w0qj, on 19 April 2024 - 11:11 PM, said:
The word "Black Hawk" for Clan Nova mechs is still there, on the bottom of the webpage for Clan Invasion I.
https://mwomercs.com/clans
(I
think they had to change from "
Black Hawk" to "Nova" designation ingame due to potential copyright infringement issues. Someone correct me if I'm incorrect; it's been a
long time ago!)
The mech names on your first linked page are entirely the Inner Sphere designations of those mechs that were given to them upon IS forces first encountering then unknown mech chassis from in-fiction perspective.
As such all of the originally introduced Clan mechs had two names: One given by the Innersphere and one given by the Clans themselves. The most prominent one being MadCat (IS) vs. Timber Wolf (Clan) where the IS designation stems from the fact that the targeting system of an IS mech (Phelan Kell's original Grinner) that encountered a Timber Wolf for the first time rapidly alternated between Maraudeur (MAD) and Catapult (incorrectly labeled as CAT instead of CPLT to fit the narrative) ultimately resulting in the pilot naming it Mad Cat (=> so Michael Stackpole f*ed up proper IS naming in his novel),
==> Black Hawk is just the original IS name given to the mech that the Clans called Nova. Once the IS omni Black Hawk-KU was built the in fiction reason for naming it that way was pretty much the same:
The Kuritas built a mech based on the design of the Clan mech Nova which they - by convention - called Black Hawk and thus the new mech was named Black Hawk-KU.
Now the real question is: What does that KU stand for? Is it a rather obvious reference to House Kurita (similar to how certain mechs used K to refer to variants that had strong ties to the Draconis Combine) or is it the Japanese suffix that usually refers to subsections (also called wards) within a larger city area?!
And no, there are no legal issues involved as far as using the actual Clan names for the mechs within the game instead of their IS names on the original sales pages. It's more of a "roleplay" thing there I guess: Anyone playing for a Clan faction would want to use Clan based designations rather than IS designations there.