Clan Elemental
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Not to be confused with the Elementals you find in fantasy.
Elementals are one of the main phenotypes of Clan Warrior, genetically engineered to serve as power armored heavy heavy infantry in the Battletech universe.
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 While originally made for swapping out weapons, it didn’t take too long to realize that Elementals could piggyback off of OmniMechs by mounting onto chassis docks to recharge their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.
Elementals
Prince Victor Steiner-Davion (top) faces down ilKhan Lincoln Osis (bottom), the latter in his 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. 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 on the assumption they didn’t know the game; only for the planet sport league to be utterly smashed by a team of Elementals, 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. The last thing that many a Federated Commonwealth or Draconis Combine Mechwarrior saw during the Clan Invasion was an Elemental busting into their cockpit.