Capellan Confederation

The Capellan Confederation is one of the five successor states of the Inner Sphere and it's designated Punching Bag which is under the defacto leadership of House Liao. It is mostly modeled after China (a mash up of Imperial and Communist) with some Russian Influence.

Origins

Unlike the other states that already had ruling families who used charisma, charm, and violence to get their seals stamped onto their section of space, the Capellan Confederation's history has been marred from the beginning with near-constant shitflinging at the Inner Sphere powers and it's own neighbors, and especially the Free Worlds League. The Confederation began life as the Capellan Hegemony, getting into pissing contests with a neighbor the Sarna Supremacy over and over again, causing a number of the inner sphere powers to come down there and beat some sense into those in the Capellan Marches. Naturally, this caused quite a bit of annoyance from pretty much everybody, but especially the myriad worlds within the Marches, most notably Capella itself, which had been founded on the controversial, somewhat insane principals of one Elias Liao, who had fled Terran space after doing a terrorism, and so they banded together to keep the Inner Sphere's hands out of their respective pots, creating the Capellan Commonality. While the myriad worlds grew closer and closer together; all noblemen feared a possible invasion from the larger powers, and it wasn't necessarily an empty threat. The Capellan Commonality was wildly corrupt and poorly organized, and was often found wanting when it came to military might. Finally, during a peacekeeping mission from the FedSun, one of Elias Liao's descendants brought all of the leaders of the Commonality together, and suggested that all of the myriad worlds of the Commonality surrender their autonomy to a single leader and single party politik, and more or less founded the Capellan Confederation within a month of this meeting, beating back the FedSun peacekeeping forces, and made sure everyone took them seriously by orbitally bombarding up their own fucking capital world; moving all the important shit to the planet of Sian. And it is there that the Capellan Confederation solidified their existence.

House Liao

The Confederation's head of state is the Chancellor, and that position has historically been run by House Liao. While many of the other houses have had their bad seeds before eventually getting their shit together, House Liao has stood out for starting crazy, and stayed crazy. Elias Liao had his third eye opened in Tibet, and that particular trait has followed it's way down the line, with nutcases, despots, and full-on basket cases that it's actually easier to list the not-crazy ones.

• Sun Tzu Liao: The face that appears besides "Magnificent Bastard" in Inner Sphere dictionaries. Managed to get the Capellan Confederation back on it's feet after numerous defeats suffered in the first half of the 31st century.

Society

On paper the Capellan Confederation is Egalitarian and Socialist. In practice it falls short of those goals. There is a hereditary nobility which holds the political power within the centralized apparatus of the Capellan State as well as various corporations. Beyond that, the Citizens of the Capellan Confederation do benefit from a fairly comprehensive welfare state and enjoy peaceful and comfortable lives with a comparatively high standard of living and social mobility. The issue is that Citizenship in the Capellan Confederation is not something your born into and if you don't earn it (either by not doing well in school or being newly conquered, also you can loose it as a punishment), you're a Servitor. No, not that sort of Servitor (thank god) but part of an oppressed underclass who does the crap work for bare basic wages as the serfs of the nobility. The only consolation is that it is possible (if difficult) for servitors to earn citizenship and their kids have the same opportunities to earn citizenship as everyone else in the confederation.

Military

Capellans have long suffered as the designated villains of the IS, and as villains used to lose, for a long time, they kept losing worlds. Including many important industrial ones.

This has forced the Capellan armed forces to make do with what they have, or go the sneaky way.

An example of the former is the Cataphract heavy mech, which is esentially a serial production mechs, cobbled together from the parts that were still available from the remainign factories. Left arm from one, right arm from another sort of thing.

An example of the latter is the Raven mech, which was the first EW specialist mech developed since the succession wars cooled down.

The modern mechs developed after the resurgence are noted for posessing advanced camouflaged armor.