Clan Elemental

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Not to be confused with the Elementals you find in fantasy.

A Clan Elemental lady, Snu Snu at your own peril

Elementals are one of the main phenotypes of Clan Warrior, genetically engineered to serve as power armoreded heavy infantry in the Battletech universe. There are some parallels between these guys and gals and Space Marines, though they are born and bred that way instead of being surgically modified.

History

There were two developments which lead to Clan Elementals, first of all was the development of a powered exosuit for deep sea mining by Clan Goliath Scorpion in 2842. The second was Clan Hell's Horses developing a line of bulked-out soldiers. Clan Wolf wanted a slice of both of these actions. First their merchants bought the schematics for the Diving Suit designs in 2860 and soon had their Scientists began to adapt them for combat. These were ready for service in 2868 and were a nasty surprise for Clan Nova Cat. Hell's Horses challenged Clan Wolf for their new power suits and after some negotiating had their set of combat trials for the rights to manufacture the armor in exchange for the gene-tech. In the end, both sides got the others tech and they were happy with this as they both came out ahead, though other Clans would go out of their way to acquire both for themselves in the next few years. Another breakthrough for Elementals was the creation of the OmniMech’s universal docking ports. While originally made for swapping out weapons, it didn’t take too long to realize that Elementals could piggyback off of OmniMechs by mounting onto chassis docks to recharge their weapons and move along with the BattleMech units for mobility. So while reverse engineered Battle Armor by Spheroids was initially restricted to defensive warfare, Elementals were able to be on the offensive alongside their MechWarrior brethren.

For the next 180 years, the Clans would field forces of Elementals in various inter-Clan conflicts. Seven generations of Elementals would be grown, raised and tested against Mechs, conventional infantry and each other and over that time they were honed to a fine edge. Both as individual soldiers and as elements in larger Clan formations.

Inner Sphere Debut

Some Comparison for scale on these bad boys/girls

When these guys showed up in the Inner Sphere, they were a bloody nightmare. Imagine being a regular Federated Commonwealth grunt garrisoning some border world in 3050. You signed up at age 18 and got a couple months of basic training. You have a uniform with a helmet and a bullet proof vest and either an autogun or a laser rifle in a platoon with similar gear. You've been trained to fight guys with pretty much the same gear marching under banner of the Red Kuritan Snek, Green Liao Machete, or the Purple Marik Birb. You might also have some specialists in your platoon with either C4 satchels and jump packs or alternatively rockets launchers and up-gunned APC to take on your occasional BattleMech, Jet Fighter, or tanks. Not that you expect to face any of those out here. At worst there would be occasional pirate or criminal gang causing trouble at the edge of civilization.

Then out of of nowhere you hear that some strange guys have showed up and are landing troops, the officers muttering confusions about "Batches of Chalk" and you're deployed to face these strangers. Then you see a group of three meter tall broad bulky figures jetting into view and crashing down. Your company tries to light them up, but you might as well be shining flash-lights on them. They, on the other hand, hose your platoon down with laser cannon fire like a scythe through wheat. Someone gets close and tries in desperation to bayonet the monstrosity, with has about as much effect as trying to carve up a car with a butter knife, and is tossed aside like a doll. Grenades do little more than annoy them. While you call in tanks and helicopters to take them out, they either jet pack on top of the vehicles before shooting the cockpit out with a laser cannon or shoot them out of the sky with shoulder-mounted missiles. Eventually the squad panics and flees in all directions. You stumble and desperately dump your power cell into one of the strange figures, which succeeds only in messing up the Wolf Logo on the shoulder. It walks over and picks you up to inspect you. Staring into the visor, you can just make out the rough image of a pair of eyes inspecting you. That's the last thing you see. The last thing you hear is a slightly tinny voice saying "Your courage is commendable little freebirth, but foolish". Now imagine that it's a bit later and you're another FCAM grunt who's heard stories of these mechanized monster troopers used by The Clans who've now jumped into your system. There's a good chance you'd need to change your underwear.

This trauma, as well as the their foreign appearance alongside unknown BattleMech designs convinced initial defenders that the Clans were an invading force of aliens. Eventually as the invasion continued, the means of engaging Elementals successfully were worked out. Mainly with the usage of vehicle-mounted heavy weapons, defensive gun emplacement, or the usage of mines. Later, heavy man-portable autocannons, gauss guns, and flamers were created but were still restricted to defensive combat. Even then, in most situations they could still cut a bloody swath through conventional soldiers while they can swarm an unsuspecting BattleMech and tear it apart like a pack of piranhas.

Eventually the remains of Elemental power armor was salvaged and sent off for study. Not long after Inner Sphere managed to devise their own Battle Armor systems and rushed them into production. This did even the playing field a bit, though the advantage was still with The Clans. Early Inner Sphere Battle Armor were rush-jobs with a lot of bugs, arrived in a trickle and were and operated by inexperienced users without doctrine to make the most of them as opposed to elite soldiers trained from childhood to fight in it and how to deal with it. Not many of the early IS Battle Armored troops that faced elementals came back alive to share notes and those that did faced the dilemma of either leaving the front to teach new recruits but reducing immediate manpower or dying at the front without passing on their experience. Battle Armor was also hard to reverse engineer from a culture that refined it over three centuries. As an example of how harsh of a learning curve Battle Armor development for the Inner Sphere was, they never completely figuring out how to integrate jump packs and shoulder-mounted rockets simultaneously on their own designs all the way to the IlClan Era with the closest being disposable rocket launchers that are fired before they can jump.

Description

"To the Victor go the Spoils . . . "
Prince Victor Steiner-Davion, piloting a Dire Wolf, faces down ilKhan Lincoln Osis (bottom), in Clan Elemental Battle Armor, at the end of the "Great Refusal."

Your basic Elemental stands between 2 to 2.5 meters tall and is built like a brick shithouse. They're strong, fast and resilient even in regular clothes. As such, most elemental wash-outs end up in the Laborer caste. As is typical with Clan Warriors, they've been trained from childhood to fight, survive, and work together as a team, with only the best of the best graduating. Even without Battle Armor, you would not want to throw down with an Elemental. In one humorous & bloodless example during the Clan Invasion, an undefended Draconis Combine planet tried to one-up Clan Ghost Bear with a game of American football in exchange for staying unconquered. They assumed the Bears didn’t know the game; only for the planet sport league to be utterly smashed by a team of Elementals who play it as a hobby, 84 to 3. One of the very few exceptions is if your name is Victor Steiner-Davion, who after a brief exchange of words dismounted from his captured Clan Daishi/Dire Wolf OmniMech and beheaded the former ilKhan of the Clans, Lincoln Osis, with a simple katana after Osis willingly took off his Battle Armor in an attempt to "teach Victor a lesson" just after the last remnants of his Clan Smoke Jaguar forces handily lost their part of the "Great Refusal" in the licensed novel Prince of Havoc.

Your basic suit of Elemental armor weighs a literal metric tonne with 250 kg of armor and is equipped with jump jets. They can operate in the vacuum of space, underwater or in heavy gravity. It has two short range missile launchers on its shoulders, and two modular mounts for weapons built into its arms. In infantry firefights, an Elemental is a goddamn nightmare able to cut a bloody swathe through squads of regular guys with guns while brushing off most of their fire. Against BattleMechs, they're small enough to hide, nimble enough to evade most fire (represented by a to-hit roll penalty in the tabletop game, but this "I'm tiny and hard to hit" bonus is not reflected in the various BattleTech-related video games that Clan Elementals have appeared in) and durable enough to take a hit or two from most BattleMech-scale weaponry. And since they come in fireteams of 5, a average MechWarrior can only kill one or two at best before the rest latch on. The last thing that many a Federated Commonwealth or Draconis Combine Mechwarrior saw during the Clan Invasion was an Elemental busting into their cockpit to shoot them in the face. Humorously enough, they were nicknamed “Toads” by the Inner Sphere militaries due to their chonky appearance and jumping capabilities.

Elemental Suit Variants

After the Clan invasion, new Power Armor systems were devised for Elementals ranging from lighter winged jump suits like the Sylph to a heavy laser cannon on legs like the Corona. In contrast to the standard Elemental armor being a Medium generalist design (though the universal metric), the end of the Clan Invasion gave both Clans and the Great Houses incentives to create specialized suits spanning the following weight range: Power Armor (Light) (500 kg), Light (750 kg), Medium (1,000 kg), Heavy (1,500 kg), and Assault (2,000 kg).