What is Classic BattleTech?
Classic BattleTech (or BattleTech for short) is a game designed to simulate warfare between BattleMechs,
combat vehicles (tanks, helicopters, et cetera) and infantry units on a wide variety of terrain. Introduced
by FASA Corporation in the early 1980's under the name "BattleDroids," the game centered on five vast interstellar
nations each vying for dominion over one another in the year 3025. These nations were the shattered remains of a
long-dead interstellar alliance known as the Star League. The Star League, founded in 2571 with the signing of
the Treaty of Vega, had existed for almost two hundred years before internal pressures and civil wars sundered
the alliance. Following the collapse of the Star League, the commanding general of the Star League Defense Force
(SLDF) Aleksandr Kerensky, took over eighty percent of the surviving military personnel, their dependants and
equipment on an exodus from known space. He knew that the Star League's surviving member-states would use the
military might of the SLDF for conquest and personal gain, rather than to protect the people whom they had
sworn their lives to defend.
For almost three hundred years since, the nations that once banded together in the cause of peace and prosperity
fought against one another in a series of catastrophic conflicts known to historians simply as the Succession
Wars. These interstellar wars witnessed the indiscriminate use of nuclear weapons in conjunction with chemical
and biological agents on thousands of worlds across human-occupied space, while space-faring WarShip fleets used
orbital bombardment to raze vital industrial complexes and economic centers, claiming untold billions of human
lives. The seemingly unending series of wars brought uneasy political alliances of convenience and cost humanity
several precious, irreplaceable technologies. Constantly maneuvering for position, the leaders of these five
warring nations assumed the greatest enemy they would ever face was each other.
They were wrong.
The Return
In the year 3049, an unknown military force appeared on the outer fringes of human-occupied space. Sweeping the
region's defenders aside with little difficulty, these unknown invaders conquered world after world in a devastatingly
effective blitzkrieg that spanned a front of over seven hundred light-years. At first, these unidentified invaders
appeared to be from an alien civilization hell-bent on exterminating the entire human race. It did not take long,
however, to realize that the invaders were not an alien army on the move, but instead the descendants of the long-vanished
Star League Defense Force. Calling themselves the Clans, they declared their intention of seizing Terra (Earth)
and re-forming the Star League in their own image. Wave after wave of Clan assaults continued unabated, executed
with blinding speed and ruthless efficiency. Within a span of a few months, the Clan invaders controlled over a
hundred worlds. Faced with a common enemy, the nations that had spent the past three centuries fighting each other
united against the threat, establishing a new Star League in 3058. Victorious in 3060, the Star League halted the
Clan invasion and a new era of peace seemed to loom over the horizon. But the precarious unity they forged in the
face of the Clan threat is evaporating quickly as the Successor States seek any excuse to re-open old conflicts.
From border skirmishes to punitive raids to civil war, the conflicts of the Inner Sphere seem destined never to
end. And the Clans, born and bred as warriors, will not suffer peace lightly.
This is but the eye of the storm.
Originally written by Dan "Albatross" Schulz for The Clan Wolf Archives
Post 3067
Battletech-Mercenaries choose to take Classic Battletech on a different path, the 2nd Star League, instead of disbanding,
pulled their resources to push Word Of Blake off Terra and restructure the Star League to be reprensentative, with Senators
Ministers and a well-oiled bureaucracy to take away the despotism of 'First Lord' after more than 10 years the system is
still weak and open to corruption but most agree that establishing a long term Star League for the betterment of member
nations is worth the resources each member contributes.