Clans (BattleTech)

Revision as of 07:40, 20 August 2018

The Clans are a species that feature in BattleTech.

History

Origin

The Clans were a warrior-based civilization founded by the self-exiled remnants of the Star League Defense Force, who were led by their founder General Aleksandr Kerensky into the Deep Periphery to flee the collapse of the Star League. The Star League was described as an utopian civilization spanning thousands of human-colonized star systems that dissolved as a result of the assassination of its hereditary ruler, First Lord Richard Cameron, and a subsequent coup d'état. The resulting war left the military arm of the Star League, the Star League Defense Force ("SLDF"), caught between the various noble houses of the Inner Sphere vying for control of the disintegrated Star League. Instead of participating in these conflicts, SLDF General Aleksandr Kerensky chose to depart from the Inner Sphere and known space in year 2784 of the BattleTech timeline, leading most of the Star League Defense Force and their families beyond the borders of the Periphery The long journey of Kerensky and his followers is termed "the Exodus" and ends with the discovery of five marginally habitable worlds depicted as being located deep within the Milky Way galaxy, termed "the Pentagon Worlds". However, the former-SLDF quickly found itself ill-suited to the task of colonization. With too many soldiers and too few support personnel, General Kerensky decided to discharge most of his military personnel from service. In order to determine who would be discharged and who would remain under arms, General Kerensky set up a series of challenges and war-games. The top performers were kept on as professional military personnel and the rest were discharged as civilians.

Nevertheless, the society of the Pentagon Worlds is depicted as falling prey to the same infighting that had torn apart the Star League, forcing Aleksandr's son Nicholas Kerensky to conduct a "Second Exodus" in 2801 to a nearby star cluster with a handful of military personnel and dedicated followers. Nicholas' followers eventually settled on a planet that his mother, Katya Kerensky, named Strana Mechty (described in-universe as Russian for "Land of Dreams"). Nicholas is depicted as having used this planet as a base to build up an invasion force to retake the Pentagon Worlds and, in so doing, completely rebuilt his followers' society to create "the Clans". The actual formation of the Clans is described as resulting from the distribution of 800 warriors still loyal to the Kerenskys and 600 civilian families evenly among 20 newly founded Clans. Notably, Nicholas is described as instituting a eugenics program, whereby each warrior became the progenitor of a "bloodname" and "bloodline", thereby contributing his or her genes to a Clan-wide artificial breeding program. The products of this system form the backbone of the Clan military. Additionally, the Clans are depicted as having developed a caste-system with these genetically-enhanced soldiers placed at the top, and beneath them various scientist, merchant, technician and laborer castes. In the BattleTech lore, Nicholas spent years training his warriors and then returned to the Pentagon Worlds with his Clans and retook them from their inhabitants, who in that time had been reduced to banditry, cultism, and savagery. After the successful reconquest of the Pentagon Worlds in 2822, known as Operation Klondike, they once again formed the core of the Clan Homeworlds, but Strana Mechty remained the capital planet.

Over the next two centuries following the Exodus era (2784-2822), the Clans are described as gradually increasing in strength, colonizing new worlds, and developing new technologies. Clan history after this point generally divides into two eras, each lasting roughly a century: the "Golden Century" from 2822 to 2947, when Clan colonization, industrialization, and technological innovation grew by leaps and bounds, and the "Political Century" from 2947 to 3049, by which time the Clans had colonized the Kerensky Cluster to its saturation point and they began to heavily compete with each other over the limited resources of the area. Their environment of the Clan Homeworlds was and remains a harsh one. The "Kerensky Cluster", which formed the core of their space, is many jumps worth of jump drive travel from the Inner Sphere, and is represented as being totally cut off from it. The borders of the Inner Sphere (the former maximum extent of the old Star League) are roughly a 500 light-year radius around Terra, yet the Kerensky Cluster is stated to be 1300 light years distant from Terra (thus 800 light years away from the borders of known space). Even the ships of the original Exodus, using peak Star League technology, took over a year to travel between the Inner Sphere and what would become the Clan Homeworlds.

Depicted as a means to reduce collateral damage to their fragile and limited infrastructure, soon after their founding the Clans developed rules of ritualized combat and warfare to avoid damaging vital resources and harming civilians. These rules are a key feature of BattleTech lore. The most important aspect of Clan combat doctrine is that they prefer to fight one-on-one duels, and actually disdain attacking numerically inferior enemies as dishonorable. Indeed, important political debates within the Clans are often settled by formal duels between two champions. Political conflicts which in the Inner Sphere would be settled with open warfare are typically decided among the Clans by selecting two champions to represent each army, like two knights serving as champions on an ancient battlefield. During the Political century leading up to the first Clan Invasion of the Inner Sphere in 3049, a great debate arose within the Clans about how to approach their conquests. The faction known as Crusaders felt that they should conquer the constantly squabbling Inner Sphere for the good of the Clans, while the faction known as Wardens wanted to uphold Kerensky's original vision of conquering the Successor States of the Inner Sphere so that they might reunify them, for the good of all humanity, into a new Star League. These were not two rival groups of Clans, however, as a single Clan might be internally divided between Crusaders and Wardens. Certain Clans, however, were noted as heavily skewing towards one or the other, such as the Crusader-dominated Jade Falcons and the Warden-dominated Wolves.

First Clan Invasion

In year 3049 of the BattleTech timeline, the Clans finally returned to conquer the Inner Sphere after two and a half centuries of expansion, preparation, and planning. The Clan codename for the assault was Operation Revival.

Unfortunately, when the Clans attempted to invade the Inner Sphere centuries after their exodus, these rules of engagement had become so thoroughly pervasive in their culture and so heavily indoctrinated into their warriors that they continued to apply them against the Successor States - who felt no compunction to reciprocate. While the first Clan invasion was devastating, the Successor States eventually rallied when they realized that Clan mech pilots are extremely inexperienced with fighting multiple enemies at once. While the Clans often possessed more advanced technology and better-trained warriors than the Successor States, concentrated attacks using disproportionately massed numbers of technically inferior units proved effective at overwhelming them. Essentially, the Clans approached large-scale warfare with the same mentality of a large-scale duel, with each unit only attacking a single enemy at a time. Moreover, the Clans had little experience with total war tactics, such as destroying the enemy's heavy infrastructure and technology centers. Infrastructure was so fragile and scarce in the Kerensky Cluster that it was forbidden to directly attack it - instead major factories or mines were awarded as prizes to the victors of a conflict. The Successor States began to employ Scorched earth tactics to great effect, destroying heavy infrastructure on frontline planets instead of letting it fall into the hands of the Clans. In time, they employed a full Fabian strategy to bring the Clan invasion to a crawl, sending lightning raids against worlds in the Clan invasion corridor to destroy their infrastructure before withdrawing, as well as harassing Clan supply lines - another tactic the Clans had rarely relied on, as supply lines were not a viable target in their battle doctrine. As the Clans' hoped-for interstellar duel turned into attrition warfare, their offensives ground to a halt and the front lines of the Clan invasion corridor largely stabilized. After three years, the stage was set for the climax of the first Clan invasion at the Battle of Tukayyid in May 3052. The resulting Truce of Tukayyid established a fifteen year armistice between the invading Clans and the Successor States,

The defeat of the first Clan invasion demonstrated a serious disparity between ritualized Clan battle doctrine and the realities of total war in the Inner Sphere. That is not to say it completely invalidated Clan martial abilities: these rules, paired with the Clan breeding program, and a ruthless level of martial training, resulted in both an extremely warlike culture and superbly capable warriors. Individual Clan warriors can utterly dominate any forces fielded by the Successor States in one-on-one engagements. Their defeat did not change that, as the Successor States simply switched to using asymmetric warfare tactics. Nonetheless this started a major debate within the Clans, between those factions which felt they should adapt to warfare in the Successor States, and those who were determined to rigidly uphold their battle doctrine.

In the two centuries between Operation Klondike and Operation Revival, the number of Clans had declined from 20 to 17. This was due to the Annihilation of Clan Wolverine in 2823, the Absorption of Clan Widowmaker by Clan Wolf in 2834, and the Absorption of Clan Mongoose in 2868.

When the decision to return to the Inner Sphere was first made, the Clans staged a round of Trials (duels) to determine which Clans would have the honor of taking part in the assault. The four Clans which won the right to take part in the invasion were Wolf, Jade Falcon, Ghost Bear, and Smoke Jaguar. However, three additional Clans were subsequently also added to the invasion as reserve forces - Steel Viper, Nova Cat, and Diamond Shark - bringing the number of invading Clans up to seven. This led to an increasing split between the seven "Invader Clans" and the ten "Home Clans" who had stayed behind in the Kerensky Cluster. The Home Clans became increasingly jealous not only of the glory the Invader Clans were reaping from their conquests, but the very real danger of the growing power of the Invaders from their conquests. The Clan Homeworlds are only marginally habitable, while the worlds of the Inner Sphere are rich (benefiting from many more centuries of terraforming), with dense concentrations of population and infrastructure. The result was that even the conquest of a small fraction of the Inner Sphere, in the Clan Occupation Zone, gave the Invader Clans enough resources from their new powerbases to rival all of the Home Clans combined. For a time, the Invader Clans began to heavily dominate overall Clan politics, alienating the Home Clans even further.

Refusal War (3057-3058)

The Refusal War of 3057 began when Clan Jade Falcon fought Clan Wolf in a Trial of Refusal to determine if they should break the Truce of Tukayyid and renew the Clans' offensives against the Inner Sphere, which the Warden-dominated Wolves opposed. The Jade Falcons were at least partially motivated to break the truce due to the opportunity presented by the secession of the Lyran Alliance from the Federated Commonwealth that same year. The conflict seriously damaged the Clans' military strength in the Inner Sphere, practically exhausting both sides and resulting in only a pyrrhic victory for the Jade Falcons (and a short-lived one at that). The Refusal War also resulted in the deaths of major Wolf leaders Ulric and Natasha Kerensky at the hands of the Jade Falcons.

The Jade Falcons were able to defeat the Wolves and then attempted to purge it of all Warden warriors, leaving only a Jade Falcon puppet-state of the surviving minority of Crusader Wolves, which they shaped into their own image as "Clan Jade Wolf". However, a small but significant number of the Warden-wolves escaped destruction and fled to the Lyran Alliance, uniting against their shared Jade Falcon enemies. The Warden-wolves formally split off from the Jade Falcon-dominated Wolves and officially declared themselves to be a new Clan, "Wolf-in-Exile", and the legitimate successors of the original Clan Wolf. The Lyrans granted them joint rule of one-half of the planet Arc-Royal: a far cry from the large invasion corridor they once controlled), but enough to inspire resistance against the Jade Falcons. The Jade Falcons' success was indeed short-lived: barely 19 days after the creation of "Clan Jade Wolf", its leader Vlad Ward assassinated the ruling (and Jade Falcon-backed) ilKhan of the Clans in January 3058, overthrew Jade Falcon domination, and declared his faction to be "Clan Wolf" once again. The new "Clan Wolf", while removed from Jade Falcon influence, was still dominated mostly by the surviving Crusader Wolves. A shadow of its former self, it still controlled most of the original Clan Wolf population and territory. In contrast, the Warden-dominated Clan Wolf-in-Exile (despite only controlling half of one planet) still maintained that it, and not Ward's faction, was the true successor to the original Clan Wolf. Technically Clan Wolf-in-Exile was Abjured by the other Clans at the time, but its continued existence created a complicated political situation.

Great Refusal (3060)

Ironically, given that the goal of the Wardens was to rebuild the Star League, the renewed Clan aggression directly led to the creation of the Second Star League in 3058. The Successor States put aside their differences to focus on presented a united front against the threat of the Clans - even the Lyran Alliance and Federated Suns put their internal conflicts on hold, despite the fact that the Lyrans were attempting to secede from the joint Lyran/Federation Suns alliance known as the Federated Commonwealth. Clan Nova Cat saw the creation of a new Star League as the fulfillment of the Clans' destiny and stated mission, and actively sided with it in opposition to the other Invader Clans. In response, the other Clans officially Abjured the Nova Cats, formally throwing them out of the Clans, but they took up residence within the Draconis Combine.

The Second Star League then declared that they would force the Clans into a "Trial of Refusal" of their own (referencing the Clan custom of dueling over a political prize), a "Great Refusal" whereby they would defeat the champions of the Crusader Clans in the Inner Sphere, thus shocking the rest of the Clans into submission. The new Star League decided that the best way to do this was to target and destroy an entire invading Clan, and they singled out the Smoke Jaguars for destruction, in a campaign known as Operation Bulldog. The Warden Clans attempted to sit out the Great Refusal: their logic being that they came to the Inner Sphere to foster the creation of a new Star League, not destroy one when it appeared. The Wardens did not give up on the ultimate progress of the invasion, as they correctly anticipated that the Second Star League, formed by the unstable and mutually loathing Successor States, would soon simply collapse on its own. Thus the threat of the new Star League was met by the Crusader Clans. Unlike the other Warden Clans, however, the Nova Cats actively fought for the Second Star League against the Smoke Jaguars, who ultimately were completely destroyed in the assault. Afterwards the other Clans declared the Smoke Jaguars officially Annihilated and it formally ceased to exist.

At the end of the Great Refusal, forces of the Successor States launched a last-ditch mission aimed at Strana Mechty itself, and on arrival engaged in Trial-based duels, with the possibility of a new full-scale invasion hanging in the balance. They emerged victorious, however, forcing the Clans to agree to uphold the Truce and abandon the renewed invasion that the Jade Falcons had hoped for. At any rate, so many men and resources had been wasted in the Refusal War that the Jade Falcons and Wolves were in no condition for renewed offensives. The losses suffered from the Great Refusal in 3060 threw the Clans into Chaos. Clan Smoke Jaguar had been destroyed and Clan Nova Cat was Abjured, resulting in a major power vacuum back on the Clan Homeworlds as Trials of Possession began over their former territories. Moreover, Clan Ghost Bear had begun transporting the entirety of its population from the Kerensky Cluster to the Inner Sphere, and after the defeat of the Great Refusal it formally merged with the planets in its occupation zone which had formerly constituted the Free Rasalhague Republic to form the Ghost Bear Dominion. The Home Clans Abjured it in response, which led to another round of Trials of Possession for the Ghost Bear territories in the homeworlds. The massive power vacuum created by the removal of three major Clans, as well as the significant losses taken by the other Invader Clans, would ultimately instigate the Clan Civil War in 3075.

Overview

Members

•  :

Notes

In other media

Television

• In BattleTech: The Animated Series, the Clan appeared in the setting of the 1990s animated television series.

Appearances

• BattleTech:

External Link

• Mech Wiki Entry

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