Federated Suns

Federated Suns
Capital	New Avalon (Currently held by the Draconis Combine)
Official Languages	Various
Size	Over 500 controlled worlds
Head of State	First Prince
Governmental Structure	Nominally Representative Democracy, de-facto constitutional feudal monarchy
Military Force	Armed Forces of the Federated Suns

"No one man can govern so vast a realm, even if that man is genius, saint, and hero all at once. And when a man of inferior or even ordinary abilities tries to exercise power over so many worlds and so many billions of people, the result is the tyranny, chaos, ignorance, greed, or hatred that we have already seen too often."

– Simon Davion

The Federated Suns is one of the five successor states of the Inner Sphere who are led by House Davion. The Federated Suns are modeled a bit on the modern day USA and the UK, with some other imperialism thrown in there for flavor.

Founding

In the Battletech universe, the Federated Suns became as they were due to the machinations of one Lucien Davion of the planet New Avalon, who was a soft-spoken idealist who made a name for himself through his charisma and his strong policy; and was well able to use New Avalon's position as regional agri-world supreme to his advantage. When shit in the Terran Hegemony went south; he began a world-hopping tour promising aid and defense to whoever joined a Pact with him. Twenty worlds did, and when Lucien was named first president, the Federated Suns was born.

House Davion

The Federated Suns have typically given the title of First Prince to their ruling executive regardless of gender, and that typically has always gone to a member of House Davion thanks to the political machinations of earlier rulers. While they tend towards being pretty smart, otherwise intelligent rulers who don't have much in the way of major qualms, there are some who have caused inconceivable damage to the Inner Sphere on sheer arrogance alone.

Society

The FedSun society is both tremendously helped and hindered by the sheer size of the Federation's territory in space, which is usually the largest of the Inner Sphere at any one time. People from all walks of life tend to make their home in Federation space due to constitutionally entrenched freedoms of expression, worship, personal enterprise, and political participation, with even the nobility having to watch their ass as specific rules in their constitution allows for their removal if they don't do their jobs well. Even the broke-ass hobos of the Suns will thank their lucky stars that they're not getting beaten for daring to say something against House Davion. As a result, most citizens lord this over pretty much any non-federation person who happens to wander into their space, making them exceptionally aggravating to put up with for more than a few minutes at a time due to their insistence that everybody else is just a bunch of backwards hillbillies.

This comes in to sharp focus from the outside perspective if you dig even slightly a bit below the surface; for all their talk about democracy and the hope for a better tomorrow, the Federated Suns went from constitutional republic to constitutional monarchy in a matter of a hundred years of it's foundation. It's citizenry are battered with insanely high stratification; the nobles are often wildly richer than any average dude in the Federation army could ever hope to be and will have an impossibly better standard of living; which is fine for the golden worlds near the capital world of New Avalon, but anyone out in the boondocks is probably more than fucked. And while their protections for individual freedoms are strong and often ironclad, their labor protections have famously been quite terrible; the Davions made it illegal to strike during the Succession Wars, and it has never been reinstated. These obvious disparities also extend to the education of their citizenry, which varies from world to world and is often wildly so. Most of the golden worlds of the Federation, especially ones close to one of the bigger centers of learning, will be able to go get a decent education. Everyone else will probably get a low-end trade school, if they're lucky. All of this is mostly obscured by a massively pro-military, pro-Davion society that continues to fuel the national character of a bunch of giant egotistical hypocrites.

Foreign Relations

• Draconis Combine: Very Bad. Look at the Kentares Massacre. Though they already had bad relationships from the War of Davion Succession.
• Capellan Confederation: Bad. The Capellans were hostile from the start when they nuked their own former capital of Capella under Davion peacekeeping occupation to tell the Davions to bug off.
• The Clans: Warily Neutral to Bad. See the Clan Invasion.
• Free Worlds League: Neutral to Historically Bad due to the Federated Commonwealth’s existence.
• Lyran Commonwealth: Neutral to Historically Good. Used to be merged together until the Fed-Com Civil War.
• The Periphery: Ambivalent. The Taurian Concordat has a massive simmering hatred against the Federated Suns. The Outworlds Alliance had an ambivalent relationship with them.

Military

The AFFS has traditionally been one of the best in the Inner Sphere, due to the absurd amount of money they receive annually to upkeep the many lightyears of space between one end of their space to the other, the insistence of their First Princes having to serve before they ever actually get the job as "First Prince", and an admittedly different but rather simple characteristic of their military that sets them apart from most of the Inner Sphere; their military is just well-organized. The AFFS is on average some of the most well-equipped, and well-supplied among the Inner Sphere; as they believe in ensuring all of their troops, from the grunt to the commanding officer, should always be the most prepared. This was not always the case, however, as before the 2800's there was plenty of individual and interdivisional rivalries between the myriad corps of the Suns, but all of that changed under Melissa Davion, who noticed that replacing Battlemechs was a tall order given how badly the industrial centers of the Federation were battered after the Succession Wars, and made major changes in what became known as her "Model Army", which turned most of their combat units into what are known as Regimental Combat Teams, which are always combined-arms, and quite unlike other units at the time of it's founding, were considered permanent. While Battlemechs are obviously at the forefront, they were now always flanked by infantry, tanks and aerospace fighters, which killed most of the interdepartmental rivalries right quick when they all had to work together to win the day.

Most AFFS regiments use the typical Inner Sphere models of organization to fight, though they typically make sure that the Battlemechs are piloted by the best individual pilots within a regiment regardless of their weight class because they'd rather not engender any idiotic games of grab-ass with each other, and would prefer their Mechwarriors are good at teamwork and shit like that. Because of that, the typical FedSun Mech lance is generally lighter on average than that of their compatriots, but it's counterbalanced by the skill of the pilots and also the sheer number of lances; and using lighter mechs with highly skilled pilots, FedSun lances can rely on having superior tactical mobility against most enemies.

Of course, that doesn't mean they win every encounter they've ever been thrown into (just most of them), as their national character of "Space America" has a very nasty reputation of smacking them straight on the ass when they least expect it. This got a big wake-up call when the Jihad happened, which devastated much of the AFFS, and forced a more streamlined, modular and defensive unit setup going forward.

Notable Mechs

• Centurion: The un-official mascot of any AFFS Lance. Put into service during the first succession war, it's been chugging along with regular updates as a perfectly competent and dangerous 'Mech, but it's almost been replaced due to the feeder mechanism to its Autocannon being a recurring issue, one that only got worse when the company that makes those parts got glassed, but post-jihad they ended up spending trillions making a massively updated version as well as the old version, just with the autocannon manufacturer switched. Newly built Dark Age models are further updated to be OmniMechs structured around an endo-steel chassis, carrying heavier equipment and swapping in different ranges of weapons, C3 and ECM depending on what the lance needs.
• Enforcer: The other mascot of the Federated Suns' Lances. Has largely existed in force primarily due to nobody really blowing up their factories, and as such this dual-role mech has been able to see quite a bit of prominence throughout the Federated Suns throughout the years, to the point that many of the royal regiments and First Princes of the Federation have or have had one that they've used to great effect. One can imagine the pilots of Centurions and Enforcers to be pretty fierce rivals because of this. Carries a large laser and jump jets in addition to its autocannon, in contrast to the Centurion's missiles and medium lasers, giving it the much needed agility for a mech of the line. The later "Enforcer III" variants branch out from the standard AC/10 for more variety in the main cannon.
• Rifleman: An ubiquitous anti-air heavy mech with advanced aerial targeting systems, the Rifleman became a common sight in the AFFS where the resource strain of the Succession Wars often forced it into a more generalist fire support role. Equipped with minimal armor, minimal heat sinks and a large number of long ranged weapons, the Rifleman is often considered lacking in head-to-head confrontations with other mechs. House Davion worked several times to "fix" this mech, producing the homegrown Jagermech design(all autocannons, resulting in low damage but no more heat problems) as well as occasional PPC and AC/10 anti-mech refits. Newer version available in later eras, one carries twin Rotary AC/5s, while the "III" variant carries double PPC's with double heatsinks to back them up.
• Valkyrie: The signature Davion light mech. Originally meant to be SLDF but mass produced by House Davion because a fully automated factory for the things happened to be on New Avalon. The Federated Suns split these fairly evenly throughout their forces and hand them out to mercenaries too. Decently armored but rather slow for a light mech, with a focus on long range missiles at the expense of lacking punch, this mech falls into a supporting scout/harasser role. Most 3050+ refits and new models follow the "laser in right arm, missiles in torso" rule, staying more or less true to the original concept while adding ways to boost speed, range and/or accuracy.
• Wolverine: An elder design of the Federated Suns, the Wolverine was designed as a decent middle ground between the Mackie and the Battleaxe, but was put through about a million different designs before it actually worked. But when it did, it came out swinging. A versatile, mobile and venerable design that took the title of workhorse mech for the Federation for generations, though because it's been so reliable, it's also been rarely updated for modern warfare. Still, if you'd rather have your command mech not overheat from jumping somewhere or from firing once, this is definitely the better choice of mech over the Phoenix Hawk.
• Dervish: A speedy, jumping missile boat with several serious design flaws, the Federated Suns ended up with the lion's share of these and never enjoyed it. Known for splitting between short and long range launchers, never committing to one and so having mediocre firepower at either range. Its short range launchers only fire two missiles at a time, but have a full ton of ordnance each in their bins. On the flip side, having so many ammunition bins allows for various specialty munitions to be carries. The main issue with this mech would later be fixed with the introduction of MMLs(multi-missile launchers), letting it fire either class of missile from all its tubes.
• Blackjack: Another one of House Davion's more maligned mechs, the Blackjack was initially conceived as an anti-infantry SLDF warcrimes machine and later found itself carrying small caliber autocannons and medium lasers. A sort of fire support mech that is annoying at long range and packs a punch if the enemy gets closer. Initially given garrison duty, it eventually got refit with large lasers of all varieties so that it could put out more damage, up to and including the AFFS' new armor-drilling Re-Engineered Lasers in the 32nd century. A seriously upgunned OmniMech model reverse-engineered from Clan tech would become popular throughout the Inner Sphere.
• Victor: For when Davion wants to win a city engagement quickly and with the least amount of subtlety possible (which happens a lot more than you think) they send in their trusty Victor. While average for an assault mech weighing 80 tons and with a sprinting speed of 64/kph, this mech shakes it up a bit by mounting 4 assault grade JUMPJETS to leap across city blocks and over buildings with ease without needing to do that whole tedious "navigation" thing on foot, or if some poor fuck is in range, to put the boots to them medium style (literally) by landing on them with the dreaded Death From Above maneuver. For weapons, the Victor goes all in on close range weapons by equipping a massive Autocannon/20 made by Pontiac (guess mediocre sedans just aren't profitable a thousand years later), the reliable Holly 4-tube shortrange Missile Launcher and two Medium Laser cannons of...obscure origin. This weapons combo has the potential to put down almost any mech in the Medium weight category or lower in a single pull of the trigger, even some of the more lightly armored heavies aren't safe from this behemoth, though this brings us to the Victor's one true drawback. For armored protection, the Victor only has 11.5 tons of standard grade armor, and while this sounds ok to your average normie, this is a paltry amount of armor for an assault mech, especially for one that works in close range. Over the years, the Victor has been outfitted with everything ranging from Gauss Rifles to Ultra Autocannons to the new Re-Engineered Lasers, but in those years, it's never lost that big knock out punch that many in the Capellan Confederation, Draconis Combine and, most recently, the Lyran Commonwealth, have come to fear.

Downfall and Current state

From the Succession Wars to the Dark Age eras in the BattleTech timeline, the Federated Suns were often used as the protagonist state in the Battletech literature, for a long time. Conversely in turn, the faction recently had to suffer for it.

After the glory days of Federated Commonwealth, a dynastic struggle between the too-focused-on-the-clans-to-see-his-own-realm-trouble Victor Steiner Davion and his will-kill-own-mother-to-gain-power sister Catherine, the two realms separated back into the Federated suns and Lyran Commonwealth, and just then, the Word of Blake started their Jihad.

Idealistic as ever, Federated Suns fully supported the new Republic of the Sphere championed armistice, and seriously reduced its military.

Its neighbors PRETENDED to reduce their militaries.

As a consequence, when the Inner Sphere heated up again, the Federated Suns was far from good fighting shape.

Worse, it came to be ruled by Caleb Davion. Of questionable sanity, limited military ability and disastrous judgement of character, Caleb's blunders led to the massive military defeat at Palmyra, resulting in his death and the enemy Kuritans and Capellans making deep inroads into the realm, to the point where the Kuritans managed to occupy New Avalon itself.

The Federated Suns last hope is young Julian Davion, a capable military commander with a suitably massive chin. Under his leadership, the remaining Federated Suns military managed to at least stop the enemy advance. Worth mentioning is that they were significantly helped in this by Republic of the Sphere, who offered a significant amount of military backup in their darkest hour.

Unfortunately, when the Republic found itself in its own darkest hour, the Federated Suns were... unable to return the favor due to still dealing with invaders. While the Federated Suns may have become the destination of choice as refuge of the remaining Republic forces after its fall (with the Free Worlds League and Lyran Commonwealth largely either ambivalent or too busy cleaning up house to accommodate ex-Republic soldiers and politicians), this failure is bound to bite them in the ass some day. The fact the Wolves' IlKhan is heir to the Steiner-Davion bloodline and already claims the Archonship makes things less likely to be calm in the future.