Battle Tech stuff.

History

Factions

From the nation states of the twentieth century up to the Republic of the Sphere of the thirty-second century, BattleTech spans myriads of places and trillions of people. Interstellar, succession, and civil wars, as well as fragmentation and infighting gave birth to countless factions, of which most are noted below.

Inner Sphere

The Inner Sphere is a region of interstellar space surrounding Earth to a radius of roughly 450 - 550 light-years, generally demarcated by the outer borders of the "Great Houses." Within this region of about 2 million stars, there are approximately 2000 inhabited planets. Beyond the Inner Sphere is the Periphery.

The Star League

Over the course of fifteen years, from 2556 to 2571, Cameron managed to sign deals with the other five Houses to establish an organization known as the Star League. Headed by House Cameron, though with the other five Houses given a place on the ruling Council, the organization promised an end to inter-House war (as well as some massive incentives to sign on to the deal, ranging from military support to technological aid). However, Cameron was as much power-hungry as visionary, and he was therefore not content to be the universally accepted leader of the bulk of humanity. When the Star League had finally been assembled in 2571, among his first actions was attempting to get the lesser nations of the Periphery into the Star League. When requests and negotiation failed, he moved to trade sanctions, and when those failed, the Reunification War began. Thought by the Star League powers to be a war that would cost little, it actually took over twenty years to pacify the last of the Periphery holdouts, as well as unthinkably large losses to the Star League Defense Forces and the various House armies and navies. However, the Star League was by far the more powerful of the sides, and their victory was probably inevitable, despite the heavy losses they suffered to win. When the Taurian Concordat's last bastion of defense (a heavily mined nebula that wreaked havoc on SLDF navies for years) finally fell in 2596, the Reunification War was over and Ian Cameron had achieved his dream of reuniting the whole of humanity under one banner, as it had been united during the early days of the Terran Alliance.
During the nearly two hundred years that the Star League endured and relative peace reigned, technology bloomed. 'Mech and WarShip technology continued to advance at a rapid pace, and the first Hyperpulse Generator (HPG) went online in 2630, providing humans a way to communicate between planets without the need for moving JumpShips to transmit messages. The golden era of the Star League would, however, come to an end in a way few expected.
In 2767, following a series of rebellions in the Periphery that drew the bulk of the SLDF forces away from the central areas of the Star League, Stefan Amaris of the Rim Worlds Republic, supposed friend of First Lord Richard Cameron, assassinated the entire Cameron family and proclaimed himself new First Lord. The SLDF, under the command of Aleksandr Kerensky, regrouped quickly, drove inwards, and liberated the entire Inner Sphere from Amaris' clutches in a long and bloody 13-year war, culminating in the conquest of Terra. However, the SLDF, having been massively depleted in this war, no longer had the strength to hold the fractious Houses together, and eventually abandoned the Inner Sphere entirely in the great Exodus of the entire SLDF to the deep Periphery, not to be heard from again for three hundred years.

Word of Blake/ComStar

ComStar is the successor to the Star League's Ministry of Communications, and runs all of the Inner Sphere's HPGs, maintaining essential communications between every pair of star systems. Formed by Jerome Blake, the last Minister of Communications, after the fall of the Star League, ComStar has slowly morphed into an organization as much religious as practical, believing in everything from the need to pray to the machines they run to an eventual apocalypse that would engulf the Inner Sphere even more thoroughly than the fall of the Star League and the ensuing Succession Wars. Early in the First War, ComStar occupied Terra and has preserved it as both neutral ground and headquarters since. As well as their obvious communications duties, ComStar is also the Inner Sphere's most important bank and money-mover, runs the Explorer Corps to catalog the deep periphery, runs the Mercenary Review and Bonding Commission, and keeps a massive force of over seventy regiments of Star League-era 'Mechs, the Com Guards, and the only fleet of space going WarShips hidden in case of a future crisis.

Alexander Kernoff	Cameron St. Jamais	William Blane

The Chosen

Heinrich St. Louis	Sister Aliette	Sister Annette	Sister Claudette	Sister Colette

Sister Ginette	Sister Henriette	Sister Jeanette	Sister Maurette

Successor States

After the fall of the Star League and the Exodus of the SLDF, the five great houses' respective leaders claimed to lead the Star League, with no formal directive of succession as the Cameron family was unable to produce an heir. This caused the houses to wage war to see who would be the heir to the throne. With most of the Star League forces gone what was left was forces loyal to the houses that they were either formed at, stationed, or even the case in a rare circumstances still believed in the ways of the Star League, still flying the banner of the Star League, only dealing with the houses as a nicety to survive.

The Periphery

The Periphery refers to the region of space surrounding the Inner Sphere. The border between "the Periphery" and the "Inner Sphere" is generally 450 - 550 light years away from Terra. The Periphery is surrounded by the Deep Periphery, though the borders for this region of space are more nebulous. The Periphery is littered with small colonies and a handful of interstellar nations, legitimate or not.

Deep Periphery

Deep Periphery refers to the depths of unexplored space and/or human colonized space located beyond the (known) coherent human sphere of influence, namely the Inner Sphere and the adjacent Periphery realms. Due to the vague nature of the term "Deep Periphery", there is no clearly defined beginning nor are there any boundaries.
Though largely uncharted, the Deep Periphery is far from uninhabited. The Deep Periphery is littered with abandoned or failed colonies, small outposts, and even interstellar empires. Many periphery and Inner Sphere factions also maintain hidden bases in the Deep Periphery. The Clans have established numerous garrisons, depots and cargo waystations between the Clan Homeworlds in the coreward periphery and the Inner Sphere, sometimes by occupying an already inhabited system.
Excepting Clan space, no established HPG communication network exists within the Deep Periphery; communication is only possible via courier ship. While this is also true for the greater part of the near periphery, the distances involved mean that many Deep Periphery settlements are isolated from the rest of humanity.

Clans

The Clans were originally descended from the self-exiled remnants of the Star League Defense Force (SLDF), who had departed the Inner Sphere after Stefan Amaris brought about the downfall of the Star League. General Aleksandr Kerensky led his forces to a hidden destination far from the Great Houses because he believed that a catastrophic war was inevitable, one that even the once mighty Star League army would be powerless to stop. After much infighting between the members of the former SLDF, Aleksandr's son Nicholas Kerensky took command of the exiles, reorganizing them into twenty Clans of warriors leading and protecting their attendant civilian castes.
While the Inner Sphere was mired in the destructive Succession Wars, the Clans experienced a technological renaissance. When they returned to the Inner Sphere, 250 years after their ancestors' departure, the Great Houses were mostly powerless to stop the massive Clan Invasion. But after their loss at Tukayyid, internal tensions within the Clans and an alliance between the Great Houses drew the invasion to a standstill.