So, after being given a thumbs up from Follower, here's some ideas I've got regarding my Battle Armors (including refined versions of them)

Non canon as hell unless something suddenly changes.

Tex Talks Battletech Episode XXX:
Inner Sphere Battle Armor Part 1: Second Best Is Still On The Podium

So, class, we've been talking a lot about how the Terrans changed the Inner Sphere. How their machines, their might, their mechs, their industry, their... well... their everything threw the 'Spheroids for a loop we wouldn't get hit with again until the Clans came home, but we haven't much talked about what the Inner Sphere has done in response.

Now, I could talk about the changes in doctrine, how combined arms became the watchword of the day, changes to how DropShips were deployed and a thousand other things, but today I think I'm going to be nice. I won't bore you all with dry logistical and TO&E facts that you can read in every TRO out there. Instead, I'm going to talk about something different.

After all, we commonly say that the Terrans are "Kings of Battle Armor", but that implies the existence of a Queen, does it not?

Today, we're going to talk about that Queen.

Today, we're talking about Canopus.

Chapter 1: Wait, the Catgirls?

You know, with all the drugs, strippers, and libertine politics I keep forgetting that when my arm needed an upgrade, Haven suggested swinging by Canopus if I didn't want to do it myself.
- Chief Engineer Swann on the Canopian BA phenomenon

Now class, I hear what you're saying. "Mr. Tex, have you lost your mind? Canopus isn't anything but strippers, blow, and funnel cake?" And while yes, Canopus does have that, one thing it also has is a surprisingly robust R&D department and enough medical knowledge that House Nobles swing by their hospitals whenever they need their tonsils taken out or something below the belt fixed. Or, and important for this episode, if you want good cybernetics, you go to the Magistracy.

Now, can someone tell me in the most basic definition what "Myomer Fibers" are?

Yes, you.

That's right, Myomer Fibers are commonly called "synthetic musculature" when used with Battlemechs and it's not incorrect. They are, at their core, the same stuff we've got powering our own legs, but industrial scaled and shoved into giant walking war machines. They are also what is used for high end cybernetics, something every Canopian Ripperdoc realized when they were first introduced to the idea of CMC Battle Armor.

Y'see, Canopus and Dumassas have an interesting history. Not an old one, but after the Terrans arrived, Dumassas got hit with a nasty disease carried over by a DropShip, common occurrence in the Periphery and even a decent chunk of the Inner Sphere. While Haven was working to contain and quarantine the problem, a Canopian Traveling Hospital swung by the planet because they were chasing down that exact DropShip and just so happened to have a bunch of samples of potential vaccines and treatments for the disease. From what we can tell, and trust me, from what I've heard, Haven investigated this thoroughly, this was genuinely just a case of coincidence and someone deciding the Hippocratic Oath actually meant something now a days.

As thanks, Haven decided to give the Canopians some data on their Pressurized Powersuits along with a bunch of medical stuff. This would, ironically enough, not come back to bite them!

But it did give the Magestrix an idea.

She put together as many engineers, industrial exoskeleton designers, cyberneticists and crackpot wackjobs as she could into a single design department, found some sponsors and subject matter experts, and gave them all the funding they needed.

And all they had to do, was give her a suit of Battle Armor.

They gave her something a bit better than just a suit.

Chapter 2: CARDNLs in a Skunkwerks

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the Periphery by hiring talented people, paying them top C-Bill, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a 1 thousand kilogram suit of Battle Armor a generation or two ahead of anybody else.
- Beatrice R. Rich in her book CARDNL: A Personal Memoir Of My Years In The Magistacy.

So, you've got a bunch of crazies, tech experts, and enough funds to buy BattleMechs made out of Battle Powder. What do you do?

Well, if you're the Canopus Armorworks R&D Neo-Labs (CARDNL, someone really stretched it to get that acronym to work, didn't they?) you go poke a handful of Terran companies that make industrial exoskeletons to see if they have any research documents left over from the Star League. Turns out, after Helm was pulled from it's pit, someone actually did find something. An incredibly detailed document for how to create knee joints for 'high speed' EVA exoskeletons.

The fact these 'high speed' EVA exoskeletons had the same knee joints as Nighthawk and Tornado PAL has caused no end of tin hat theorizing after the Tukayiid Reveal. Speaking of, pay your phone bills.

In the end, this was really nice for the Canopian test pilots of what was tentatively called the "Small Walking Non-Mech Combat Platform 1X", or the SNMCP-1X since it had a habit of snapping legs like twigs whenever the pilot got up to a jog.

Oh don't give me that, CARDNL intentionally picked people who had cybernetic limbs for this exact reason. Anyway, back on track.

After ditching the Raider derivative designs, CARDNL was able to get their first experimental system up and, literally, running. No armor, no weapons, but the suit could dash around and carry hand held weapons. Not good enough for the team, though. The design would be revisited when they created the Beauty Commando Suit, but right now, they decided to scale up. Create something bigger, tougher, something with a bit of bite.

So they got to work and made exactly that.

With their knee problem basically solved, turns out melding Myomer in place of PPS hydraulics does funny things around the joints, see above for why that was bad, the rest of the design went more or less smoothly. They settled on a round 1 thousand kilograms as the ceiling tonnage for this suit, 250 kilograms more than CMC and now known as "medium BA", decided on two smaller vehicle grade weapons over rumors of the Lyrans melding support lasers to their suits, and that it should be able to eat a medium laser and survive.

The Claws were, ironically enough for how iconic they would become, a design limitation since the armored gloves kept crushing things it held, they just decided to shove claws on the tips of the fingers and make it part of the design.

In the end, the Canopians presented their Magestrix with the design they worked so hard to perfect.

The Hellion Battle Armor.

Chapter 3: OH DEAR GOD WHY IS SHE LAUGHING

One of the serious problems in planning against Third Magistracy Fusiliers Doctrine is that they do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.
- Anonymous Marian Hegemony Officer

Now, let me set the scene for you. You are a bunch of pirate infantry riding around in an APC, probably swapping stories and laughing about what you're going to do when you reach the town full of Canopian strippers or whatever.

Then, you hear a thud. No, not a thud, a metallic "clang". Like something just hit the back of your moving Vee.

You freeze up, get silent, someone picks up their rifle.

And then you hear distorted laughter as a pair of massive claws punch through the back door of your APC, rips the door open, and just stands there soaking up your rifle fire.

That's the moment you notice the pilot light under one of it's arms.

Char broiled pirates, what a field test.

Alright, zooming back out, but when the Hellion suits were basically complete and about to be sent out for field trials, a bunch of pirates decided that the planet they were being developed on looked perfect for a raid. So while the Magistracy's best garrison forces went out to go beat up whatever Vee's and 'Mechs the pirates could wrangle up, the platoon of functional Hellion Battle Armor suits got shoved onto their test pilots and sent out to take out the infantry swarming the testing lab.

This, of course, went over swimmingly.

First, let me give you the baseball card stats for this thing. It's a 1 thousand kilogram Medium Battle Armored suit carrying a medium machine gun, a Battle Armor flamer, and 200 kilograms of Neosteel enhanced Battle Armor plating, the first of it's kind. Turns out, aside from the PPS designs and a thriving tourist economy going both ways, medical, business, and other tech wasn't the only thing Haven and Canopus decided to share. As Haven began to rip apart the Laser Rifles, Crabs and Shilones traded to them by Canopus, the Magistracy got something back. Steady shipments of Commercial Neosteel to experiment with and study. The Magestrix decided that a portion of that Neosteel should go to CARDNL and, out of it, came what we now call "Advanced Battle Armor Plating", primitive edition. Now, that's not to say this armor wasn't good. It was damn good, bulky sure, but lightweight enough to allow room for the rest of the incredibly heavy components. However, it did come with some downsides. Later studies on the Brute suit showed that Primitive Advanced Battle Armor Plating couldn't be stacked higher than 290 Kilograms before growing paradoxically brittle, something fixed by the use of Clan Alloys or Military grade Neo-steel later on, but this gave the Hellion suit an incredibly sharp advantage over their competitors at the time who were using Standard Battle Armor Plating. The main side effect, as you may imagine, is that the only way the Magistracy could resupply these suits until they started Neo-Steel production of their own was through trade with Haven, but luckily it didn't take too much Neo-Steel to make, so the costs never ballooned too high.

But that's not the important aspect of this suit, what makes it special is that hidden inside that suit, inside those overbuilt thighs that I know you're thinking of making jokes about, are bundles of myomer woven at a ratio of 34 to 1 with a proprietary system they called "Myomer Boosting Weave".

Now, what does this mean? It means for every "bundle" of Myomer in the arms and legs, there are 34 "strands" of myomer inside. Now, smart boffins might be catching on, that's correct. Inner Sphere Standard Battle Armor uses a ratio of 12 to 1. Yeah, I see we've got a mechtech in here who just realized it. For anyone who hasn't caught on yet, more myomer you add to a bundle, the more force it contracts with. In Battlemechs they tend to use a bundle size of 200:1 at least, but for industrial stuff? For exoskeletons? It's not uncommon to see it going as low as 5:1.

And now we've got the Canopians shoving as much Myomer as they possibly can into bundles all tracked around the limbs.

So, what does this do?

Simply put?

It lets the wearer of the Hellion suit run up to 150 meters in 10 seconds. That's 15 meters per second or 54 kilometers per hour. You can outrun basically any assault mech on the market and keep up with the walking pace of most Heavies. This is very useful since before omni-technology started floating onto the Spheroid market, you either had to use your Chevrolegs or hitchhike on an APC to get anywhere if you were in Battle Armor. The Hellion, however, lets you sprint about as fast as most of your Combat Vehicle support for hours and fight a battle afterwards, drastically increasing the usefulness of this armor.

If you want shock commandos, it's hard to go wrong with the Queen of Battle Armor's old standard, the Hellion Battle Armor.

Chapter 4: Rip And Tear

COME HERE SQUISHY! MOMMY WANTS TO SEE WHAT YOUR INSIDES LOOK LIKE!
- Comment recorded on Hellion Corp battlerom. Pilot returned to base covered in viscous red fluid.

Now, just like the Elemental Suit the Clanners brought out to the shock of basically everyone, the Hellion is really a two part product.

First part, the suit itself with its incredible speed, claws, machine gun and flamer, and enough armor to eat a small laser to the face.

Part the second, that right there is the pilot.

Canopus wasn't able to create gene forged post human warriors stripped of all emotions but hate and pride, yet, but they sure as hell went to the second best thing. The original Hellion Corp were made up of recruits taken exclusively from the Third Canopian Fusiliers, fitted with cybernetics that increased their, well, everything and then shoved into the Battle Armor and told "have fun".

Ever wonder why one of the stranger features of the Hellion suit includes a distortion setting on their external microphone as the default? They're why.

Canopian ARC and assault teams tend to appreciate that type of psychological warfare and after the first time you see an infantry formation break simply because you charged them laughing your ass off and shrugging aside machine gun rounds? Tends to make an impression.

Now, I mentioned claws and inevitably someone is thinking of the Clanner three fingered Battle Claw. While this is, indeed, a Battle Claw, what Canopus mounted was more akin to a dragon's talons than the industrial stuff Clanners like.

Four fingers dexterous enough to operate heavy equipment on the end of each arm powered with, as I mentioned, 32:1 strength Myomers and industrial cutting talons means they can grab some poor Leaguer bastard and physically rip them apart straight down the middle. Or, as proven during a brief skirmish where CMC clone clad troops from the Capellan Confederation raided Canopian space, rip CMC helmet seals open and take skulls like the girl inside, because in Canopus the Hellion Corp is nearly universally female, is cosplaying some diet predator.

What I'm saying is that watching a Hellion Operator go to work is oddly arousing, but I married an Elemental, so I know where my tastes lie.

And that's all before I bring up the fact that the modern Hellion Corp mainlines a syringe of combat stims. Rumor has it the machine gun plus flamer combo is because the designers didn't know if their troops would be in the right state of mind to accurately aim their weapons when in the middle of a fight.

Once heard a Terran comment that "thought we left this shit back in Korpulu" after engaging with a pack of Hellion battle suits during a friendly warfame.

Terrans won, obviously, but the Canopians sure as hell earned their second place spot on that podium.

Ended up putting the quote in the next marketing advertisement along with a picture of a Hellion suit physically throwing one CMC clad Raider at another.

Chapter 5: So What?

I've got eight sets of Hellion out back if you're in need of a rapid order. Everything else is going to take a few weeks to spool up production of. Yeah, even the ISS BA, that stuff needs so many patents to independently build.
- Comment overheard at military equipment market, 3065

Yeah, yeah, I hear you folks asking "so what". Asking why you'd ever want to use something like the Hellion when there's the IS Standard, Elemental, or the various CMC clones floating around?

And you'd be right to doubt its use in the modern day, in part. It can't work with Omni tech, it is expensive, it has a habit of removing legs if those Myomer boosted systems gets damaged, and a whole heap of other teething problems going on that mostly got solved with system patches.

So sit down and let Uncle Tex tell you why.

Because Canopus made these suits to be fucking efficient and then sold them to everyone.

IS Standard tends only to be standard via will of the Star League and we know how fickle they can be, CMC clones need boatloads of repair and those servos keep dying on me personally, but those Hellion suits? Those bitches just don't die unless they are killed.

So long as you can keep up with replacing the plates, basically every other part is considered an "off the shelf" component because CARDNL were the ones to stock the shelves. The Myomer booster kit is expensive, sure, but Canopus sells machines that will weave military grade Myomer to the right bundle size for you so you can repair your own suits. The mounting points need Neo-steel, but it needs commercial Neo-steel and the Steiners have flooded the market with that stuff. Hell, even the weapons are an off the shelf Sperry-Browning 50 cal and a FlameTek flamer, something you can pick up at any militia mart in the 'Sphere. This thing is so easy to upkeep in part because everything else was built to its spec. I'd compare it to the Mackie, but I don't want to compare anything the Periphery makes to whatever the Terran Hegemony spat out.

Oh, but don't you worry, it gets better. Y'see, because of the friendship between the Canopians and Raiders, there's a version of the Hellion Suit made with a very important piece of Terran tech.

The Impaler Gauss Rifle.

That's right, they swapped out the 50 cal and flamer for two dual linked, Gauss accelerating, infantry mulching, armor denting assault rifles. The type of stuff that put the fear of Blake into every pirate, mercenary and house lord army that stumbled across a platoon of CMC clad Raiders out on patrol. The very rifles that would give even Clan Elementals pause, forcing them to begin utilizing abstract maneuvers normally devised to avoid mech scale weapons fire instead of platoons of infantry.

And CARDNL gave the Hellion suit two of the bitches before setting up a belt fed ammo feed to feed these beasts after ripping out the pesky burst fire capacitors and setting it solely to Fullest Auto.

30 rounds a second. That's over twice the Federated Long Rifle's measly 13 a second.

That suit is what we in the business tend to call the "IIK" or "2 Korpulan" and it is genuinely terrifying. Unless you're sitting behind BAR10 armor and a decent amount of it, those machine guns will rip through armor, letting Hellion suits deal with infantry in APC's even easier since they don't even need to crack it open and torch it with their flamer anymore. They also upgraded to 175 kilograms of full Neo-steel armor, saving some weight while also allowing it to take two small lases to the chest and have armor left over because why not? Why not give it some of the best Battle Armor plating around? This thing's got more protection than the suit that came before it, even dropping some sheer tonnage.

There's a reason Anastasia Findlay even ended up using a Hellion IIK instead of CMC like her pa, which didn't help the rumors she's the secret love child between him and a Magestrix in the slightest.

Oh, and a firedrake needler because these crazy women love torching people with barely Ares Conventions compliant weaponry.

And that's not even the weirdest setups I've seen these suits cooked up into.

There are versions that strip down the weapons to basically nothing so it can mount jump jets, there are some which use recoilless rifles, missiles, everything you can think of.

I even heard that they took took some tech from the Specters and figured out how to make the bitches invisible.

Now there's something to give you nightmares.

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Coming second best in tech to the Terrans is like coming second best in brightness to the sun.
You couldn't get any higher on that podium if you tried, but look at how many people you're ahead of.
- Director of CARDNL to Magestrix Centrella when asked why the Magistracy wasn't more dominant in the BA market.

Now, I've spun a yarn about this suit, but I haven't quite justified calling Canopus the "Queens of Battle Armor" yet, have I?

Well, let me tell you a story. When the Star League was looking to agree on a Battle Armor that would become the Inner Sphere's Standard (see what I did there?) suit when facing the clans, who do you think they went to for Subject Matter Experts? That's right, CARDNL. They asked Canopus.

When the Star League needed to replace and upgrade their commando suits from ComStar stock Nighthawks and Tornados, who did they go to for a fresh new design template? That's right, MIM's own Beauty Commando Suit.

And when the Free Worlds League decided that their Swooping Hawk needed the best leg reinforcements to survive the repeated impacts from VTOL jumps, who do you think- alright, no need to interrupt me. Yeah, they stole the legs and massive thighs from the Hellion suit to ensure it could take the hits along with rumors of back alley collaboration from rogue and ex-CARDNL members.

Other nations might be building their own custom suits now and with the Elemental, first place has been getting crowded between the Clans and Terrans, but throughout it all, Canopus has been working quietly in the background, getting their suits working, getting them out there, and making all the money in the world doing it.

The Magistracy might not be the King of Battle Armor, but they sure as hell are the Queens.

And we all know which throne in a monarchy the Magistracy prefers to use.

And here we go. My first entry into TTBT stuff and my first entry into rewriting the Hellion BA's history.