(L)), allowing the UrbanMech to core out an Assault mech with a lucky shot, or just get a quick headshot to end things right there. You can put an MRM-40 (the UM-R68) on it, giving it the ability to absolutely wreck face if it gets in range, and destroy some of the less armored Heavy mechs in an ambush (Clan Ghost Bear did not like being hit by these). You can even strip some armor and downgrade to a more cramped cockpit if you want to replace the primary weapon with an Arrow IV Artillery Missile Launcher, which can also carry missiles fitted with a fusion warhead. It's an incredibly slow, heavily armored, highly modifiable light mech that looks like it should be a joke. And it is. Until it destroys you. MWO players with more advanced battlemech technology take the Urbie even further. Fancy rebuilding the superstructure with a Star League-grade Endo Steel frame to free up some tonnage? Swapping the engine with a bulkier XL Fusion Engine to get more performance and movement speed, complete with Double Heat Sinks for even better heat management? Replacing the armor plating with Star League-grade Ferro-Fibrous? Upgunning from regular Autocannons to LB-X, Rapid, or Ultra variants? Taking a subtle tack instead, swapping out for Capellan Stealth Armor with an ECM package to match? A fully-modernized Urbie can free up a deceptively large amount of tonnage and run deceptively fast, easily achieving 80-ish KM/H speeds that let it actually keep up in a running battle, yet sport the absolute maximum armor possible and still bristle with guns. To take it even further, the Urbie in MWO even sports all of its unique positive quirks, like having a full 360-degree torso twist and being small enough to be tricky to hit in a pitched battle.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In MechWarrior 3rd Edition (still available but rebranded "Classic BattleTech RPG") the Life Paths system. Picking packages for various stages of a character's life was cool, but then there's a random event table to roll on. 2d6, the higher the better. Several events at the lower end of the table cause a character to suffer disadvantages, usually giving them negative traits, and especially for the Clan Warrior paths straight-up making progression towards being a warrior impossible (the first three or four events on the Clan tables are variations on "wash out of warrior training" barring the character from adding warrior-related Life Paths). One can reroll an event in a Life Path by increasing the cost to purchase Edge. Even if you don't get bad rolls, some character concepts require good rolls in specific Life Paths to achieve (officer training in the Inner Sphere is only available via 10+ events on a few military-related Paths). Events can saddle the character not just with negative Traits, but positive ones and skills that don't fit with the character concept. The system has been described as "set out to make a Clan MechWarrior, end up with a one-eyed pirate fry cook with a substance abuse problem and a love of 23rd century Korean opera." The next edition of the RPG (A Time Of War) did away with the randomness entirely, making everything a Point Buy System.
• Status Quo Is God: In this case, the status quo is "constant warfare." Each conflict resolution only sets up the next conflict (much like how WWI led to WW2 led to the Cold War, for a modern example). Even besides the major wars - the Succession Wars, the Clan Invasion, the FedCom Civil War, and the Blakist Jihad - there are constant clashes among secessionist rebels, organized criminals, rogue mercenaries, petty nobles, extremist terrorists, chest-thumping Clanners, and many more to keep driving the action. Even during times of alleged peace, like the eras of the Star League era and the Republic of the Sphere, there are discreet shadow wars taking place between rival factions looking to have a head start when the next inevitable war launches.
• Tainted by the Preview: Jihad era in the early Dark Age materials.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many players reactions to the Dark Age period, especially the releated CMG. The reaction was far from universal, however, with the CMG not only bringing in new players, but many older players enjoying it and the changes to the setting. And, in all fairness, this has been a reaction to just about any change to the universe or game.
  • The extreme negativity of the reaction (from some quarters) to the Dark Age came about for a number of reasons.
    
    The release of the DA wasn't very well planned or presented, from the perspective of long-time BattleTech players. The initial DA synopsis made it feel rather like the rest of the Inner Sphere powers disappeared or fell into obscurity. The various Republic sub-factions seemed to be merely remnants of a by-gone age.
    
    Because of the seemingly sudden death of FASA and other things, the curators of Classic BattleTech took a long time before they could actually explain the Jihad and therefore justify what seemingly happened to the universe that lead to 3132. The pace of book releases, even for the 3067 period, slowed in the initial years of FASA's demise.
    
    Compounding this, the main tool for moving the fiction forward, novels, stopped happening for non-Dark Age settings. While a substitute was created on-line, those were primarily short-stories that filled in the gaps, rather than novels that pushed the storyline forward.
    
    These all combined to give the sense that BattleTech was dead. And therefore, MWDA was blamed for killing it.

• Ugly Cute: The UrbanMech. Imagine R2-D2... if R2-D2 was thirty feet tall and equipped with a 12-ton autocannon.