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• 2-D Space: Every space map in the game is two-dimensional, even the maps of the Inner Sphere.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: One of the earliest events of the Battletech universe was the creation of the first fusion reactor in the then-distant year of 2018.

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• Abnormal Ammo:
  • Needle pistols, which blast out needle shaped shards of plastic. Plasma Rifles seem to operate on this too, as they fire out clouds of what used to be plastic blocks, that have been lased and converted into a superheated plasma state. Infantry can also use a Gyrojet rifle, which fires self-propelled rocket bullets rather than using gunpowder.^note Gyrojet rifles and pistols actually exist, dating from the sixties, and this is indeed their operating principle. Unfortunately a tiny spin-stabilized rocket, while inherently cool, is a much more complicated and expensive thing to manufacture than an ordinary powder-and-primer cartridge, which along with reliability problems doomed the Gyrojet line to languish in the prototype stage despite initial interest from the US Army. The few remaining examples are mainly of interest to collectors, especially since no one is still making Gyrojet ammunition and what remains of it almost certainly can't be fired.
  • There are missiles which deploy minefields, and artillery shells that launch radio and radar jammers. Some missiles can use Inferno rounds, which is basically napalm on crack.
  • Another special mention goes to the Fluid Gun, which, as the name suggests, can be adapted to spray a variety of fluids, including water, oil, coolant, Inferno gel, and acid.
  • BattleMech flamers vent the 'Mech's reactor plasma onto the target. Jump jets use it to propel the 'Mech through the air. A jump is one of the time-tested methods of clearing off infantry making a swarm attack, by crisping them.
  • Gauss Rifles are abnormal in the context of 'Mech weaponry: whereas missile and autocannon ammunition has a chance to explode violently (and usually lethally) if struck by an attack, Gauss Rifle ammunition, being inert ferrous slugs, will just break, with no other effects. If the Gauss Rifle itself is hit, however, its electrical capacitors will explode with enough force to destroy the armor or torso location where it is mounted.
• Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: Some 'Mech designs can rotate their arms 180 degrees to aim at targets directly behind them. By the construction rules, this is enabled by designing the 'Mech without any hand and lower arm actuators at all (they formally keep their shoulders and upper arms); since on OmniMechs these same actuators happen to be merely pod-mounted and can be left off at leisure, in principle any Omni that doesn't explicitly put them back on can do this by default.
  • The UM-R60 UrbanMech is unique in that it can turn its torso 180 degrees, allowing it to attack while moving in any direction (which is extremely helpful in the urban environments the UrbanMech is designed to fight in).
  • The Rifleman can rotate its arms from front to back, allowing it to fire at targets behind it.
• Absent Aliens: Humanity has spread to many different planets, and there are no other sapient species out there. Subverted in that there are alien creatures living on other planets, but they're all more or less the equivalent of wild animals, and humans interact with them as such.
  • The only exception is the stone age-like Tetatae from Far Country. However that novel was not well received by most of the fandom; the official stance is that the novel is canon but takes place in an effectively unreachable part of the universe.
• Ace Custom: Encouraged by the construction rules and supported by the fiction. Even with scores of distinct "stock" 'Mech designs rolling off the factory lines in usually a number of variants already, individual MechWarriors still show up in customized personal rides time and again. Possibly the earliest example in the novels (and certainly still one of the iconic ones) is Justin Allard's Yen-Lo-Wang, a Centurion modified to replace its autocannon and long-range missile rack with a shorter-ranged but far more powerful autocannon specifically for arena combat. After his son Kai inherited it, it was again customized with a gauss rifle replacing the autocannon.
  • OmniMechs are specifically designed for customization with a set amount of payload mass and internal space for loadouts using special modular equipment easily interchangeable with any other OmniMech's payload, as well as a specialized gyrostabilizer design that allows for automatic recalibration within the parameters of the allocated pod mass and space. Standard BattleMech gyros take technical skill to manually recalibrate like that, and OmniMech gyros also need such manual recalibration if the base mass distribution is altered.
• Action Girl: A LOT of them throughout the setting; unsurprising given that mechanized warfare is king, although many women are quite formidable even without; a standout is female Clan Elementals, who due to the Clans' genetic engineering and breeding programs are just as much hulking masses of Powered Armor-combat-optimized muscle as their male counterparts
• Actually Four Mooks: Battlearmor come in squads of four (or five, for the Clanners). Infantry come in even bigger sizes. Some miniatures portray the correct amount of infantry/powered armor, some don't.
• Adaptation Amalgamation: BattleRun: Best Ever!, an April Fools crossover adventure where BattleTech is set in the future of the Shadowrun universe. April Fools 2020 brought a sequel, BattleRun 2: The Quest For The Thing.
• Adventure Archaeologist: LosTech prospectors and Clan Goliath Scorpion's Seekers. Also Snord's Irregulars, who were spun off from Wolf's Dragoons to be this trope explicitly.
• Aerith and Bob: With all the cross-cultural influences going on, it's not too unusual (Takashi Kurita and his son Theodore being probably the best-known example). A few truly peculiar names do stand out, however, like Grayson Death Carlyle^note (pronounced "deeth") and Photon Brett-Marik.
• After the End: Downplayed, but the devastation caused by the fall of the Star League and the resulting Succession Wars leans heavily into the post-apocalyptic genre, especially during the First and Second Succession Wars (before WMD usage was ended by all factions by tacit agreement). Until the reintroduction of Lostech following the Clan Invasion, most, if not all mechs in the setting were centuries old, maintained and kept running because they couldn't be replaced. Several advanced technologies necessary for the continuance of life on colonies (terraforming tech, JumpShips, etc) were lost, resulting in colonies dying out, the remaining JumpShips being emphatically off-limits as targets, and so on. Mechwarriors placed (and still place) a high emphasis on salvage from their battles, sometimes even more than monetary gain, because even broken equipment was more valuable than other spoils of war. The only reason that the post-apocalypse genre is not more emphasized is because, from the outbreak of the First Succession War to the Jihad (c. 2786 - 3081, or a period of three hundred years), the apocalypse keeps. Freaking. Happening.
• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: The Cloud Ten airborne aircraft carrier. It's basically a zeppelin with a fighter bay and surveillance equipment.
• A.K.A.-47: Mixed with Brand X. Several combat vehicles are openly based on existing real-world vehicles to varying degrees of similarity. The Chevalier scout tank is one degree of separation away from the South African Rooikat armored fighting vehicle, and the Hetzer is based on the similarly named German tank destroyer, albeit with wheels instead of treads. Personal weaponry places boxy Shadowrun-esque unique designs alongside AKA-47 expies like the Federated Long Rifle (AR-15) or the Gauss SMG (P90)
  • Inverted with the Striker, which first appeared in the 1987 supplementary book Technical Readout: 3026, only for a very similar vehicle to appear in the real world known as the Stryker.
• The Alliance: The Second Star League was a joint Inner Sphere front against the Clans; rather than a single House-dominated union like its predecessor.
  • The Council of Six formed by the Inner Sphere Clans after the Wars of Reaving resembled the old Grand Council but, rather than acting as a ruling body, it was meant to allow the now-isolated Clans to survive in the Inner Sphere, mostly through jointly restoring the HPG network, their now-purged Scientist Castes and some of their military hardware and bloodnames that were devastated by the Jihad and the Wars of Reaving.
  • Devlin Stone's anti-Blakist Coalition is notable for its sheer diversity. It included units and characters from four of the five Great Houses, all six Invader Clans, most of the major Periphery states, and a huge number of mercenary companies. Things were not exactly smooth but they did accomplish their goal of eradicating the Blakists and managed to avoid full scale conflict among themselves afterwards.
• All Planets Are Earth-Like: Within a reasonable limit, all inhabited planets have between 0.9 and 1.1 atmosphere pressure, 0.9 to 1.1 g-gravity, and Earth norm temperature ranges, though no planet is as comfortable for humans as Earth is. There are exceptions (like the dome-covered cities of Sirius V where the atmosphere is methane), but understandably humans would tend to pick earth-like planets to settle.
  • Quite a few planets have issues involving gravity as well as unpleasant (and barely survivable) biomes. Ice planets in particular seem popular, probably due to the cold temperatures being an aid to dissipating a 'Mech's heat.
  • Source materials also mention Star League-era terraforming technology. In addition, it is frequently noted that settlers introduce genetically modified variants of Terran flora and fauna to colonized planets. The preponderance of Earth-like planets is primarily due to terraformation. And the lack of new planets to colonize is because that terraformation technology was blown up so hard it's still losTech.
• Alpha Strike: The contextual Trope Namer. Step one: fire every weapon you have, simultaneously. Step two: hold your breath and hope to god your mech can sink the heat^note Failure to sink sufficient heat may result in death from heat stroke, death from ammunition explosion, and the medical condition known as "my 'Mech shut down and I'm a sitting duck for my enemies oh god help me!". Step three: hope that you land a knockout.
• Always Accurate Attack: The entire philosphy behind Streak SRM launchers. They utilize a built-in targeting computer to lock a target and prevent wasting ammo by only firing when a direct hit is virtually guaranteed. In game terms, this means that the launchers don't consume ammo or generate heat unless a successful hit is rolled. Additionally, on a successful hit, there is no volley hit count roll, as all the missiles in a Streak SRM volley hit.
  • Clan Coyote managed to accomplish the dream of many Star League weapons techs when, in 3057, they rolled out Streak LRM launchers, boasting the enforced accuracy and ammo control of a Streak missile and the range of an LRM. They proved very popular with Clan mechwarriors, despite several drawbacks compared to standard Clantech launchers, such as being unable to use alternate ammo types, doubling the launchers weight and lacking indirect fire capability.
  • The Society managed to go one step further and created the "improved Advanced Tactical Missile", or iATM for short, which is a Streak ATM in every practical concern. The flexibility of the system made them extremely effective, but the crimes of The Society meant that most, if not all, captured examples were destroyed as a matter of honor, and it's doubtful any made their way to the Inner Sphere before the Wars of Reaving cut off the Homeworld Clans.
• Alternate Universe: Featured in the Empires Aflame adventure book. A Misjump dumps the player characters into the universe where Aleksandr Kerensky was assassinated before he could reveal the Exodus plan to his troops, and in grief Aaron DeChavilier decided to stay and take the fight back to the Great Houses, establishing the Terran Supremacy in the process. Some other highlights: No Exodus obviously means no Clans, which among a lot of other things means no Wolf's Dragoons, and the Draconis Combine conquering New Avalon; the Federated Suns and the Capellan Confederation united into one nation, the Confederated Suns; The Free Worlds League fare even worse, taking the Capellans' place as a punching bag in 4th SW, politically dividing the League into the Pro-Marik and the Pro-Halas factions; The Periphery nations are stronger due to various factors; ComStar does not exist and many other things also while the succession wars still happened they weren't has brutal as they were in the official universe so much fewer pieces of technology went lostech and more planets and various mech fighter and large craft designs stayed around instead of being destroyed as they were in the official universe.
• Amazon Brigade: Katana Tormark's elite regiment Amaterasu.
• Ambiguously Brown:
  • A lot of people in the Inner Sphere end up looking for this due to the interbreeding of Terran colonists.
  • Lampshaded in one of the Dark Age novels: a character possessing red hair and green eyes goes through the customs office as "Rabbi Martinez" and no one bats an eye at the juxtaposition. See also Minobu Tetsuhara, a Kuritan Samurai who is also a black man.
  • An earlier novel referred to the "great Inner Sphere gene plasm bingo" as the reason for this.
• Ancestral Weapon: Families will pass down Mechs from father (or mother) to son/daughter. Justified by the fact that a Mech usually costs millions of C-Bills and thus is a valuable heirloom as well as a tool of war. For some perspective, if A Time of War, set in the Jihad era of 3068-3080 is any indication then the average peasant can save up 10,000 C-Bills. That's approximately $65,400 U.S. Dollars, at 2010 values.
  • Not to mention that, before the coming of the Clans with their OmniMech technology, 400+ year old Star League-era mechs were actually more technologically advanced than brand new 'Mechs being produced in the 3025 era. The constant war and strife has nearly "beaten humanity back to the stone age" (actually more like the mid-late 20th Century) where repairing BattleMechs is essential when the base technology is not even all that well understood. Same goes for the Kearny-Fuchida drives in the JumpShips, which nearly all date back to the Star League era since the technology to construct new faster than light drive engines had been lost until a recent resurgence. See also Ragnarök Proofing.
  • In one scenario from an early gamebook, a pair of Mackies from the original production run, the first BattleMechs ever designed and pushing eight hundred years old, passed down through a family from the days of the Terran Hegemony, are powered up to fight the Black Widow Company. They usually acquit themselves with great distinction.
  • As of "Decision on Pandora", Grayson Death Carlyle's Marauder has officially become one, as Ronan was gifted his great-grandfather's 'mech by his parents. Ronan starts using it in his capacity as the leader of the newly-reconstituted Gray Death Legion. He is well aware of the history inherent in the machine, and the first time the PPCs are fired in combat is treated both in story and in the narration as a moment of awesome.
• Ancient Conspiracy: ComStar among others - there are multiple sourcebooks for the various ancient conspiracies lurking in the background.
• Animal Mecha: These occasionally crop up, being regular battlemechs with some animal motifs (such as the Wolfhound◊ light mech containing its sensor equipment in ear-like lobes on the cockpit, making it look vaguely like a wolf head or the Mandril◊)
  • On occasion you will also have 'Mechs like the Barghest, which is only a step or two away from being a Zoid.
• Animal Motifs: Almost all of the Clans. The sole exception is Clan Blood Spirit, named for the concept of esprit d'corps (ironically they swiftly became the most isolationist of Clans).
  • And they eventually inverted the trope. The blood spirit, a genetically engineered vampire bat, was named FOR the Clan instead of the other way around. Albeit it was meant as a Take That! by the Blood Spirit's worst enemy.
  • Clan Diamond Shark was originally Clan Sea Fox. The name change was due to the introduction of the diamond shark (also genetically engineered by a rival Clan) into the sea fox's native habitat, where it promptly drove the former species to near-extinction. In a form of Insult Backfire, the Clan decided to embrace the Diamond Shark as their new mascot and changed their name. Some sea foxes did apparently survive in captivity, though, and Clan Diamond Shark eventually effected a name change back to Sea Fox around 3100.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range:
  • Many long-range weapons have minimum ranges, making it harder to hit within that minimum range. There are a variety of reasons: For missiles (most notably Inner Sphere Long Range Missiles), there is a distance arming fuse that typically doesn't kick in until they're past the minimum range. For ballistic weapons, it's typically because the barrel is long and ungainly to aim (though artwork sometimes doesn't depict this). For PPCs, it's because there's a safety system designed to prevent the shot from damaging the firing unit with electrical interference. The lack of minimum range on extended range PPCs is partially explaned by "field inhibitors." There's an optional rule to disengage the field inhibitor on a standard PPC, removing the minimum range but risking damage to the firing unit. ERPPCs presumably have better field inhibitors that remove the minimum range and the possibility of particle feedback to the firer.
  • Of course, this also goes in the other direction as well. Lasers have absurdly short ranges compared to how long they could actually reach given no intervening terrain, in the neighborhood of a few hundred meters for the large laser, down to 100 or thereabouts for the small laser. Weapons in general have much shorter ranges than they should realistically have. ^{For Example...}the standard machine gun in the game, which is something like the .50 cal M2 Browning machine gun used by the US Army, is 90 meters, or three hexes. A real life M2 Browning has an effective range of 1,830 meters, or 61 hexes. This is lampshaded by the designers, who acknowledge the discrepancy, but argue the choices were made deliberately for game balance and playability, as using real-world ranges for weapons would necessitate an almost prohibitively large playing field at the scale of the game.

    Unnamed MechWarrior (in the writeup for the machine gun in BattleMech Manual'': Damn, he's 91 meters out.

• Arcade Game: Back in the 1990's, there were several Battletech Centers - an immersive arcade with enclosed mech combat simulators. The place was designed to feel like being in the universe of BattleTech. Also notable for having James Belushi in one of the barker videos the Centers would play.
  • The machines themselves still exist, but they are no longer produced or supported by the company that made them (which has gone defunct). Existing pods are maintained by enthusiasts and seen at conventions, but they are slowly wearing down. In effect, this makes the pods a real-life example of LosTech.
• Archaeological Arms Race: During the Succession War era, the discovery of Lostech caches can cause small-scale wars over their possession. Then the Gray Death Legion mercenaries discovered the Memory Core with almost complete lostech schematics and spread it contents through the Inner Sphere despite the efforts of ComStar.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: In MechWarrior swords are described as still being a preferred weapon aboard starships because combat will invariably be close quarters and the blade won't rupture the ship's hull as opposed to firearms.
• Arch-Enemy: Dozens of cases here. If two or even three factions have shared a border for any length of time they probably hate each other.
  • Secular (relatively) ComStar and the Church Militant Word of Blake hate each other as they believe that the other has perverted Blake's vision. Jerome Blake would have hated what ComStar had become when Conrad Toyama succeeded him, so post-schism ComStar is more his vision.^note Actually, given revelations in Second Succession War, Jerome actually was the one who wanted ComStar to become a religion, in the hopes that that would preserve knowledge from being destroyed, and it was Conrad who was against, but who reluctantly agreed to carry out the plan out of loyalty to his friend. However, both of them acknowledged the risks inherent in the plan, risks that slowly came to reality with the Jihad.
  • The Free Worlds League and the Lyran Commonwealth despise each other for both economic purposes and because their conflicts in the Succession Wars were among the most brutal.
  • The Capellan Confederation is still bitter from all the losses the Federated Suns dealt it. The Taurian Concordat is pretty much an entire nation of General Rippers; to them the Suns are behind everything.
  • The Draconis Combine had the typical hate with the Suns and the Commonwealth but also had a sore spot with several mercenary units. The most notable case was Takashi Kurita's personal vendetta with Wolf's Dragoons; which lead to him hampering his nation's war effort in the Fourth Succession War when he threw an entire military district's forces at five regiments - while his armies were losing ground elsewhere.
    • The Davion and Kurita ruling families became more amiable towards each other due to an Enemy Mine situation that the Clans precipitated. The rank and file of the Combine and FedComs, however... old animosities die hard, especially with the more conservative elements. Eventually the old rivalry flared up again in the 32nd Century.
  • The Wolves and the Jade Falcons have a history of bad blood; they lead opposing factions within the Clans and the Falcons are still upset that the Wolves possess exclusive rights to the Kerensky bloodname.
  • Clan Diamond Shark never really forgave the Snow Ravens for wiping out their original namesake the Sea Fox. Their revenge generally consists of jacking up prices though. The Ravens consider the misdeed a dishonorable act by a rogue member of their clan, so they grin and bear it as penance with the Shark merchants bilking them.
  • Clans Blood Spirit and Burrock were constantly in conflict, a situation "resolved" by the latter's Absorption by Clan Star Adder. The Spirits shortsightedly goaded the Adders into taking the Burrock's place, a bad move considering the power imbalance between the two Clans and one which usually resulted in the Spirits getting handily beaten and eventually wiped out, after the Wars of Reaving.
  • Clan Ghost Bear and Hell's Horses feuded with each other for over a century, but their bitter hatred eventually transformed into mutual respect.
  • The Inner Sphere and the Clans as a whole; the former didn't appreciate losing a few hundred worlds and the Clanners blame the Successor States for ruining the Star League. Eventually the Ghost Bears and the Rasalhague Republic, the Ravens and Outworlds Alliance, and the Wolves-In-Exile and the Lyran Commonwealth start to patch things up.
  • The Word of Blake is pretty much this to the rest of humanity; no one wanted a Succession War-style conflict and weren't pleased at all when the Blakists started one over the break up of the effectively moribund Second Star League.
  • Among mercenary units, the Waco Rangers had a bitter, if one-sided, rivalry with Wolf's Dragoons due to an incident involving the founder's son of the former faction being inadvertently crushed to death by a Dragoon Assault Mech during a Capellan campaign. While the Dragoons brushed this off as simply an accident, the founder, Wayne Waco, and his Rangers swore bloody vengeance towards the Dragoons ever since. The Dragoons consider them as an Unknown Rival until the Jihad when the Rangers supposedly acting under the Blakist's employ managed to turn things personal by killing several noteworthy Dragoon personnel in the planet Outreach, including Jaime Wolf, though it also led to the death of Wayne Waco himself. The Dragoons then responded by exterminating all non-Dragoon personnel, including the Rangers, and thus completing the chapter of this rivalry.
• Arm Cannon: There are 'Mechs that fit in both variations. In fact, 'Mechs that physically hold weapons in their hands are very, very rare (and growing more so, as most of them are Unseen, i.e., based on artwork BattleTech's owners do not have the rights to). If a 'mech has a weapon in an arm that has a lower arm actuator but not a hand actuator, odds are that weapon is depicted as such in the artwork. Besides a few notable mechs like the Battlemaster that carry a BFG in their hands (the Battlemaster being one of the Unseen), most 'Mechs with hand actuators mount a cannon on their forearm. By default, a 'Mech with weapons and a hand actuator has weapons along their forearms, while 'Mech's lacking hand actuators will have a wrist muzzle, and 'Mech's lacking hand and lower arm actuators will pretty much have the whole arm just be gun.
• Armored Coffins: While almost all BattleMechs and aerospace fighters avert this, it applies to tanks, VTOL craft, Protomechs, and a few infamous deathtrap mechs, like the Spider SDR-5V, which has no ejection system. To get out in combat, the pilot needs to get out of the control chair, unhook his neurohelmet, and then climb through the hatch below the armored window.
  • The Hunchback IIC was made to be this by the Clans for warriors who are too old(above 35) or have suffered disgrace, to die in battle. But the mech is still formidable even by Clan standards, being able to put out nearly as much raw damage as front-line 'Mechs twice its size. ^note For those keeping score, its peak damage if both cannons are firing and hitting at double rate is 94 points per turn, whereas the 100-ton Dire Wolf Prime, arguably one of the most powerful 'Mechs in existence, puts out a maximum of 98 points with a full alpha strike, and would immediately shut itself down upon doing so.
  • The Wolf Trap was a terrible mech designed as its ammunition bays are on its back and attacking mechs usually aim for its backpack. It was discontinued ten years after it was made.
  • To say nothing of the Lucifer, a medium aerospace fighter that has no ejection system due to a cockpit redesign. As Technical Readout: 3025 put it, "the pilot is strapped into his fighter until he lands or crashes, whichever comes first." Even worse, the fighter has problems with dead-stick atmospheric re-entry and its ammo bays have a tendency to suffer internal explosions (destroying the craft) even outside combat!
  • The four-legged Clan Hell's Horses second-line mech called the Thunder Stallion has been referred to as a "quad coffin" by some mechwarriors due to the fact that some of the ammo for its main weapon (a Class 20 Autocannon, one of the most powerful weapons in the game) is located in the head, where the pilot is also located. If that magazine gets cooked off with even one round loaded in, the mech gets decapitated and the pilot gets fried.
  • The Spider gets this treatment as well, at least in its earlier incarnations — due to the mech's small size, the cockpit is largely located in the torso, and the placement made putting in an ejector seat too difficult to accomplish.
  • A borderline case exists with the stock Succession Wars-era Vindicator. It does have an ejector seat, however, the head-mounted laser has been known to... interfere... sometimes with the ejection process, leading to messy results.
  • ProtoMechs nine tons and under cannot mount ejection systems. Even though ProtoMechs are surprisingly robust for (and due in part to) their size, it is statistically likely that a hit which disables a ProtoMech will at least injure the pilot too, ejection system or no.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Later eras of Battletech (after the 3080s) eventually introduce Armor-Piercing ammunition for Autocannons, which can punch through armor and strike at your mech's structure and internals directly. More strict Critical Hit rules also allow for Through-Armor Criticals, where a "golden BB" shot is rationalized as finding a weak spot between armor plates and punching straight through into your internals.
  • There are also "Re-Engineered" Lasers, only usable by the Inner Sphere (for now), which have the effect of ignoring the damage reduction that would normally apply from certain types of armor (i.e. Reflective Armor).
• Arms Dealer: The Lyran Commonwealth, the Free Worlds League and Clan Diamond Shark, as well as many other private businesses.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: Many of the more hardcore Crusader clansmen can come across as this. Special mention goes to Vlad Ward.
  • The first MechWarrior was one of these by what information is available, up to and including finishing the test battle by literally stomping the last opposing tank flat.
• Art Evolution:
  • Early ''BattleTech'' art was usually very basic black and white◊ unshaded drawings (save for sourcebook covers). Later art◊ featured shading, digital art, and more visually complex designs, with rendered CGI artwork becoming more common. Later sourcebooks got more covered artwork, whereas earlier sourcebooks typically had more simplistic black-and-white artwork.
  • BattleMech designs shifted from relatively anthropomorphic chassis ripped directly (and quite a few cases, literally!) from Japanese anime to more mechanical Walking Tank designs more typical of Western mecha (which, ironically, BattleTech helped to popularize). The anthropomorphic 'man-walkers' from the early days are often redesigned to look less like guys wearing goofy cardboard box costumes and more like robots merely inspired by the human form; compare the Banshee BNC-3E◊ from 1984 to the BNC-1E◊from 2012.
  • And it's gone full circle with the new Classics redesigns for the Unseen, which shed many of the artistic hallmarks of the source material in favor of a more unified art style in line more with recent art while still honoring (as far as copyright law will allow) the original designs.
• Artifact Title: in-universe in several cases.
  • Hanse Davion is First Prince of the Federated Suns, which has no other Princes, because when the title was introduced the Federated Suns was divided between five princes and the Davions were simply first-among-equals. The other four principalities were abolished following a civil war.
  • It might seem strange that the ruler of the Draconis Combine is merely called the Coordinator, but the first leader of House Kurita used the apparently humble title to allay the suspicions of rivals within what was then the Alliance of Galedon until he could position himself to eliminate them.
• Artificial Gravity: JumpShips have rotating grav decks, while DropShips use thrust to simulate gravity. The not-quite-canon animated series also features grav boots.
  • Centrifugal Gravity
• As You Know: The Shattered Sphere sourcebook contains many excerpts from Lyran propaganda. The editor of the In-Universe document makes many notations correcting the historical events covered. Thing is, they are addressed towards Victor Steiner-Davion, usually regarding events that Victor himself was involved in.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • Megamek is an open-source java application that emulates the board game on the computer. In-universe, a nod is given in also being the name of the official military strategic planning software that the Lyran Alliance uses.
  • The epigraph for the recent novel "Children of Karensky," by Blaine Pardoe, is attributed to one Randolph P. Checkers, a character created/played by Tex of The Black Pants Legion, known to the Battletech community for his "Tex Talks Battletech" series of short videos and feature-length documentaries.
  • Supposedly the story behind the existence of the UM-AIV Urbanmech variant s that one of the game designers at GenCon saw a fan-made model of an Urbanmech launching a nuke that he loved so much he made the supplement that introduced it just to make it canon.
• Ascended Glitch: The original sourcebook illustration of the Commando showed its head tilted to one side, which subsequent illustrators misinterpreted as an asymmetrical head with a weird, lopsided "helmet". Almost every redesign since has continued to give the Commando an asymmetrical head in some way, the current version having prominent targeting lenses on one side of its face (which, combined with its domed head, small size and stocky, humanoid build, gives it a passing resemblance to the Scopedog).
• Ascended Meme: The toy for the Mauler from the animated series had an ejection seat that triggered when a panel on the lower-center torso was hit. This would eventually lead to the "Daboku" (The prototype for what would become the Mauler in canon) having a faulty ammunition safety feature that would trigger the auto-eject system at an impact to the lower center torso.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: The Clans work this way. Amusingly, they also get hit with the predictable downside: because their system selects on single-combat prowess, it also doesn't select based on organizational or unit-based tactical skills. In combat with the Inner Sphere at the strategic scale, they lose more often then they win.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Clan Ice Hellion's preferred method of operation, in both politics and war. Combined with their impatience, it usually ends poorly. So poorly that most of them got killed by the Falcons and Horses and the rest were Absorbed by the Scorpions.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The raison d'etre of Battlemech combat. The invention of war machines much more expensive and much less effective than battalions of tanks or legions of infantry was supposed to make humans think twice about fighting each other, but of course that didn't happen. Ironically it kinda worked. Most "wars" for a planet only involves an dozen or so mechs, in an open area, after a battle or two the loser walks off.
  • In the early days of the game, the vehicle rules underwent several rounds of nerfing to keep Mechs the dominant unit on the battlefield. People kept spending their points on tons of hovercraft and swarming the big slow targets. Another related hampering of most non-mech units is the inability for them to mount double heat sinks for better heat dissipation, which is why energy weapons are not the to go weapons for most of them.
  • Most Solaris 7 inventions are beyond useless in an actual battlefield, but are used in the arena because of how flashy they are. Swords, bucklers, Bombast lasers, and Flails are all popular weapons.
  • Many of the more iconic 'Mechs are ridiculously impractical. For example, the Mad-Cat/Timberwolf (the one with two beam arms and big missile launcher shoulders - currently the page image) is, pound for pound, one of the absolute best Heavy 'Mechs that you can get, with an OmniMech design that makes it versatile, an array of weapons that makes it deadly at any potential range (in its default configuration), and a price tag that makes it completely ridiculous to afford. The Timberwolf has a cost of 24 million C-Bills. An Atlas (the other iconic Mech, with a skull-like face design) has a cost of a little over 9.5 million C-Bills, and is almost as powerful as a Timberwolf (sacrificing some versatility for firepower). Meaning you can buy two Atlas 'Mechs for the price of one Timberwolf. This is emblematic of Clan 'Mechs. Of course, being the Clans, their 'Mechs and technology are not typically for sale on the open market. . . until the mid-late 3060s, when Clan Diamond Shark smells money in the water^note Though the Diamond Sharks had to step pretty lightly to avoid the other Clans taking umbrage at the selling of cutting-edge Clan military technology to what was still more-or-less the enemy.
    • Clan 'Mechs (especially most "Primary" OmniMech configurations) have a marked tendency to pack way more weapons onto the platform than they can reasonably ever use. The above Timber Wolf, with its arrays of PPCs, ER and pulse lasers, and missiles; the Warhawk with its four PPCs; the Nova with its twelve ER Medium Lasers; and most Dire Wolf configurations are standout examples. Firing all, or even most, of the available weapons on any of these will spike your heat into "this is bad" territory, if not push it all the way to automatic shutdown. Inner Sphere 'Mechs have this problem both less and more: Succession Wars era designs lost double heat sink technology, but also the XL engines and Endo Steel structure that let you pack more weapons into a 'Mech, with the result that many 'Mechs from that time will have either one group of weapons for one job (say, long-range fire) and one for another (say, close-in brawling) and you're simply not supposed to use both sets at the same time. Others just have a jumble of assorted guns, leaving it to pilot discretion what and how much to fire at any given time and whether or not to risk overheating. As the Inner Sphere recovered Star League technologies, it became possible to mount more equipment on 'Mechs, though many were still limited by the extra bulk of the lighter systems. The Marauder II is a sterling example of this, with a pants-browningly scary array of PPCs, ER Medium Lasers, and an autocannon, but so packed with goodies it has no space for Double Heat Sinks, making the heat of its weapons fire (and the possibility of that detonating its AC ammo) a very real concern.
    • "Zero-Heat Alpha Builds" straddle between this and Boring, but Practical. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a 'Mech build that can fire all of its weapons at once with zero heat buildup. Of course, doing so means you're packing a lot less firepower than most other 'Mechs in your weight range, and lack an eleven to dial your 'Mech up to if you absolutely, positively need to kill an enemy 'Mech NOW. You're either undergunned compared to a different variant of the same 'Mech, your internals are filled with heat sinks (which can take crits and ruin your zero-heat alpha strategy) or both. That said, it's enormously satisfying (and can be quite effective) to let fly with EVERYTHING and not have to worry about the deleterious effects of heat.
  • Any weapon that gets over ten damage starts to stray into this territory, due to being being exceptionally heavy, taking up several critical slots, extremely high heat, extremely low ammo-per-ton, or a combination of the above. The Clan ERPPC weighs only six tons, takes only two critical slots, and does fifteen damage. . . for the price of fifteen heat (for reference, if a 'Mech's heat reachs 30, it's automatic shutdown)^note You'll need eight double heat sinks to absorb this heat, so the actual weight of an ERPPC plus what it needs to be used effectively is fourteen tons and eighteen critical slots. Comparatively, a Clan Ultra Autocannon/20 does 20 damage for 7 heat (40 for 14 if you rapid-fire it and risk it jamming and becoming useless for the rest of the game), weighs twelve tons, takes eight crit slots, and gets only 5 shots per ton of ammo (and has not quite half the range of the ERPPC). LRM-15, LRM-20, and SRM-6 launchers are comparatively forgiving in terms of weight, heat, slots, and ammo. . . but there's no guarantee every missile fired will hit, and thus that you'll get the weapon's full damage potential every time you fire it.

B

• Badass Army: The (larger) Mercenary company armies are usually made of the best of the best MechWarriors, pilots, and crews.
  • Many of the most prestigious House regiments, frontline Clan galaxies, the ComGuards and the Blakist Shadow Divisions also fall here. Getting a place within these units is an incredibly competitive process and many of the above mentioned mercenary units tend to recruit from House veterans who mustered out.
  • The Star League Defense Force was this by design. They needed to be better armed, stronger, and more technologically advanced than the Great House's militaries to enforce the peace. At the time of Operation Exodus, even after losing more than 60% of their forces in the Amaris Civil War, the SLDF was still the most powerful military force in the Inner Sphere.
• Balance, Power, Skill, Gimmick: The four non-FWL Great Houses fit roughly into this. The Federated Suns are Balance, the Lyran Commonwealth favors heavy-duty firepower, the Draconnis Combine in contrast, prefers undergunned, over-engined mechs, and the Capellan Confederation make up for their relative conventional weakness through gureilla tactics and electronic warfare.
• Balkanize Me: The Free Worlds League effectively ceased to exist during the Jihad, leaving half-dozen of larger nations and hundreds of independent planet-states. Most of the states were reunited later in 3139 by a descendant of the last Captain-General.
  • After the failure of HPG network most of the Republic of the Sphere border prefectures seccedded either to strike it on their own or to join the Successor State or Clan they originally belonged to.
  • At the start of Il-Clan era the combination of Lyran Commonwealth's inability to respond and the Jade Falcons leaving behind a massive power vacuum in their haste towards Terra gave rise to various opportunists carving out their own private kingdoms in the former Falcon OZ.
• Batman Gambit: Ulric Kerensky deliberately sabotaged the Clan Invasion by having his Clan Wolf perform better than the other Clans, which caused the other Invader Clans, already poorly equipped logistically and mentally unprepared for strategic-level warfare, to trip over each other and spread themselves thin trying to one-up the Wolves. When he was tried by the Clan Council after the war, it basically consisted of Ulric and his defense proving that he was just doing his job.
  • He also pulled another gambit during the Refusal War with the Jade Falcons. Most of the Wolf warriors he led into battle were of the Crusader faction, while he sent most of the Warden-minded ones away to the Inner Sphere. Win or lose, he would thin out the ranks of the Crusader-oriented Wolves who were causing problems as well as deny the Falcons the pleasure of beating Wardens. However he also got hit by one where the Jade Falcons used their freeborn and low-skilled trueborn warriors as Cannon Fodder for Zerg rushes, so that by the time the Wolves got to the high-ranking and/or skilled Falcons they were worn down first.
  • The Battle of Tukayyid is another example. Long story short, ComStar realized that the Clans were basically unstoppable because the Inner Sphere couldn't band together to fight them off. ComStar decided, therefore, to challenge the Clans to a winner-takes-all battle on Tukayyid, inviting the Clans to bring their absolute best to the battle, with the results of victory either being that ComStar loses and doesn't stop the Clans from taking Terra, or ComStar wins and the Clans have to stop the invasion for 15 years. The Clans jumped at the chance, and ComStar committed almost all their forces to the battle. The gambit was that either ComStar somehow managed to eke out a victory and stop the Clans cold, or ComStar lost but absolutely devastated the Clans by mangling all of their best equipment and pilots beyond repair. After 20 days of vicious fighting, ComStar did both, sacrificing a hell of a lot of lives, but ultimately forcing the Clans to admit defeat (and therefore prompting the 15 year truce and stopping the invasion), and also ripping apart the Clan war machine to the point that only 40% of their assets were repairable, with the other 60% either lost outright or damaged well beyond the point of repair.
    • Going back to Ulric Kerensky again, he provoked Tukayyid by leaking to ComStar (who'd previously been fully cooperating with the Clans) the fact that the Clans' ultimate objective was Terra- their own home world. This galvanised ComStar into ceasing their collaboration and stepping up to stop the Clans dead, just as the Warden ilKhan wanted. And then just to ice the cake, Clan Wolf was the only Clan to actually cleanly win on Tukayyid due to Kerensky's foreknowledge of what ComStar was going to do.
• Batman Grabs a Gun: Word of Blake breaking the Nuclear Weapons Taboo pisses off every other faction enough to get them to collectively nuke the Blakists back.
• Beam Spam: The state of any battle in which a 'Mech with more than five laser weapons is in, with bonuses for pulse lasers. A number of designs, such as the Nova/Black Hawk Prime and the Flashman, are built to bring this.
  • Honorable mention also goes to designs such as the Awesome, the Warhawk, and the Hellstar, which carry multiple particle projection cannons, easily the largest and most destructive energy weapons available in the setting. And the I-UK Timberwolf variant, what with packing 11 ER Medium lasers and an ER Large laser, is it's own walking rave party.
  • The Medium Laser is ideally suited to this. It is, succinctly, perfectly balanced: One ton, one crit slot, no ammo requirements, three heat, five damage, respectable (albeit still short) range, and cheap if you're going into more campaign-based play. You can cram a stupid amount of these on a modern medium mech design and still have enough weight left over for extra heat sinks (double type, natch) to at least allow for most of them to be fired. Offshoot variants don't manage it quite as well; either due to range and weight (pulse variant) or excess heat (extended range variant). Some crazy, fan-constructed variants have mounted upwards of 50 of them into a single mech. That's more than enough potential damage to completely shuck even the heaviest mechs of all of its armor in a single salvo.
    • There is a canonical 'Mech that does precisely that—the Komodo is a 45-ton 'Mech designed to kill Power Armor. To do this, it brings a pants-browningly terrifying battery of ten medium lasers to the field, which is enough firepower to slag over three tons of armor in a single salvo. Note that the heaviest battle armor suits only weigh two tons.
• Bears Are Bad News: Clan Ghost Bear symbology elicits this. They have a very heavy-weighted military, and became the premier Warden Clan after the Refusal War tore asunder Clan Wolf, the previous de facto leader of the Wardens. During the Jihad, a combination of a bombing by the Word of Blake at a summit on dealing with the Blakists claiming their Khan's life (among many others), and a series of usages of weapons of mass destruction against their civilian castes, prompted the Bears to throw all rules of warfare to the wind and went full "take no prisoners" against the Blakists. Their fury was so unrestrained that they were even attacking other anti-Blakist forces who got in their way, until they came to their senses.
• Becoming the Mask: Wolf's Dragoons apparently preferred life as mercenaries to life in Clan society, though it helps that Ulric Kerensky specifically ordered them to help prepare the Inner Sphere for the Clan Invasion in secret.
  • The "false Thomas Marik" strived to become an actually good leader of the Free Worlds League: unfortunately, when he tried to distance the FWL from the Word of Blake (which was incidentally lead by the real Thomas) they revealed that he was an impostor, which caused the FWL to collapse from different parties claiming that they had the true claim on the seat of Director-General, a situation that would persist until 3139 (ironically, the Director-General of the new state was the "false" Marik's daughter).
• Behemoth Battle: Tactical wargame centered on giant piloted robots (or mechs). Had a focus on team tactics, ie groups of mechs fighting each other. Spawned the BattleTech Expanded Universe franchise.
• Benevolent Alien Invasion: Partway through the Clan Invasion, Clan Ghost Bear realized that if they were to actually move to the Inner Sphere, they should treat it better, so they brought in their garrison Galaxies and Merchant Caste members to serve a double role - freeing up their mainline forces to serve in the invasion proper, while also assisting in public works and infrastructure rebuilding in order to improve their image in the eyes of those conquered. This paid off for them in a big way when they transferred almost all of their Homeworld assets to their Inner Sphere holdings, and were even able to negotiate a peaceful annexation of the remains of the Free Rasalhague Republic into what would then be known as the Rasalhague Dominion.
• The Berserker: Clan Smoke Jaguar was absolutely brutal in battling their enemies and in their treatment of conquered civilians. Their leadership only amplified the resulting problems with internal political skullduggery and shortsightedness regarding logistics. This attitude didn't work out very well; their brutality led to the Inner Sphere singling them out for destruction (both for their atrocities and their fighting prowess) and the rest of the Clans standing by and allowing the Jaguars to be destroyed.
  • Clan Ghost Bear also displays this attitude towards their enemies if they have been sufficiently angered enough by whoever is facing them.
• Bigger Is Better: The favorite strategy of the Lyran military is to send a slow avalanche of metal at their enemies. Some of their generals use heavy 'Mechs for recon, and are stymied why anyone would bother with medium and light units at all. Clan Ghost Bear also has a similar bias in their mechs, thanks to an abundance of raw materials enabling them to bias their touman (a Clan term meaning all the organic military assets, i.e. mechs, tanks, aircraft etc.) on the heavier side.
  • Explicitly mentioned in the description of the Heavy Gauss Rifle in MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries ("Built around the concept that bigger is better, [...]"). No prize for guessing which nation commissioned that design.
  • Who was the first nation to field the Autocannon/20, the first headchopper weapon mountable on a 'mech, in centuries past? You guessed it... the Lyrans.
  • Amusingly, contrary to the stereotype the Lyrans actually do canonically have quite a few quality light 'Mech designs to call their own...which promptly led to some fans jokingly referring to such fully-fledged 'Mechs as the 25-ton Commando as "Lyran battle armor". The trope is also ultimately subverted — despite the big machines and a prestigious MechWarrior academy or two, the Lyran military gets just perhaps the least respect among those of the five major Successor States, due in large part to frequently less-than-competent leadership.
• BFG: All 'Mech guns, really. But then there are Seriously Big Effin' Guns; Gauss rifles heavy and standard, any autocannon in the 20-bore size, Clan ER-PPCs, and Long Tom artillery pieces, any of which is sufficent to blow a suit of power armor to vapor or take a 'Mech's head clean off with one shot. And just as a modern tank's main gun is huge compared to a rifle but tiny compared to a battleship's turret, a Mech's guns are small compared to naval artillery as found on Dropships and Warships.
  • In infantry variants, there's Gauss rifles, which can be quite large. Or autojet rifles, which are like the Warhammer 40K bolters, imagine a modern rifle, except it shoots a rocket propelled, explosive tipped mini-rocket.
  • A mild subversion kicks in as units get bigger, though — eventually there aren't any bigger guns anymore and the only thing really left to do is mount more instead. For instance, even the heaviest individual BattleMech-portable weapons can in a pinch be squeezed into a medium 'Mech frame; the result may not carry any other weapons beyond its signature BFG and possibly cut some corners in other areas, but it can in principle be done. There isn't a single weapon that would actually require a heavy or assault 'Mech just to carry it.
• BFS: Starting around 3050, Mechs gained a new melee option in mech sized swords, which further got expanded into experimental Vibroweapons versions later on. Should be noted that except for the aforementioned Vibro weapons, the melee weapons are basically stylized 5 ton metal clubs.
  • Compared to hatchets, swords have a better hit chance (due to better weapon balance) with a minor drop in potential damage.
• Black Box: Thanks to the devastation of the Succession Wars, any Lostech that hasn't vanished completely from the Inner Sphere ends up as this - usable by whomever can get their hands on it, perhaps even repairable to a limited degree, but good luck trying to replicate it. In one famous case, a fully automated Battlemech factory was allowed to run without human intervention for centuries, lest any attempt to uncover its secrets render it inoperable instead.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Retractable Blades◊, which fit onto the arm of a 'Mech for extra stabby-ness.
• Bling of War: Due to their proclivity to consider themselves something of an incarnation of medieval knights ^note  which, considering the neo-feudal nature of the inner sphere, isn't entirely incorrect, some mechwarriors elect to decorate their war machines with gaudy and colourful paintjobs based on their allegiances or personal heraldry. Taken up to 11 in most videogame depictions of Rasalhague 'Mechs, which normally incorporate intricate norse inspired gold and silver patterns into their battlemechs' armour along several shades of blue, guaranteeing that their 'Mechs are the shiniest killing machines in the field of battle.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Clans, at least to the Inner Sphere.
• Blood Sport: Solaris VII. Subverted in that while their Mechs will inevitably get destroyed thanks to the There Can Only Be One stipulation in the games, pilots themselves usually do not get killed; they will eject once their Mechs are nearing destruction.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Armor on BattleMechs, other vehicles and Battle Armor functions essentially as extra hit points that need to be ticked off before reaching the internal structure.
• Boom, Headshot!: Any weapon that can reliably outright destroy even an undamaged 'mech head in one shot should the Random Number God favor your hit location roll are colloquially referred to as "headchopper" guns. They're typically given much higher values in systems meant to quantify combat effectiveness.
  • In Wars of Reaving, this is how Etienne (leader of The Society) anticlimactically goes out - the Jade Falcons storm his sanctuary, and Loremaster Kael Pershaw shoots him in the face as soon as he visually confirms Etienne's identity.
• Boring, but Practical: All that Double Heat Sinks do is the same job as classic single heat sinks, only twice as well for the same weight...which basically renders the former obsolete and allows for unit designs with hitherto-unprecedented levels of firepower for their respective weight class. Their extra bulk meant as a counterbalance doesn't quite do the job, as every 'Mech gets ten weight-and-space free heat sinks in their engine, and heavier engines can have a number of space-but-not-weight free heat sinks built into the engine, and these become double as well. With their advent, many 'mechs just mount those free double heat sinks and none additional, especially if there aren't many energy weapons on board. Assault 'mechs are the only ones that really have problems with double heat sinks' bulk, since their typically heavy-duty weapon arrays are also quite voluminous as well and compete for space in designing. Inner Sphere 'Mechs really suffer from this, as IS Double Heat Sinks take three crit slots, while Clan Double Heat Sinks take only two.
  • In terms of weapons, the trope is embodied first and foremost by the medium laser. Modest damage, fairly short range... lightweight, compact, heat-efficient, no ammo needs, and arguably the most ubiquitous BattleMech weapon in the entire Inner Sphere. You'll be hard pressed to find a 'Mech that does not have at least one medium laser, either as a main gun on certain light 'Mechs or a reliable backup weapon on heavier ones. And since it's very easy to stack up multiple medium lasers due to their neatly packed size and mass, quantity has a quality all its own.
  • The Clan ER Large Laser. It's a bit heat inefficient (10 damage for 12 heat), lacking the raw punch of the ERPPC or the hit bonus of the Large Pulse Laser, and does not have those two weapons' heat efficiency (both deal equal amounts of heat and damage). But it's two tons lighter and one less crit slot than both, and is the third-longest-ranged weapon in the game (tied with the Light Gauss Rifle) in most eras. Not LRMs, not Gauss Rifles, not ERPPCs can reach out and touch someone as far as the Clan ER Large Laser can. It is exceeded only by the Inner Sphere LB 2-X and Clan Ultra Autocannons by two hexes, and the Clan LB 2-X Autocannon by five, and does between six and nine more damage. Heat problems on many Clan 'Mechs can be solved by replacing ERPPCs with ER Large Lasers, gaining two hexes of range in the process and rolling the space and weight savings into more heat sinks.
  • Among Autocannons, the 10 class. Their range is solid, though not as insanely far-reaching as the 2 and 5s, and their damage is good, though not as brutal as the 20s. They're heavy and bulky, but not punishingly so, and have a decent amount of ammo per ton. Compared to the awesomeness of the extreme range 2s and 5s that deal Scratch Damage, or the terrifying punch of the 20 that your enemy may never let you get close enough to use, the class 10 autocannon is good all-round choice when you want a bit of dakka.
  • Also, all those fancy BattleMech melee weapons and cool death-from-above moves? Frequently pale in comparison to a plain old 'Mech-sized kick, which comes completely free of charge^note Well, you can't have fired any leg-mounted weapons that turn... not a concern for most designs that aren't called Crusader. and tends to be accurate and do a fair chunk of damage — often to a target 'Mech's legs, which can cripple its mobility in short order once armor is breached. Yes, there's a chance of overbalancing and falling yourself, but that's only if you miss in the first place. . . and hitting with a kick forces the target to roll to avoid falling.
    • Add the Triple Strength Myomer boost to the BattleMech kick and you pretty much can remove the legs from any foe who lighter then you, and even some of the same weight class if they skimp on leg armor in one kick. Against a downed foe, this can result in some pretty brutal curb stomps, and that's before you add the experimental Talon weapons for boosting kick damage. . . which, by the way, ALSO benefit from the TSM boost.
  • A 'Mech design that has taken a somewhat bad rap for this in recent years is the Hellstar — a Clan assault machine with maximum armor for its 95-ton weight, four extended-range PPCs whose heat buildup it can sink completely, and no explosive components to be concerned about. Since Clan ER PPCs are "headcappers", that means it can basically walk onto a battlefield, engage the enemy 'Mech of its choosing, and has a 1-in-9 chance each turn ^note 1-in-36 for a headshot in the hit location table X up to 4 chances per turn to kill its target right then and there or, even failing that, deliver a heavy pounding under which something is bound to give sooner or later...lather, rinse, repeat as needed.
  • Lore-wise, the fan-favorite UrbanMech is this. It's puny, slow, and can't take a hit. It's also optimized for Urban Warfare and carries a big gun that can take down Mechs twice its size. You may not see them in open battle, but they are almost guaranteed in urban situations. They are also very, very cheap to produce, and one can raise a garrison of these tiny terrors quickly and cheaply. And finally, from a technological viewpoint, while many mechs go obsolete and/or extinct due to the technological up and downs, the Urbie's been in production for centuries, that spareparts will always be available.
• Born Winner: This is what Clan trueborns are intended to be.
• Brain/Computer Interface: Clan "Enhanced Imaging" and the Inner Sphere's "Direct Neural Interface". Both allow the pilot to effectively control his or her 'Mech with their mind. Possible side effects include delusions of godhood and insanity. Direct Neural Interface also kills you after about a decade. Even among Clan warriors, most consider the consequences too excessive to be practical.
  • To clarify; all mechs are controlled in part by the pilot's mind, and always have been, via the Neurohelmet (which only requires a clean haircut instead of surgery). In particular, the mech's gyro is directly controlled by the pilot's sense of balance; whether an imbalance is pilot intent (such as tilting forward to walk or run) or peril (when a hard hit from weapons fire teeters the mech). It also gives indirect feedback^note Which has an inherent danger on its own: the reason that an ammunition explosion will always hurt the pilot is because of the feedback from the explosion essentially punching the pilot in the brain, giving pilots a kinesthetic sense of their 'mech to aid in such balance judgements. Direct Neural Interface is a two-way system, feeding data from the mech's sensors directly into the mind, rather than using conventional status displays, with all the dangers that implies^note The aforementioned ammunition explosion in a 'Mech will be felt by the pilot directly instead of just giving them feedback pain.
• Brave Scot: The Northwind Highlanders, an illustrious and storied large mercenary outfit, are this. Their emblem comprises of a scottish claymore over a plaid kilt banner, and one of their favored 'mechs is the 90 ton assault mech of the same name. Their reputation apparently was so fearsome that the Word of Blake just engaged in some trickery to make them think they were being blockaded instead of savaging planet Northwind like they did Outreach (home of Wolf's Dragoons); when Devlin's Coalition dropped in to investigate their absence, they only found that their satellite network was knocked out and Northwind was unspoiled. The Highlanders signed up with Stone's coalition once they learned just what the Blakist zealots were up to.
• Breakout Character: More like Break-Out Mech: The Atlas is one of the most memorable and noted mechs.
  • The "Mad Cat" (Clan name: Timber Wolf, pictured above) timeshares with the Atlas as the face of the franchise.
  • Among fans, the delightfully useless UrbanMech is uniquely loved.
• Breath Weapon: The Berserker◊ mounts a flamer where a person's mouth would be.
  • The Mongoose◊ has a similar mounting point for a small laser
• Broken Pedestal: After their self-imposed exile, the Star League Defense Forces became viewed as heroes by the Inner Sphere. And then their descendants returned. Violently.

C

• CamelCase: Throughout the setting. BattleMechs, IndustrialMechs, MechWarriors, WarShips, DropShips...
• Cadre of Foreign Bodyguards: The Fidelis in service of the Republic of the Sphere, though they were more of a special ops force than a true Praetorian Guard. Many suspected that they were survivors of Clan Wolverine, when in actually they were the survivors of the Smoke Jaguar Annihilation.
• Canon Welding: Michael A. Stackpole has revealed in a 2002 German interview that Wolf's Dragoons unintentionally became an advance recon force for the Clans while the writers were planning out the Clan Invasion. Specifically, during a convention in 1988, Stackpole and Battletech co-creator Jordan Weisman were speculating about Natasha Kerensky's connection with Alexandr Kerensky when Stackpole noted the coincidence of Wolf's Dragoons and one of their planned Clans sharing a name. Since the Dragoons already had a mysterious past, the writers were able to cleanly connect them to the Clans.
• Can't Stop the Signal: This is how the Helm Memory Core was distributed to the Inner Sphere. The Gray Death Legion mercenaries, rightfully not trusting ComStar in the matter, instead distributed copies of the library core to a large number of free traders, as well as certain specific people (such as Duke Hassid Ricol, who had aided them in the defense of the core); which ensured that, in spite of ComStar's efforts to destroy the core, they ultimately failed at eradicating it, which allowed for the long-standing decline of technology in the Inner Sphere to be reversed.
• Car Fu: An interesting take on the concept, this is the premise from the popular lighter class mech urban tactic "Death-From-Above". Step 1: Realize your 40-ton mech can't go head to head with a 80-tonner. Step 2: Flee between skycrapers. Step 3: Jump-jet onto top of building, one that's taller than your opponent. Step 4: Wait until opponent is in jump range. Step 5: Gain as much altitude as possible before letting your "light" 35 tons of steel and armament come crashing down on top of your opponent. This is usually considered a last ditch tactic, as even a successful DFA is likely to cause some damage to the attacking unit.
  • Not just light mechs, either. The Highlander, a 90 ton Assault class mech, has jumpjets that allow it to DFA. Doing so is called the Highlander Burial, and can easily result in an instant kill by crushing the targeted mech's cockpit. Even without the likelihood of a cockpit crush, landing 90 tons of 'mech on another will do massive damage to even another assault 'mech.
• Catchphrase:
  • The Clan batchall (Battle Challenge): "This is [Rank] [Name] of the [Unit Name]! What forces defend [Objective]?"^note The batchall is the Clan standard method of declaring their intentions for honorable combat: the version here is abbreviated. A formal batchall involves announcing your presence, announcing what units you have (in general terms; you can say you have a Star of 'Mechs, but you don't have to specifically indicate which 'Mechs, for example), announcing what your objective is, and then asking what forces the defender will commit to the battle. The batchall was designed by the Clans to preserve honorable combat, and also minimize losses: by declaring your attacking force, the defender could reasonably look at the correlation of forces and honorably withdraw without actually committing their forces to combat and therefore having to deal with combat losses (a serious concern in the resource-poor Kerensky Cluster the Clans call home). Needless to say, announcing your presence, forces and objectives doesn't work as well when the other side doesn't answer, like the Inner Sphere did when presented with the unknown combat rule: IS forces instead just got set up to blast their opponents, whether by surprise, ambush or otherwise, frequently replying to the batchall with something along the lines of "You want to know what forces I've got, come on down and find out." It speaks to the Clans superiority in combat and technological advantage that purposefully handicapping themselves didn't slow them down at all.
  • "Bargained well and done," spoken to accept the terms of a batchall.
  • And among the now-Annhilated Clan Wolverine:
    Wolverine 1: And what are we?
    Wolverine 2: (switching comms to broadcast in the clear) Wolverines!
• The Chessmaster: ComStar had a hand in instigating a good number of conflicts during the Succession Wars.
• Chest Blaster: Seen quite a bit, from BattleMechs that just install some secondary guns in the torso to support arm-mounted main weapons to such extremes as the Hollander light 'Mech that is basically just a BFG on legs (it's built around a Gauss rifle that, when also counting its ammo, accounts for almost half its total weight and looks the part). The construction rules actually somewhat encourage this by generally making the left and right side torso locations the ones with the most room to install weapons and other equipment.
  • Slightly less insane than the Hollander is the classic Hunchback, whose variants (with very few exceptions) mount the biggest cannon possible for their tech level into their right torso. A Hunchback that DOESN'T have a gargantuan cannon jammed into its torso is such a different beast that most pilots will not call it a Hunchback at all (they're Swaybacks instead)
  • Slightly more insane than the Hollander is the BZK-F7 variant of the Hollander II. Initially, the BZK-F5 Hollander II was built to address the original's shortcomings, increasing the 'Mech's mass by ten tons and adding extra armor and some backup weapons. Then someone had the bright idea of stripping out all of its weapons and replacing them with a single Heavy Gauss Rifle. This variant can potentially destroy itself without enemy help whatsoever.^note Explanation: Any 'Mech of 100 tons or less that moves and fires a Heavy Gauss Rifle in the same turn needs to make a piloting skill roll (of variable difficulty depending on its weight class, with mediums like this design being the second-worst possible) to retain its footing. If it fails, it falls, and should it land on its back the fall damage is more than enough to destroy the armor on a rear side torso and transfer over to the internal structure. Assuming this happens to the right torso, this has a good chance of damaging the Gauss rifle — they're big and there's not really anything else in there — and causing it to explode with enough force to gut the 'Mech outright.
  • The Clans built a model that takes it up to eleven: the Hunchback IIC features two Ultra AC/20s, one over each shoulder. Of course, in order to fit that sort firepower onto a mere 50-ton frame certain sacrifices had to be made... such as armor and speed. Or enough ammunition for more than two and a half turns of fire at full blaze. Getting assigned to one is therefore generally an invitation to go out in style.
  • Some 'Mechs have smaller weapons embedded in their torsos, and the models depict them with the bore situated not far from dead center on the machine. Examples include the Hermes II, the Peregrine, the OstScout and the Spider.
  • Special mention goes to the Fafnir, which has twin Heavy Gauss Rifles in its chest, enough to savage an entire Assault Mech unit even on its own^note And enough to core out the 'Mech in the event of a lucky critical hit to one of those Gauss Rifles, which will make it explode, which will then explode the other Gauss Rifle, which, if the first one didn't destroy the center torso region, the second will.
• Collateral Damage: BattleTech normally assumes that missed shots simply miss and have no other effect. There are three exceptions to this:
  • If a mech has partial cover, then any shots that would normally hit the location behind the cover hit the cover instead. If this is because a battlemech is standing behind a low hill, this doesn't really matter. If it's because the mech is standing behind a small building, on the other hand, the building takes the hit. This can potentially destroy the building if it takes enough damage.
  • Weapons that strike entire hexes, like artillery, always hit *something*. If you miss the target, you roll on the scatter chart to see which direction the shell drifts off-target, then calculate the distance based on how badly you missed by. This could mean that it hits another enemy unit. This could mean that it hits one of your own units. At point-blank range, this could potentially wind up drifting so badly that it lands behind the unit that fired the shell.
  • There are advanced rules for calculating a missed shot to see what it's chances are of hitting something else that's on the line from the attacking unit to the target. As this adds a lot of extra work, it slows the game down considerably and is therefore not used very often.
  • In the 2018 game, a mech standing behind (or in front of) the target can take stray hits from shots that miss.
• Chicken Walker: Quite a few 'Mechs have reverse-joint legs, including favorites like the Marauder or the Timber Wolf.
• Church Militant: The Word of Blake, its predecessor pre-schism ComStar, and Clan Cloud Cobra
  • Modern-day ComStar itself may be considered one as well, though with the religious aspects toned well down. Still, old habits die hard.
  • The Brotherhood of Randis straddles the line between this and Knights In Shining Armor. At any given time, a Knight can be studying the Bible, helping to build a hospital, or blasting the hell out of pirates.
  • Also astride the same line above are the Knights of the New Avalon Catholic Church, who formed out of House Davion MechWarriors fed up with their comrades-in-arms who'd formed secret societies called MechWarrior Brotherhoods. The Brotherhoods were abusing their position in society to extort, harass and brutalize civilians, and the KotNACC fought to put a stop to it, with the blessing of the Church.
• The Clan: The different Bloodname families in the Clans work like this.
• Colony Drop: The Jihad had a few Asteroid Drops caused by Word of Blake, in one case framing the Federated Suns in the eyes of Taurian Concordat, sparking another front the Suns didn't need.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Frequently Inner Sphere troops in general when compared to the Clans. Not all Clan warriors put Honor Before Reason, but enough of them do that peer pressure tends to keep the rest in line while the "dirty Spheroids" are largely free to run the gamut of what the Honor crowd considers acceptable tactics to gain an advantage in combat.
  • Theodore Kurita, mastermind of the Draconis victory in the War of 3039, is this compared to his father Takashi Kurita. Takashi was a staunch disciple of Bushido, which resulted in a bad showing in the Fourth Succession War. By the time the War of 3039 rolled around, his son Theodore was being groomed for succession and had already become general of all the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery. His more pragmatic view to warfare was a major factor in the change of fortunes compared to the Fourth Succession War. Teddy's son Hohiro Kurita in turn is more a mind like his father than his grandfather, which makes the two far more able to strategically combat the Clans than the old die-hard Bushido warriors in the DCMS.
  • The hat of Clan Star Adder is that, amongst the Clans, they most resemble a professional military and prize unit cohesion, military intelligence and long-term strategic thinking. Ironically this tendency kept them out of the Clan Invasion because their realistic assessment of what invading the Inner Sphere would require caused them to make a bid that was considered laughably overkill by the other Crusader Clans.
  • Clan Wolverine remained this as Nicholas Kerensky was pushing the Clans deeper into Honor Before Reason. It was one of the factors that lead to the other Clans not liking them very much, anyone challenging the Wolverines in Trial by Combat found themselves victims of disadvantageous terrain, flanking maneuvers, pincer attacks, ambushes, and combined fire.
• Company Store: Most nations in the Inner Sphere have tried to tie up mercenary companies in the national equivalents of "one company owns everything" from time to time, though some of the most famous incidents were the Draconis Combine's attempt to assimilate the Wolf's Dragoons into the Combine's military and the Federated Suns' hamhanded treatment of the Northwind Highlanders. Both ended tragically as the Dragoons ended up in a Pyrrhic Victory against Warlord Samsonov's forces on Misery, and the Highlanders, covertly backed by an agent of the Capellan Confederation who was a descendant of one of their heroes, decided to go independent when Katherine Steiner-Davion's actions triggered the FedCom Civil War, leaving FedSuns forces unable to keep hold of their homeworld of Northwind.
• Continuity Nod: The Era Report: 3145 gives a few nods to the Clix Mechwarrior boardgame and the WizKid era Dark Age novels:
  • The RISC cards, presented in-universe as unstable equipment that somehow shows up everywhere with no rhyme or reason, criticized by the in-universe writer of the report.
  • The inconsistent characterization of Anastasia Kerensky in the early novels:
  The aimless bouncing from one goal to the next that characterized her actions in the mid-3130s caused many observers to question her mental state, with some claiming she seemed like a different person each time she popped up into the public eye.
• Cool Helmet: The Neurohelmet. The pre-Succession Wars/post-Clan Invasion neurohelmet are similiar to jet fighter helmets, while the Succession Wars era helmets are massive 10 pound monstrosities that limit the wearer's field of view.
• Cool Shades: Most incarnations of the Banshee have a polarized windshield designed to look like the mech is wearing sunglasses.
• Corporate Warfare: Mostly by mercenary proxies.
• Corrupted Contingency: At the height of its power, the Star League built a series of nigh-impregnable orbital defenses around Terra in order to protect the capital world from any aggressors who might seek to conquer it. Unfortunately, when the usurper Stefan Amaris managed to take over the Star League in a manner that bypassed the orbital defenses^note (by becoming the First Lord of Star League's most trusted friend and advisor over the course of several years and then shooting him in the head), those same defenses exacted a terrible toll on the loyalist Star League Defense Force when it came to remove Amaris from power.
• Crapsack World: Dozens of worlds are actually quite nice to live on. It's the hundreds of others - alternately exploited, ignored, and conquered by somebody or other - that are lucky to exist on the industrial level.
  • Pretty much amounts to a Crapsack Galaxy on the whole...
  • Somewhat Averted however. 90% of the time, the factions go out of there way to prevent as much civilian losses as possible and for them being conquered just means a new flag.
• Critical Existence Failure: BattleArmor troops are the only ones that play this straight. A suit of BattleArmor has a certain number of armor points (depending on how heavy the suit is, how much of that weight it devotes to armor, and how advanced its builder's armor technology is), plus one for the trooper inside. The definitive BattleArmor, the Clan basic Elemental armor, has ten armor points. Hitting a BattleArmor trooper with a weapon that does ten damage means the suit's armor is completely stripped (and so, logically, the suit itself should be all but destroyed), but the trooper in question can still run, jump, shoot all his weapons (that still have ammo), and climb up a 'Mech to try and tear up its actuators with his armored hands. Only when that eleventh point of damage, representing the trooper inside, is taken, is the BattleArmor out of comission.
  • 'Mechs can theoretically remain active and functional with just one point of internal structure remaining on the center torso, but in reality a 'Mech is far more likely to sustain critical damage and become combat nonfunctional (or withdraw) well before that. Engines and gyros are in the center torso, three engine hits "kills" a 'Mech by forcing the engine to shut down; two gyro hits make it impossible for the 'Mech to stand (though it can prop itself up with its arms to keep shooting). Your shots aren't likely to all go to the CT, you'll scatter damage across left and right torsos, arms, legs, and head, which all have their own armor and structure and components you can damage to decrease the 'Mech's effectiveness. Killing a 'Mech by reducing its CT to zero structure is known as "coring" among the fans.
    • 'Mechs can easily suffer a CEF through one thing: ammo explosions. Damage transfers through a 'Mech, you see. . . hit a left arm that has only five structure with your Autocannon/20, fifteen of your damage isn't just lost, it goes to the left torso. When an ammo bin takes a critical hit, the ammunition explodes, dealing damage equal to what the weapon does when fired once times the number of shots remaining in that ton. So if a full ton (five shots) of AC/20 ammo explodes, it does 100 damage to the location it was stored in, and if that location can't absorb 100 points of damage without being destroyed (impossible), it transfers to the next location. Damage always transfers towards the CT, so a 'Mech suffering an ammo explosion (without the benefit of CASE to mitigate it) pretty much inevitably dies immediately.
  • Conventional vehicles can mount way more armor than a 'Mech of the same tonnage, and can put on a pretty frightening array of weapons to boot. But vehicles are very prone to suffering "motive system" crits, even when they have plenty of armor left, which can increase the difficulty of piloting rolls, reduce the vehicle's MP, or even render it immobile. They can also suffer "turret locked" crits, which locks the turret in the direction it was facing when the crit occurred. A good volley of fire can reduce your fearsome combat vehicle an expensive battlefield ornament.
  • Conventional infantry platoons are filled with One Hit Point Wonders, each point of damage kills one trooper (some weapons may be more or less efficient at this). The more soldiers are in the platoon, the more hits it can achieve and thus the more damage it can do, but the whole platoon is not destroyed until the very last soldier dies.
• Critical Failure: Death from Above attacks have a very high probability of dumping the attacking mech on its face, missing the target entirely. Rapid fire weapons like rotary and ultra-autocannons have a chance to jam if they're fired more than once in the same turn. It's possible to get critical failures from movement; roads are notoriously good at making your battlemechs stumble around like they're drunk, as players need to perform a roll when making high-speed maneuvers on smooth surfaces - fail the roll, and the mech will faceplant onto the road or the ground next to it. God forbid you have to turn on a road while in a city, as failing the rolls will make your mechs slam into buildings, taking huge amounts of damage and even worse depending on what you slam into you could then cause the building you slam into to collapse on top of you for more damage. You can also skid into other units. . . typically your own.
  • The Experimental Hyper-Velocity Autocannon lines have a Critical Failure condition where getting a bad enough roll when using one of these Autocannons causes the gun to blow up in your face for damage to the unit using them.
• Critical Hit: Any sort of combat machine, be it 'Mech, aerospace fighter, Dropship, or vehicle, can suffer critical hits to their internal components. These are applied once armor is lost, and generally speaking the loss of any single slot of a component rendered the whole weapon useless. Even worse, some components, like Gauss Rifles and most forms of ammunition, could explode if hit. Under certain conditions, some weapons can bypass your armor's threshold for damage mitigation to score a Through-Armor Critical Hit.
• Culture Chop Suey: While each nation has a dominant culture, they also have hundreds of billions of inhabitants across dozens or hundreds of worlds, each with its own influences. Then keep in mind that those nations that try to invoke historical cultures are usually going by bastardized interpretations of them, sometimes deliberately.
• Culture Clash: Hilarity Ensues when the Inner Sphere meets the Clans...
• Culture Police: The Draconis Combine's Order of the Five Pillars. The Word of Blake and pre-schism ComStar also had a department of ROM dedicated to maintaining ideological purity.
• Cumbersome Claws:
  • Battle Armor has several options for hands. Armored gloves let you do anything that a human could do with their hands (since they're literally just gloves over the wearer's hands)). Basic Manipulators are less dexterous and prevent the wearer from doing any tasks that require fine motor skills but are still good enough for basic tasks. And finally Battle Claws, which are weapons first and pretty dismal at any task that doesn't involve ripping enemies apart.
  • Battlemechs often have hands, but these can be replaced with claws as a melee weapon. Claw attacks deal more damage than punches but take a penalty on the attack role. On top of that, if the mech tries to use its claws for any task other than attacks (for example, trying to pick something up), they have to make a piloting skill check or they hit it with an accidental claw attack.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: In a sense, the Battle of Tukayyid: the Clans brought their best, and the opposing ComStar forces brought their...all. And then ComStar proceeded to fight to the literal death, which was not a battle that the Clans were prepared for (their way of life emphasized honorable retreat, and while death in combat was full of honor and glory, it was also something to be avoided due to relatively scarce resources in the Kerensky Cluster). In addition, ComStar had studied the Clans and knew that they couldn't decline a challenge without a serious loss of honor, which the warrior culture wouldn't allow, and ComStar also knew that the Clans preferred direct combat with 'Mechs over any other form of battle. As a result, ComStar was able to utterly savage the Clans using indirect attacks (artillery, aerospace assets, ambushes, etc), asymmetric warfare, direct challenges in which a Clan unit about to break and retreat was instead goaded into continuing the attack for honor's sake, and human wave tactics. The result was that ComStar lost a lot of lives and equipment, utterly savaged by the Clans superior weaponry, equipment and training, but the Clans lost worse, including most of their equipment and some of their best Mechwarriors for an entire generation.
  Tex Talks Battletech: tl;dr, the Clans brought their best. And Space AT&T said "Get bent, weirdo".
• Cyber Cyclops: The aptly-named Cyclops assault/command battlemech has a head which is dominated by a massive red/black glass canopy designed to look like a eye. In MechWarrior 4, it's also the mounting point for a large laser
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Clan Enhanced Imaging and the Word of Blake's Direct Neural Interface both allow the user much greater control over their vehicle. However they also cause psychological and physical problems; up to and including death after several years.
  • Generally averted for everything else; as long as you don't screw with the central nervous system than you can have as many Artificial Limbs and organs as you need. Even the extensively augmented Manei Domini, the above implant notwithstanding, are not merciless killers because of their augments; they are merely ideologically indoctrinated well before they were seriously upgraded.
• Cyborg: The Manei Domini elites of the Word of Blake.
  • Even before the Manei Domini, several characters were shown or described as having visible cybernetic prosthetic limbs or facial features, and the tabletop game recognizes the less subtle variants are more common than the 'stealthy' ones.
• The Cycle of Empires: The Successor States and the Crusader Clans are fighting one another to become the next empire after the Star League's fall.

D

• Dark Messiah: Nicholas Kerensky to the Clans and The Master to the Word of Blake. Lesser examples for other factions come up with distrubing freqenecy.
• Darwinist Desire: The Warrior castes of the Clans in Battle Tech practice eugenics. A Clan's scientists blend together the genes of two respected warriors and grow about a hundred (of which as few as five might survive childhood) kids in tanks.
• Days of Future Past: The rapid expansion of humanity eventually results in a reversion to quasi-feudal governments. Almost every government is ruled by a noble family, and via Rule of Cool, BattleMech pilots are compared to chivalric knights. The inclusion of monarchical intrigue and royal romance help put the soap back in Space Opera.
• Decadent Court: House Kurita's internal politicking is more often violent than not. Houses Liao and Steiner end up like this when the families crazier traits manifest in the current ruler. The Davions have to deal with a minefield of regional politics and lesser nobles while the Mariks have to contend with representatives from a few hundred worlds and very powerful provincial leaders. Civil wars are common in the Inner Sphere for this reason.
• Deadly Doctor: The Society
• Deadly Escape Mechanism: As BattleMech interiors tend to be extremely hot places, most 'Mech pilots dress for comfort rather than survival post-ejection, making them rather ill-equipped to handle all but the most temperate of environments outside their cockpits. And that's before considering the utter hellscape that is the average 31st-century battlefield. Or the fact that ejecting from a toppling 'Mech has the propensity to send the pilot rocketing straight into the nearest solid object. Or the design "quirks" of certain 'Mechs which make a successful ejection from them nigh impossible...
• Death from Above: You can attack from higher ground to gain a chance to hit enemy Mechs in the vulnerable head area, call in air strikes or artillery, or perhaps just jump into the air and drop one multi-ton machine onto another. That last one is specifically called Death From Above in-game and in-universe. One rulebook even considers it good form to loudly declare Death From Above while attempting it in the course of a game. The Highlander assault Mech is one of the few Mechs of its class that can perform this tactic thanks to having jump jets installed in the chassis as standard equipment, allowing it to execute the infamous "Highlander Burial" on opposing mechs smaller than itself.
• Death Seeker: For a Clan warrior, the highest goal is a glorious death amidst a sea of fallen enemies, as it proves you have the courage and skill to be worthy of your genes being used to breed future generations. To live past the age of thirty is shameful, unless you're high-ranking enough that your badassery is truly without question.
  • Common among disgraced Combine warriors, who either wish to die in battle or be granted permission to commit Seppeku, and in The Fundamentalist units in the Word of Blake (particularly the Manei Domini), often carry out suicide attacks so they can die for their beliefs.
  • Also not unknown among Capellan troops since the Fourth Succession War went badly for the Confederation, Romano Liao took over to salvage what was left, and retreating from the enemy in combat effectively became treason and punishable by death. She's dead now, but "hopeless battle syndrome" has remained a real problem well into the reign of her considerably more rational son Sun-Tzu.
• Death Trap: The base model of the Hunchback IIC mech is in-universe called one by most Clanners, since with it's light armor (for a medium size mech ) and sparse armaments (once the UAC20 ammo is gone it only has 2 medium lasers to fall back on) anyone put into one is not expected to make it out alive. Given the above trope, aging Clan warriors will sometimes request this assignment so they can have a chance to die gloriously.
• Death World: Many planets inhabitants depend on terraforming to stay alive on some of the worst examples. When the Star League collapsed and these technologies were lost, millions died in the Periphery to due disease and a lack of clean water and food.
  • The Clan homeworlds are at best considered sub optimal. Resources are in short supply, leading to wastefulness being a cardinal sin in Clan society. Many of the original SLDF exiles also contracted diseases in the early years. The Clans are also named for actual animals native (or modified and introduced) to their worlds, and these (which include lovely critters such as Steel Vipers, Ghost Bears and Smoke Jaguars) are often more dangerous than the Super Soldiers that took their names.
  • Dunkelwalderdunkelerfluesseschattenwelt in the Draconis Combine is reputed to be one, with flora and fauna that is marginally less deadly than Catachan from a different franchise. The dreaded nachtzehrer (a gigantic vampire bat-like creature) is even part of the planetary flag! ^note Don't go looking for it on current maps, though: The planet's citizens, fed up with the gigantic jawbreaker of a name, changed it to "Bob". Bureaucrats being what they are, the DCMS office in charge of supply shipments lost the declaration paperwork and so refused to send any new supplies to "Bob". The planet largely died, though pockets of colonists are still hanging on, and are bloody terrifying, given what they've had to survive for the past 300 years...
• Defector from Decadence: Candace Liao pulled this when the rest of her family got a bit too Ax-Crazy and started harming the Capellan Confederation.
  • Clan Nova Cat as a whole defected to the Inner Sphere once they realized that the Crusaders were going to destroy any chance of the Star League being reformed. Clan Wolf (In Exile) had this forced on them, they sought to protect the Inner Sphere from Crusader aggression (under orders and in accordance with the Warden philosophy) but then the Jade Falcons came along, cheated to win the Refusal War and then had the Warden Wolves Abjured without a Trial. The Ghost Bears started off as a Crusader Clan but then abandoned their beliefs and fully embraced the Warden ideology after the Invasion, and then completed their defection by merging with the Free Rasalhague Republic and thus turning into the Ghost Bear Dominion.
• Democracy Is Bad/Democracy Is Flawed: Democracy did not fare well in the BT universe, to say at least:
  • In the early days of colonization before the HPG communications became the norm, the democratic style of government was simply ineffectual, and even detrimental, for managing a large interstellar nations.
  • Terran Alliance, in its efforts to get rid of the large amount of problems it had managing the unruly colonies, voted to simply abandon the colonies past a certain distance, leading to associations with isolationism.
  • The democratic process in the Free Worlds League over the centuries has degenerated into a farce.
  • The Democracy Now! movement in the Lyran Commonwealth turned into a secessionist one during the Jihad.
• Designer Babies: The Clans' "trueborns" are all test-tube babies, with their genetics manipulated to create Super Soldiers. Goes right down to "Freebirth" being a really nasty slur — "freeborn" is the neutral term for describing someone born naturally, but "freebirth" is a racial slur similar in offensiveness to the N-word.
  • Freeborns did sometimes join the warrior caste though; more than one series of the associated fiction involved a despised, bottom-caste Freeborn proving his worth as a warrior. In addition, certain Clans hold little or no value on test tube baby superiority, awarding rank and status purely on merit.
  • There's the opposite, "Trashborn" or "Vatborn" which is used by Freeborns as a slur against Trueborns (usually where the Trueborns can't hear them).
  • Clanner opinion changed after extensive warfare versus the Inner Sphere, especially in proving that older warriors weren't necessarily inferior (most Clanners past the age of about 30-40 were relegated to "cannon fodder" duty strictly on age). All Inner Sphere warriors are Freeborns, many of them on par with Clan warriors and and few (Kai Allard-Liao) being remarkably deadlier than the best the Clans have to offer. Inner Sphere warriors frequently have a decade or more of experience on their Clan counterparts; by the Clan way of thinking, since the Trueborns of one generation are born of the absolute best of the previous generation, they all start out as good as that generation, and only get better as they're properly trained. Once they hit 30 years old, they're facing warriors three and four generations "improved" on them, thus the genetic equivalent of a biplane trying to take on a jet fighter. All-out warfare with the Inner Sphere (once the tech gap was narrowed significantly, and the Inner Sphere learned how to trick their way around it) proved that edge Clan warriors have is minimal (and possibly has more to do with their methods of training warriors from birth than any kind of genetic superiority), and thus that older warriors with greater experience are more valuable than a young, new, "genetically superior" raw recruit.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: Just about every vehicle in the game is customizable, or one can simply create wholly new designs from scratch; by the Total Warfare edition, there's an entirely separate book of construction rules, plus extra material to be found spread among several others. (Individual parts will still be off-the-shelf, though — whether you call it a ChisComp 43 Special or a Magna Mk III isn't going to make one large laser noticeably different from the next.)
• Diabolus ex Machina: Just when a lot of LosTech has been rediscovered and things are starting to stabilize into the Republic of the Sphere, somebody throws a wrench into the works by shutting down the Hyperpulse Generator (FTL communications) network. The setting more or less immediately reverts to the pre-3025 political arrangement.
  • This also happens earlier in the timeline, specifically in 3050: the Inner Sphere is stable (well, as stable as it gets), and there's relative peace after the end of the Fourth Succession War, as things stabilize into neutrality. And then the Clans show up and cut a huge swath of Periphery space away, all but destroying several smaller powers and permanently up-ending the political situation in the Inner Sphere forever.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Land-Air Mechs (or LAMs) tend to have some painful tradeoffs in durability and loadout flexibility due to the structural needs of their transforming capabilities, and usually have less armor or firepower than other battlemechs of equal tonnage. Using LAMs effectively requires you to keep them out of anything resembling a fair fight, make allowances for regular refuelling, and ideally requires a very large theater of operations that they can stretch their wings and fly for. However, if you apply them well, they become an absolute menace on a strategic level, as they can quickly lift off and break away from unfavorable fights and constantly reposition on the battlefield to menace exposed artillery, unguarded flanks, or supply lines, constantly picking away at enemy weakspots with hit-and-run raids that force the enemy to commit more defenses to their backlines and away from the front, slowing them down and weakening their combat positions.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: The way engine mass works, there is an optimal engine size and speed for any given 'Mech mass and while deviating from this may give some benefits, dramatically over-engining results in a 'Mech with virtually no room for weapons or armor as the engine mass increases more and more with each extra point of movement added. Conversely, under-engining results in smaller and smaller weight savings for the same reason. As such, most practical 'Mechs won't deviate much more than a point of movement in either direction from this curve. The later addition of Light and XL engines shifts this curve in favor of faster designs, but doesn't actually get rid of the curve.
  • Dramatic examples of over-engining can be seen with the Cicada and Charger, which have engines that take up more than half of their mass, leaving them badly undergunned and incapable of carrying the maximum armount of armor for a 'Mech of their tonnage.
  • Underengining can be seen in the UrbanMech, which could gain another point of movement for only 1.5 tons and of that 1.5 tons gained, an entire ton is spent on a heatsink that's not really necessary given that the UrbanMech can't actually generate enough heat to overtax even the ten heatsinks already included in the engine.
• Direct Line to the Author: All of the sourcebooks exist In-Universe as secret reports, historical textbooks, vehicle manuals or something else along those lines.
• Divided States of America: The USA hasn't existed since the 21st century in the setting, but the Terran Hegemony and the Free Worlds League are close enough to qualify. In the Terran Hegemony's case their territory was divided up by the Successor States in a series of brutal wars following the fall of the Star League. In the Free World League's case . . . well, it's pretty much a Running Joke in the franchise that there's a betting pool going for when their next civil war is going to break out.
• Divided We Fall: The Free Worlds League tends to fight itself as often as it battles as other Successor States, mostly due to the fact that it's a collection of hundreds of "free worlds". It has had numerous civil wars (which are always exploited by the other Houses, and some of them are actually triggered by foreign spies) and during the Jihad broke up into no less than three major powers who all claimed to be the "true" Free Worlds League and were willing to fight to prove it. All while fighting the Word of Blake.
  • Clan Fire Mandril is arguably even worse than the League and this was intentional on the part of their first Khan. Divided into several Kindras they battle amongst themselves so often that they routinely get pulverized by other Clans. It got so bad that they were eventually Absorbed during the Wars of Reaving.
  • The Draconis Combine began to have these issues during the Clan Invasion and it only got worse as time went on. The reforms of Theodore Kurita were opposed by the Black Dragon Society, a bunch of hardline samurai traditionalists, who eventually engaged in armed rebellion against House Kurita. At the exact time the Word of Blake started its Jihad.
• Double Meaning: Theodore Kurita's warning about Operation Scorpion to Hanse Davion had manifold meaning to it, where even the medium used was part of the message: the Secret Black Box Tech outside of ComStar's perception. First, he revealed to the Feds that the Dracs had figured out Black Box tech as well. Second, he conveyed really did not want ComStar to eavesdrop on their communique at all. And third, Teddy considerd revealing that the Dracs had figured out Black Box tech to the Feds an acceptable price to pay to convey how dire his warning is, and Hanse gave it all due urgency in response.
• The Dreaded: Many individuals and military units fall here. However during the Succession Wars the mere threat that ComStar was considering to Interdict you (refusing any communication services) was enough to get all but the gutsiest leaders to back off. This is understandable as without the HPG network a nation is restricted to using months long and resource consuming Jumpship courier routes for interplanetary communication; throwing their military efforts, intelligence networks and economics into chaos.
  • In terms of mechs there's the Dire Wolf, a hundred ton Clan Assault OmniMech better known to the Inner Sphere as the Daishi, Japanese for 'Great Death' (Unless it's on your side then the Buddhist translation of Daishi "Great Master" probably implies instead). It is every bit as implacable as an Atlas and a smidge over half of its 100 tons loaded mass is available for a modular arsenal, which inevitably include a pastiche of Gauss Rifles, Ultra Autocannons, Pulse Lasers and the feared Clan ER PPCs. It's not unheard of for one of these mechs to destroy twice its own weight in Inner Sphere units before being taken down.
  • Speaking of the Atlas, that mech was deliberately designed to invoke this trope with a sinister skull motif on its cockpit in addition to its incredible arsenal.
  • Among conventional combat vehicles, there's the Demolisher heavy tank, the Shrek PPC carrier, and the Alacorn Heavy Tank. Not only are these three feared by any other combat vehicle crew, but even the cockiest 'mech pilots will soon lose their nerve when faced off with (respectively) dual AC/20s, a trio of Particle Projector Cannons, or a trio of Gauss Rifles. These armaments are all top-tier heavy-damage weapons in Energy and Ballistic classes, and each vehicle mounts multiples of them, something that's a challenge to design even an assault mech to carry^note The number of 'Mechs that are designed to hold three PPCs can be counted on one hand, and they have severe heat issues as a result. A 'Mech mounting a single AC/20 is considered dangerous, and the weapon is heavy enough that mounting two is normally unfeasible. A Gauss Rifle has the range exceeding a PPC and does enough damage to take a 'mech head off in one hit.
• The Dreaded Dreadnought: Played With. Dreadnought-class WarShips are not the biggest or most powerful in the setting, but they were the first, and all other WarShips owe their existence to that class.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Done completely by accident with the mercenary unit The Black Thorns, whom had been the subject of two novels and one sourcebook. Early into the Jihad arc, fighting between Combine and Suns forces accidentally released a deadly bio-engineered plague on the planet Galedon V which led to the planet being sterilized with nukes. When a writer later wanted to write a short story on the Black Thorns, fact checkers discovered the unit had been last seen assigned to garrison duty on Galedon V... Rather than try to retcon or rewrite the story, the developers simply decided the Black Thorns were all wiped out from either the plague or the nuclear bombardment.
  • They weren't terribly broken up by the error — Here's then-Line Developer Herb Beas' recollection of how he reacted to the situation. Complete with a Sincerity Mode "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer.
• Drop Ship: Literally called that, probably as a Shout-Out to the original Starship Troopers novel, which was published 25 years before BattleTech.
• The Dog Bites Back: At the dawn of the ilClan era, Clan Jade Falcon was hit with a double dose of this. Their Khan, Malvina Hazen, was ultimately stabbed to death by their adoptive "daughter", Cynthy, after a long period of physical and emotional abuse. When Galaxy Commander Stephanie Chitsu (who was a staunch opponent of Hazen's cruel methods) found the dying Khan, they ultimately decided to ignore the "Chinggis Khan"'s demands for aid. On a larger scale, Clan Hell's Horses, taking advantage of the Falcons' weakness following the ilClan Trials, struck back at the Falcons for Hazen's perversion of the Horses' Mongol Doctrine, as well as being made unwilling allies of the Falcons; launching Operation: STAMPEDE and taking several Falcon worlds.
• Double-Meaning Title: The Inner Sphere Reporting Name of the Dire Wolf, the Daishi is either translated from Japanese as "Great Death" when it's barring down on you but if it's on your side, the Buddhist term of Daishi which translates to "Great Master" is more applicable

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The game was originally called Battledroids, but someone else asserted ownership of that word.^note The case was actually fairly spurious, as "android" has existed in the English language as a term since 1728 and was solidly in the public domain, and it wouldn't really be that hard at all to assert that the derived term "droid" was a logical extension of the public domain idea courtesy of scenes-a-faire, but the still-young FASA didn't like the idea of even trying to meet Lucas in court, and so changed the title to something that was ironclad trademark-able itself but still obviously sourced from free language.
  • The early setting, seen most prominently in Tales of the Black Window Company and the first two books of the Gray Death Legion series (Decision at Thunder Rift and Mercenary's Star), had a much more Scavenger World feel to it; BattleMechs were generally treated as being literally irreplaceable. This was toned down fairly quickly via one of the few actual retcons the game has seen, for both storytelling and profit reasons; first and foremost, it's hard as heck to sell new expansion packs if nobody is making new 'Mechs!
    • A bit more pointedly, it also simply became clear as the setting got eyeballs on it that Scavenger World-ism on this scale simply didn't make a lot of sense; yes, the borders of the interstellar realms would be pretty hard-luck and hit by constant warfare, but as presented, the Davion, Steiner and Kurita realms in particular were huge, with even the early lore well establishing that the interior regions were comparatively safe, stable and not subject to nearly as much warfare. It therefore simply didn't make a lot of sense that these regions were unable to handle at least some kind of manufacturing burden. There was also a bit of a story-and-gameplay divide; in the rules as printed, light 'Mechs in particular were incredibly flimsy, and could often suffer crippling damage from just a few Medium Laser shots. The fiction would talk about nursing Wasps and Stingers along for decades at a time, but on the tabletop, players were likely to leave dozens of them completely wrecked beyond hope of salvage scattered across the battlefields of even one multi-mission campaign that would've lasted a few months, in-universe. Going by the rules as printed, even a huge unit like the Eridani Light Horse could get ground down to nothing surprisingly quickly (and with the first edition of MechWarrior, the RPG supplement coming, the rate of loss made it frustrating to keep players in 'Mechs at all) so the fiction was altered to make recovery from heavy damage or even 'Mech loss significantly more practical, albeit losing a big unit like a Marauder or Atlas still hurt.
  • Speaking of the early setting and early releases, it's actually worth pointing out that part of the reason the Unseen were such a headache early on was that they were the game's original starting roster; both Battledroids and the first ''BattleTech'' box set used licensed designs exclusively, with BT-original 'Mechs not becoming a reality until Technical Readout: 3025 was released in 1986, a full two years after Battledroids had first hit the market and a year after the game became ''BattleTech''! This means that, in the earliest fiction, a number of what would become utterly iconic 'Mechs are completely absent; the Atlas is the most blatant in its total absence from things like Black Widow Company or the earliest Gray Death books, but just as prominent is the absence of units like the UrbanMech, the Commando, the Jenner, the Centurion, the Vindicator, the Catapult, the Orion, and the Stalker, all of which fans today would identify as absolute staples of the Succession Wars era. Some of these would at least make a showing in Mercenary's Star and onward and become those staples, but the very earliest products can feel rather bizarre by today's standards, with an extremely limited 'Mech selection, none of which is entirely "native" to BattleTech. (This also results in the official PDF releases of those legacy products feeling oddly empty in places, because they featured massive amounts of Unseen-inspired art that had to be stripped out.)
    • This also highlights a little side-oddity of the first few years of the game: it featured no official 100-ton combat vehicles, period. In fact, while the custom-construction rules have been a part of the game ever since the very first Battledroids release, which allowed for player creation of vehicles up to 100 tons, the heaviest official unit in BD was the 75-ton Marauder; the first "BattleTech" release featured exactly one assault-weight 'Mech, that being the 85-ton BattleMaster! There wouldn't be an official 100-ton 'Mech until the Atlas in '86 ^note A very early take on the Mackie was featured in Black Widow in '85, but it had no art or model and the fiction at the time noted that the two in the mission were the only two still in existence by then, which would end up being another small thing retconned away, TRO 3025 also gave us the first 100-ton AeroSpace Fighters (the Stuka and Chippewa), and it wouldn't be until 1987, with TRO 3026 and its expanded vehicle selection, that a 100-ton tank (the Behemoth) would take the field.
  • And the above segues nicely into another oddity of the very early days of the game: a general lack of conventional armor. The very first Battledroids set did feature basic entries for infantry and a few tanks, and rules for how they work, but it featured all of three tanks, no rules for constructing bigger ones, and all three tanks were very early versions of later tanks (the Scorpion, Vedette and Hunter); this would carry over into BattleTech wholesale. The fiction made it clear, from the outset, that the Successor States were having to fall back on using conventional armor heavily to replace 'Mech losses (even after the earlier retcon; the rationale later on was that you could build an entire lance of tanks for the cost of one BattleMech, and the technology for building them was a lot easier to maintain) but it wasn't until TRO 3025 that the non-'Mech vehicle selection would be expanded (and then only slightly), and it wouldn't be until TRO 3026 in 1987 - three full years after the overall game had first hit the market - that the huge range of vehicles the fiction had hinted at for years was finally expanded on and statted out. This is where non-'Mech icons like the Demolisher, the Manticore, the Schrek, the J. Edgar, the Warrior helicopter, those goddamned dedicated missile launchers, and more finally became part of the established game lore. The earliest years of the game featured none of them, and once again they are, to a modern reader, bizarrely absent in much of the early fiction. (In particular, Natasha Kerensky, in her group's scenario book, apparently never has to deal with someone trying to jump her infamous group with a shedload of nasty tanks, when BTech of the 90s and later, especially the video games, presents getting snowed under in cheap, heavily-armed enemy armor as every 'Mech-merc's worst-and-highly-plausible nightmare.)
  • Speaking of Tasha K, the Black Widow Company book can be odd in places, because there's a decent few sections of the book's fiction that are narrated from the perspective of Natasha and other BWC members, and here it is extremely obvious that their later backstory, and that of Wolf's Dragoons overall, hasn't been completely nailed down yet. There's probably something like the Clans cooking in the background as a long-term plan for the game, and the Dragoons' Mysterious Origins™ are definitely pointed out, but by and large the entire group is presented as a pile of malcontents and screw-ups that Natasha had to whip into shape, and neither she nor her squadmates behave like even former Clanners in any way. This might've been a little easier to ignore, if not for the fact that it later became obvious that Alex Ward, their Stinger pilot, must logically be another member of the Dragoons' Bloodnamed contingent but behaves nothing like it. Later works attempted to explain that part of the reason so many of these people came with the Dragoons, Alex Ward especially, was because they were considered especially hopeless in Clan society, but things like their casual use of contractions (which many of the Clan-born still should have struggled with in the 3020s) were never really addressed.
  • Another oddity in the early fiction, especially the first Gray Death book, were descriptions of the 'Mechs engaging in much more fluid movement than is associated with BattleTech today, in particular the 'Mechs easily falling into prone firing positions, rolling around, and engaging in other human-like combat movements. This is very likely because the VF-1s that inspired the Stinger and Wasp, in particular, did behave like that in their home show (with Dougram doing it less but still featuring the idea) and that footage was likely being provided for reference. Even back then, though, the franchise was quickly becoming famous for the "stompy", tank-like nature of its robots in contrast to the more fluid Gundam-isms that were actively developing in Japan at the time; FASA's creative leads rolled with it, and even by 1990 the weightiness of 'Mech combat had been canonized.
  • The very first edition shipped with several alternate rule types not seen in later editions. "Expert" rules formed the basis for the game today. "Advanced" rules removed physical attacks, piloting checks, falling damage, and aimed shots. "Basic" rules completely altered the game with very simplistic rules; all your weapons would be fired at once and would either all hit or miss, and would not expend ammo or generate heat. Mechs were simplified to a single hitbox without Subsystem Damage, and depleting these hitpoints would destroy it. Many years later, the "Alpha Strike" edition of the game would emerge along a similar trajectory, albeit with somewhat greater nuance to it.
• Earth Is a Battlefield: The Liberation of Terra in Amaris Civil War and Jihad.
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: Geographically speaking, in this case—all the maps of known space have Earth as the center. And despite the setting encompassing countless other planets, dates are always given as whatever day it is on Earth when something happened.
  • Controlling Earth generally means you're the most powerful faction as well.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Castles Brian (or "Castles named after Brian Cameron"), with the average one being the size of an average planetary capital city and rivaling a Dwarf Fortress for how long they can hold out against a siege.
• Elite Army: The Clans, especially their frontline Galaxies. Even their garrison troopers tend to be formidable due to the Clans' technological advances and high barrier of entry.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Battletech is constructed around the BattleMech and the lion's share of gameplay and rules are for 'mechs. In-Universe, MechWarriors are akin to medieval knights, 'riding' the rare but extremely powerful BattleMechs into battle as part of a combined-arms approach to warfare (in the Inner Sphere at least). The Clans (except Hell's Horses) made the BattleMech as important to their overall warfare doctrine as it is presented in-game and field almost exclusively 'mech-based armies with some aerospace and infantry support.
• The Empire:
  • The Draconis Combine was this for much of the backstory, being the only Great House nation to be founded on the idea of uniting all of humanity under House Kurita by force, and the Successor State that opened the First and Second Succession Wars. During the game's main timeline, a combination of Balance of Power concerns (under Takashi), reformist leaders (under Theodore) and the Clan Invasion kept the Combine on the defensive, although as of the Dark Age period they have re-started their wars of conquest.
  • The Star League was like this to the Periphery nations; who were heavily taxed, denied the rights enjoyed by the Great Houses and were forced to join after the Inner Sphere attacked them in the Reunification War.
  • Downplayed by The Marian Hegemony, a micro-nation that practices slavery, used to be a bandit kingdom, and has conquered several other states in the Periphery. As a small power even by Periphery standards, they are far too weak to threaten any of the Successor States, or even any of the major Periphery nations.
• Enemy Civil War: The Wars of Reaving, when the homeworld Clans tore themselves apart throughout the 3070s over perceived 'taint' from the failed Inner Sphere invasion. Unfortunately, the Inner Sphere powers were too busy dealing with the Word of Blake Jihad to take advantage of it.
• Enemy Mine: First happened with the feuding Successor States when the Clans invaded. And then, when the Word of Blake started the Jihad, the Successor States did this again with the very Clans that made them invoke this trope the first time. Of course, chances of the Successor States and the Clans allying with the Blakists in the future against an even greater threat is low, seeing how as the order is essentially dead, and any survivors are considered to more or less be akin to Amaris supporters back in the Star League's final days.
  • In the Dark Age, the Inner Sphere was shocked when the Wolf's Dragoons signed up with their traditional arch-enemy, the Draconis Combine, although by this time-frame almost all the Dragoons who had issues with the Draconis Combine were dead or retired by now which lessened the shock.
• Energy Weapons:
  • Lasers, PPCs, and their variants. They don't require ammunition, but are terribly heat inefficient compared to missiles and ballistics.
  • The current developments of laser weapon technology (as described on that page) almost perfectly mirrors how the differing in-game laser weapons work according to the sourcebooks.
• Enforced Technology Levels: ComStar's Operation Holy Shroud. Pretty much the cause of +90% of the problems in the Inner Sphere.
• Epic Flail: Mech sized versions of flails appear on mechs customized for the gladiatorial combat on Solaris 7.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Hatchetman and Axeman BattleMechs; guess what they carry? Likewise the UrbanMech. It's the slowest light 'mech in the games (both original tabletop and the video games based off it), but it works because it's intended to be used in the kind of cover that a city can give.
  • Some of the 'Mechs can have rather pretentious names, but quite a few are surprisingly apt. The Charger excels at physical attacks like ramming, the Ostscout is a great recon vehicle (and dead meat if anywhere within a kilometer of a proper battle), and the Annihilator has eight rather considerable guns, half of which can fire the tactical equivalent of BattleMech buckshot and will chew up most smaller targets if given the chance.
  • Many 'mechs named after medieval siege weapons, projectile weapons, or soldier classes who operate them are often in the business of Long Range Missile volleys. Examples include the Trebuchet^note A Medium class mech with some short range backup, but primarily intended to mount two LRM15 launchers for indirect fire support, the Archer^note The originator of this naming convention, being the first true fire support mech and armed with twin LRM20 launchers with a battery of lasers for backup, and the Catapult^note A Heavy class mech with point defense weapons built around two LRM20 launchers, though variants can include extreme long-range weapons like PPCs in place of the missile launchers.
• Evil Counterpart: While it's difficult to call a war machine evil, any Clan 'Mech of a "Z" configuration is about as close to the mark as you can get. Z-types were the exclusive domain of the Society during their attempted coup, having selected the designation to symbolize what they believed were the last days of the Clan's old Warrior dominated way of life. They are quite potent, having been packed with absolutely bleeding edge gear in an attempt to compensate for Society Mechwarrior's lack of combat experience, but their role in assisting many of the Society's crimes against humanity means they are seen as symbols of evil and consequently none survived the Wars of Reaving.
• Evil Is Petty: Several examples come to mind. The most infamous is probably Jinjiro Kurita; who had over fifty million people executed because his father was killed as a legitimate military combatant. The resulting furor over the Kentares IV Massacre cost the Draconis Combine the First Succession War, which they were winning before. Nice Job Fixing It, Villain.
  • When the Word of Blake realized that they were going to be defeated and receive no mercy for their crimes their tactics became even more destructive. During the Liberation of Terra they detonated cobalt laced nuclear weapons in key population centers, irradiating them for decades, not for any tactical purposes but simply because they wanted to pull If I Can't Have You… on humanity's homeworld.
  • On a slightly smaller scale, this is a defining character trait of Katherine Steiner-Davion, who after seceding with her half of the Federated Commonwealth is repeatedly shown to be more concerned with how to get back at people for real or imagined snubs than the responsibilities of actually running her nation.
• Everything's Better with Samurai: Well, considering that the Draconis Combine is obsessed with feudal Japanese culture... it's not surprising that Kurita MechWarriors style themselves after the Bushido code of old. And then there's the Hatamoto-Chi, which is actually designed to look like a samurai.
• Explosive Overclocking:
  • The Myomer Accelerator Aignal Circuitry (MASC for short), which will allow a 'Mech equipped with it to run faster than it normally could at a risk of suffering critical leg hits that goes up the longer it is used. The Supercharger works similarly (and can stack its effects with that of the MASC), but risks damaging the engine instead. And of course, BattleMechs not generously supplied with 'heat sinks' risk building up significant internal heat levels from simply moving about and using their weapons too often, which progressively impedes their performance and can in extreme cases lead to automatic emergency shutdowns, ammunition explosions, or microfusion core meltdowns. Triple Strength Myomers work as a Limit Break, as their increased strength only applies when the battlemech is nearing dangerous levels of heat; one lucky Inferno missile could send the heat spiraling out of control, resulting in a shutdown or internal ammo explosion (a Very Bad Thing).
  • There's also an optional rule that allows a player to overcharge a PPC. This gives them extra damage but instantly ruins the weapon, possibly causing it to explode as well. In the same vein, standard and light PPCs come with built-in field inhibitors that prevent feedback from the weapon, but impose a minimum range on the weapon. Disabling it ignores the to-hit modifier for minimum range, but brings the risk of feedback and weapon destruction if the target is too far away.
  • Also, quick-charging a Kearny-Fuchida drive. (This is seen more usually in the fiction, but the game has suitably advanced-level rules for the situation if it ever should come up in play.) Normally a JumpShip will leisurely unfurl a high-tech solar sail and use the energy from that to recharge its drive core over the course of a week or so, but in a pinch and with enough fuel it's theoretically possible to use its fusion power plant to do the job much faster. The reason this is generally considered a Dangerous Forbidden Technique is that said core is both incredibly sensitive and huge (most JumpShips are just a small bit of "extra starship" wrapped around theirs, in fact), so pushing its limits can cause anything from initially unnoticeable defects that will come back to bite the ship sometime in the future to more immediate charge loss and even fatal misjumps from which the ship fails to emerge in one piece or even at all.
    • The Lithium-Fusion Battery allows a second jump safely by storing another charge. However, it has its own variant; with both charges dumped in, a few minor tweaks to the drive allow a Jump of up to 900 light years instead of 30. The problem is, not only are the fatal malfunctions more likely, both the drive and the battery are only good for scrap afterwards.
• Eyepatch of Power: Precentor-Martial Anastasius Focht sported one. Combines neatly with his Cool Old Guy factor (not physically, but he proverbially stared down the Clans with the Com Guard under his command).

F

• Faction Calculus: Very loosely, as the game places a massive emphasis on personal customization. However there are some trends within each faction, if you care to play lore accurate:
  • Clans is the Powerhouse faction to the Inner Sphere's Subversive. Clan mechs are generally much better armed and faster, but absurdly expensive. If you field a single Clan Timber Wolf in a Point Buy game, expect your Inner Sphere opponent to field two Awesomes to match, or even four Awesomes if you use a C-Bill purchase system instead. As a Clan player you invest in overwhelming power but you pay for it by fielding fewer units and having to take rather stupid Honor Before Reason tactical decisions, like insistence on single combat and no artillery. Even within the Clans and Inner Sphere, there are breakdowns on preferred tactics:
    • Clan Smoke Jaguar likes using heavy and assault units like the Warhawk and Dire Wolf along with an aggressive and lethal style of war, but this makes them slow and vulnerable to supply issues, making them easy to outmaneuver.
    • Clan Wolf and Clan Nova Cat take a more moderate approach to war with units like the aforementioned Timber Wolf, and more flexible units like the Shadow Cat. Less power, but last longer than their peers.
    • Clan Jade Falcon is the textbook Cannon faction. They favour fast-moving units with tons of firepower and little in the way of protection, like the Hellbringer and the Summoner. They're deadly, but can be put in a lot of pain if caught out of position or focused on.
    • Clan Ice Hellion is an interesting take on a Powerhouse/Subversive mixture. Units like the Viper and the Fire Moth won't win against bigger and more heavily-armed and armoured mechs, but they run rings around their Clan peers and field quite a lot of units relative to the price they pay. Unfortunately, this often makes them reliant on achieving a win condition that isn't a straight duel to the death.
    • Do you want to field Panzers in space? Look no further than House Steiner, the Inner Sphere's Powerhouse faction. They have the economy to field very large mechs like the Zeus and the Atlas, emphasizing armour and tonnage at the expense of speed and numbers. They have a preference for the long-range Gauss Rifle, letting them reach out and wallop their enemies from miles away. But this makes them very predictable and slow on the move, easy to outflank and outwit.
    • House Liao is Subversive to a tee, a mish-mash of Imperial and Communist China and favours mechs that are fast and light, loaded out with high-tech stealth armour and electronic warfare suites, as well as unusual missile launchers. House Liao's units like the Raven and the Vindicator will lose if they try and fight head-on, but they can sneak-grab objectives and score critical hits like no other.
    • House Marik and House Kurita are Balanced, but in different ways. You go with the United States/Yugoslavia/Holy Roman Empire-themed House Marik if you just want a "little bit of everything", with a vehicle pool listing all categories and weight classes but nothing particularly standing out; you mostly win by fielding whatever the enemy lacks. House Kurita, the Japanese-influenced faction, quite unusually focuses on very light and very heavy units almost exclusively, largely omitting middleweight mechs; averaging out to a tenacious balance by using both extremes in tandem.
    • House Davion is the Inner Sphere Cannon faction. Taking on the fine British tradition of using More Dakka in their armies, Davion likes to use light-armoured and quick mechs loaded with autocannons up the wazoo, something you can see in their Enforcer and Victor class mechs. You have to be careful with the fragile mechs, but if you can manage to outflank and focus down an enemy mech, you'll Swiss cheese it in no time.
  • That said, there's nothing outright preventing House Steiner or Clan Ghost Bear from feilding fast light and medium 'Mechs, House Davion from using tougher units armed with lasers, or Clan Jade Falcon from taking a more cautious approach with better-armored units, or House Liao from meeting the enemy head-on in straight-up slugging match. The factions have their stereotypical preferences, but none is strictly forced into one specific playstyle, forsaking all others.
• Failed Future Forecast:
  • The game's timeline started with the fall of the Soviet Union — in 2011; this was changed in later editions to the Russian Federation. The most recent edition puts it back to the Soviet Union, with history having changed from ours during the 1980s.
  • Later editions had Russia undergo a civil war between reformists and communists; which forced NATO to act as peacekeepers. This cooperation lead to the formation of the Western Alliance, which became the Terran Alliance which fell and was replaced by the Terran Hegemony.
  • Betelgeuse is shown as being an inhabited system, part of the Capellan Confederation, by 3025. New observations of the rapidly destabilizing star in Real Life suggest there is a good chance it will have gone supernova by then. Technically, due to the speed of light, it would have already exploded some 600 years before we could see it. So for all we know, it has already gone supernova and we can't detect it yet.
• Failure Is the Only Option: If any one faction succeeded, or even if widespread peace breaks out, the game ends! So when one faction does succeed, it must inevitably fall (Star League, Federated-Lyran union, Republic of the Sphere), and when widespread peace breaks out it must be betrayed (Clan Golden Century, Dark Age).
• False Flag Operation: Many examples crop up but the Blakists are the masters of this trope. One of the reasons the Jihad was initially successful (despite taking on all the major powers at once) was because the Word was able to trigger several brush wars, civil uprisings and succession movements to weaken their enemies.
• Fantastic Caste System:
  • The Clans place Super-Soldier Designer Babies at the top of their society. Although it's possible for a Freeborn warrior to earn a Bloodname and officially join the guys on top, unofficially, they remain looked down upon.
  • The Technician Caste can be considered to have a number of sub castes. A tech maintaining a mech has a higher social standing than one who maintains, say, a hydroponics unit.
  • Applies to Scientists as well. A Scientist working on the breeding program or weapons development (both of which support the Warriors) enjoys more prestige and standing than one working on new hybrid food crop. Even Laborers, one building a new Warrior barracks or testing ground is better than a mere farmer. And even among Warriors, the statuses of Trueborn or Freeborn, if you have a Bloodname, the pedigree of the specific Bloodname you hold, which Bloodhouse you belong to, rank, age, and personal combat record all influence a specific Warrior's standing. Basically, the Clans have a Fantastic Caste System inside their Fantastic Caste System.
• Fantastic Firearms: In addition to lasers there are the needler pistol, needler rifle and gauss pistols. Needlers shoot lots of sharp shards from a composite block fired by compressed gas while the Clan's gauss pistols are Magnetic Weapons.
• Fantastic Racism: While normal racism is far more common; many Trueborns see "Freebirths" as Puny Earthlings and many freeborns consider "Trashborns" to be Not Even Human. Neither charge has much basis in reality.
  • The Free Worlds League, despite being the most tolerant society in the Inner Sphere when it comes to any form of diversity, discriminates against those with cybernetic implants. Paradoxically they are also the most tech savvy of the Great Houses in many areas.
• Fantastic Underclass: Below all the official castes in the Clans' Fantastic Caste System exists the Bandit - aka "Dark" - caste. Its members are the outcasts and rejects of Clan society, often those who have failed in their assigned (or reassigned) caste but who refuse to accept demotion, or simply those who do not fit in to the rigid structure of Clan life.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: In spades.
  • Each of the Inner Sphere States includes populations with roots in various Earth cultures (or rather: a heavily fictionalized version of these Earth cultures as outsiders might imagine it), usually with one being strongly dominant. However, what the nations of the BT universe have in common is that they're strongly "medievalized", so to speak - the historical circumstances of the setting being engineered in a way that it promoted feudal societies, traditional knighthood, courtly intrigue, isolationism due to poor communication and complicated methods of transport and so on.
    • The Draconis Combine, based on samurai-era and World War II Japan, is the most culturally homogeneous. The only two major exceptions to this are the Muslim Azami and, prior to its secession in 3034, the Scandinavian-influenced Rasalhague Military District.
    • The Free Rasalhague Republic is extremely Norse, to the point of having a sea serpent for its banner and later merging with a winter-themed Clan that was co-founded by a man with strong Nordic ancestry.
    • The Capellan Conferedation is predominantly Chinese, but also has notable Russian and Indian populations. They're kind of a mishmash of dynastic Imperial China (how they like to be percieved) and modern Communist China (how they really are).
    • The St. Ives Compact started as pre-transfer Hong Kong, with elements of Taiwan being added over the years. The latter is lampshaded with the april fools e-book Free Taiw...St. Ives.
    • The Lyran Commonwealth is German, with Norse and Italian influences. And with references to the Norse pantheon all over the place.
    • The Free World League somewhat avoids this, being the only nation that isn't a clear-cut throwback to a specific Earth culture. While its ruling House Marik are descendants of Czech nobility, the biggest member-states of the FWL between them contain cultures from Europe, South Asia and the Middle East, and the numerous smaller regions and independent worlds are drawn from all over Earth.
    • The Federated Suns can be summed up as the "Western" faction, with its leaders being of Anglo-French stock; and being the ones most rooted in Western political traditions, with Arthurian elements woven into the culture.
    • Historically, the Terran Hegemony could be considered "the Anglo-American alliance IN SPACE!"
  • The Periphery States:
    • The Marian Hegemony wishes it was Rome, as per its founder's design.
    • The Magistracy of Canopus is like Las Vegas (tons of slot machines everywhere) and the rest of Nevada (legalized prostitution) combined.
    • The Taurian Concordat are essentially Texas, with their fiercly independent and defiant streak backed up by a predeliction for shotguns (personal and Battlemech sized), by way of Spain thanks to being ruled by House Calderon.
  • The Clans: Generally, the Clans are less defined by having strong roots in a specific Earth culture like the Spheroid states, and more as having themes (there's the trader clan (Diamond Sharks), the religious clan (Cloud Cobras), the over-aggressive clan (Smoke Jaguars), the mystic clan (Nova Cats)...). However, a common element of Clan society is that it is actually a mix of Maoist China, the Mongol Empire, ancient Sparta (with the importance put on martial prowess, raising their kids The Spartan Way, their cruel treatment of and disdain for serfs, civilians and freebirths in general (all of whom are basically various version of helots) etc.) coupled with a Brave New World-like mindset when it comes to eugenic matters, a very pronounced disgust for natural conception, sexual promiscuity and restricted freedom of thought.
    • Clan Coyote has some Native American influences sprinkled in.
    • Dark Age Clan Hell Horses modeled their tactics after the Mongols, even naming this philosophy the Mongol Doctrine. Then the Jade Falcons under the leadership of Malvina Hazen took over the doctrine, only they chose to emphasize the terror warfare aspect to frighten opponents into submission. This caused a conflict between two Clans.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Of the "Jump" variety, using a Kearny-Fuchida (K-F) Drive. Ships that do this are called JumpShips. BattleTech has one of the slowest FTL systems in Science Fiction. 30 light years at a jump, but then around a week to recharge. it would take about 9 months for one ship to travel from one end of the Inner Sphere to the other. Though as this thread notes, BattleTech actually compares pretty favorably to Star Trek. A K-F drive takes a week to recharge, but covers up to 30 lightyears in an instant when it has a full charge. A Star Trek ship at warp 6 covers 2.4 light-years per day, meaning it takes 12.5 days to cross 30 light-years, which JumpShips can do an average of once a week. Recharging times vary greatly based on the stars your traveling to, so actual numbers might vary.
  • Travel from one end of the Sphere to the other can be done quicker via a "Command Circuit" — a series of JumpShips waiting one after the other. A Drop Ship disconnects from the first Jumper to catch a ride with the next one, and so on. This is incredibly expensive to set up and is essentially reserved for military use or priority travel by the ruling class.
  • Though commercial space travel is commonly accomplished by riding one JumpShip for jump or two, then transferring to a different JumpShip for other jumps, in a manner not unlike picking up connecting flights in modern air travel (the HareBrained Schemes BattleTech video game shows this very well).
  • You can speed up the recharging process (and thus the travel time) in a few ways. The main way JumpShips (and their bigger, meaner cousins, WarShips) recharge is by deploying a solar sail and collecting energy from the star they've jumped to. The process is slow, but steady and safe. Many important systems have recharging stations which can recharge a K-F Drive faster than solar collection, and (almost) as safely. Beyond that, a ship may use its own conventional drives and generators to funnel energy into the K-F Drive, though at risk of actually losing charge or damaging the drive. Lithium-Fusion Batteries can store an extra jump charge, but take as long to recharge as the drive itself. You can only charge the drive or LF Battery from one source (sail, station, or onboard energy) at a time, and a source can only charge a drive or a battery, but nothing stops you using one source on the drive and another on the battery, if you're willing to risk potentially damaging the battery.
• The Federation:
  • The Federated Suns, and Lyran Commonwealth. However, while both are largely free societies, both are ruled by autocrats. The Federated Suns has a partially democratic congress, however. The Lyran Commonwealth also has a parliament with some power. Both states do have democratic governments at the planetary and local levels as well, for the most part.
  • The Star League was this to the Inner Sphere; the member states handled their own internal affairs and major decisions were made via a vote by the House Lords who could and did occasionally override the First Lord.
• Feudal Future: All of the Successor states are ruled by royal families and nobles, with individual nations having different amounts of feudalism. The Federated Commonwealth is a (largely) free society, while the Draconis Combine takes feudalism up to eleven.
• Fictional Geneva Conventions:
  • The Ares Conventions, and its spiritual successor the Honours of War, are perhaps the most exhaustive examples ever written. The former cleaves close to this trope in being intended for humanitarian purposes, the latter are more a case of pragmatism in the face of total societial collapse and boil down to "don't break shit that's hard to replace." This obviously means damaging the remaining faster-than-light Jumpships gets everyone pissed at you, but pretty much any piece of technology more advanced than a microwave oven can be ransomed — along with the guy who owns it; at any time during a battle, a Mechwarrior can offer to yield with the full expectation of his opponents ransoming him and his Battlemech to his faction, and can usually expect the offer to be accepted. Same with space fighters and dropships; no-one wants to wreck operational technology. It also protects spaceports, industrial areas and power plants. The Conventions are known and acknowledged even at the civilian level because civilian populations and agricultural areas are implied to be part and parcel of those sites as they're the local source of trained workers to run and maintain them — especially because a lot of the expertise is passed down through families. This means that most WMDs are also banned, because biosphere damage that kills too much of a planet's population is likely to demolish all technological civilization on the planet, rendering it all but worthless unless someone brings in megatons of hardware and people to rebuild it from scratch. However, the resulting Adventure-Friendly World clearly demonstrates the Hard Truth Aesop at the trope's heart; the Conventions legalized warfare, and made it so simple and cheap that nations waged war for resources and territory almost constantly.
  • As with everything to do with warfare, taken to the logical extreme by the Clans. Where the intent of the Honours was simply to outlaw weapons of mass destruction and keep civilians and irreplaceable Lostech out of the line of fire after the apocalyptic First and Second Succession Wars, The Clan Way and zellbrigen (which rose from the similarly apocalyptic Pentagon Wars) places such emphasis on limiting collateral damage that bidding takes place before all combat, with the intention of keeping even military units that aren't absolutely necessary to achieve victory from being destroyed. Likewise, combat is ritualized to such an extent that in many cases even ganging up 2-on-1 against an opponent was unethical. Naturally, the clash of cultures was a shock during the Clan Invasion.
• Flawed Prototype: Frequently, prototype 'Mechs, fighters, vehicles, etc. will have serious design flaws and bugs that the finished design may (or may not) iron out. For much of the game's history these flaws were an Informed Attribute, only present in the fluff descriptions of the unit but not at all affecting its performance on the tabletop, though later rules for Quirks remedied this somewhat. In fact, a whole Technical Readout book (appropriately entitled "Boondoggles") was all about Flawed Prototypes that were so flawed they never made it into production at all.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The Wolf's Dragoons sourcebook openly speculates that the mercenary unit is actually a scouting party for the return of Alexander Kerensky's Star League Defense Forces.
  • The novel Wolves on the Border features a Clan ritual conducted by members of Wolf's Dragoons.
• For Great Justice: The Brotherhood of Randis might qualify as a modest mercenary band, except they don't fight for profit, a rare thing in the pragmatic ''BattleTech'' universe. They do have an as-yet-undisclosed source of income though, so they can afford to be altruistic.
• Founder of the Kingdom: Nicholas Kerensky, the creator of the Clan's social and governmental structure, is revered by all Clanners as "The Founder". His famous father, Aleksandr Kerensky, is even more revered and remembered as "The Great Father" of the Clans. His remains were preserved aboard his old flagship, the SLS McKenna's Pride orbiting the Clan capital world Strana Mechty as a monument to the Exodus (at least until the Wars of Reaving).
• Fragile Speedster: Most of 20-30 ton light mechs by standard design. Due to their relatively small size, they do not have enough space to equip enough weapons and enough armor to go toe-to-toe with heavier mechs without sacrificing speed, at which point it would be more cost effective to field a medium mech. Thus, the light mechs are used for scouting, hit-and-run, and general harassment, with the "fair" opponents for them being the equally light mechs or extremely slow-to-turn mechs.
• Franchise-Driven Retitling: When MechWarrior: Dark Age was introduced, the original game was retitled Classic BattleTech to differentiate it from the new line (why this was necessary for a pair of games that shared no common words in their titles is a mystery). After Dark Age was discontinued, the Classic moniker was dropped from the original game, which went back to being just BattleTech.
• Franken-vehicle: "FrankenMechs" are BattleMechs that have been jury-rigged from the parts of two or more 'Mechs. They became somewhat common during the Succession Wars due to supply problems and the destruction of factories. Some even ended up becoming standardized and marketed as new models such as the Merlin and Cataphract.
• Free-Love Future:
  • The Magistracy of Canopus has legalized prostitution (and sex tourism is a substantial part of their tourism and entertainment industry, which basically sustains their entire economy) and is pretty liberal when it comes to sex of any sort.
  • The Clans, despite being ruled by a military junta devoted to social engineering, also practice this. With no form of marriage in place, warriors reproducing through the eugenics program and civilians though arranged pairs (the resulting children are raised in communal creches), sex is treated like recreation. Asking a peer if they'd like to "couple" is functionally the same as asking them if they'd like to play a game of cards.
• Frontline General: There are many examples. This is encouraged in the Inner Sphere and all but mandatory in the Clans.
  • For the Inner Sphere, there are several 'Mech designs, like the BattleMaster, Cyclops, and Archer that are "Command 'Mechs" with extra communications and control equipment to help their pilot both lead a sizeable force and personally kick ass (this is largely a fluff designation, but the Quirk rules give Command 'Mechs an initiative bonus). Someone piloting one of these is likely to be both an extremely cunning and talented leader and an exceptionally skilled MechWarrior.
  • In the Clans, since Asskicking Leads to Leadership is in full effect, their leaders are typically right there on the front ranks, even up to the Khans. The ones that try and avert this and lead from the rear tend to have their careers end horribly when it comes out they aren't "true" warriors.
• FTL Travel Sickness: Transit Disorientation Syndrome, or "jump sickness", is a condition that afflicts some people after a K-F jump. Symptoms include headaches, nausea, irritability, disorientation, and diarrhea. They typically only last for a few hours, but if the person undergoes a second jump while still experiencing symptoms, they can be incapacitated for as long as a week. Suffering from this condition doesn't really impact a mechwarrior's career in any way, but you can't serve on a jumpship or dropship crew or as an aerospace fighter pilot.
• Future Slang: The Clans in particular embrace this. Though they insist on speaking proper grammatical English, they also added plenty of their own military and cultural slang. It's part Russian, and part easily figured out, but it's there.