The
First Succession War was a war of atrocity and war crimes, full of mass murder and nuclear weapons, orbital bombardment and general mayhem. I have often thought about how realistic is it, the prolific use of
nuclear and chemical weapons to destroy whole worlds. After much reflection, and perhaps disturbingly, it seems all to likely that once one side if no longer dependent on the same air, water and atmosphere as the enemy that resorting to weapons of mass destruction seems like a lot lower threshold. Scorched earth tactics employed as far back as the American Civil War and the mass starvation tactics of the siege of Leningrad are low level examples of how one can see the immediacy of now overriding moral codes. Chemical weapons were employed as late at the 1980s in large scale combat during the Iran-Iraq war, and in recent times in lesser amounts in Syria and Kurdish regions of Iraq. Time will tell if the last major taboo of modern times, nuclear weapons, will be broken in the Ukraine conflict. All this to say, extract the immediate toll of environment disruption to your own people and the chance the enemy can effectively retaliate and the practical limits, versus the moral ones, to WMD use are far degraded.
So the stories written about the 1st Succession Wars excesses, a plot device to explain away the technological decay and pseudo-medieval structure of the 3025 BattleTech universe, actually are fairly believable. At least as believable as 10 meter tall walking war machines.
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"Honor of Pesht" rising to orbit as Helm gets
business. |
One example which was brought to life in the
1st Succession War sourcebook in "Ghost Rain" was the bombardment of Helm by the Draconis Combine after that successor state failed to find its star league depot which it had made such a long range daring raid to get. Stymied by the, yet unknown, efforts of the local commanders to hide the star league depot beneath the frozen mountains of Helm, the Draconis Combine pulled out and back into orbit, where - via orders of the Coordinator - they struck the major population centers with
orbital bombardment, salted the land with radioactive metals, and threw the occasional nuke in for good measure.
For those keeping up with the lore, you will remember that it is this very planet, so scorched and destroyed, which would house the "
Helm Memory Core" discovered and distributed by the
Gray Death Legion in 3028 to the inner sphere, sparking the 'renaissance' period before the clan invasion. It is always interesting to me for the Battletech stewards to re-visit these scenes that, if you are a casual reader you will find interesting in there own rights, but from a deep lore fan like myself they are truly unique ways of filling in the story.
To note this particular event I choose to do a quick project on the Union dropship "Honor of Pesht" which acted as the command vessel for the raid and ultimately ordered the bombardment of Helm. I choose to do it in the Aerotech (Battlespace for you old timers...) scale since I don't have many of those yet and it would be super quick with contrast paints. House Kurita navy colors are gray and red, though at this scale its hard to do multi-color units so I went with a classic house Kurita red. When I do larger models I will attempt to do a more colorful depiction. These are too small for any house emblem decals, but the model gets it done - and adds to my growing fleet of Aerotech scale ships. This model if from IWM and I recommend there Aerotech mini-scale ships; especially with contrast paints since the mold lines are smaller and more refined then plastic models.
Sources:
1st Succession War: "Ghost Rain" short story
Historic Turning Points: Helm
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