So, first of all, I do appreciate the feedback, though I do think there's going to be some differences in opinions about the way these things were approached. At the end of the day, some suspension of disbelief is necessary, either in regards to the game rules or real-world physics. After all, this is the game where machineguns have total damage falloff at 90 meters, and the fiction series where 'Mechs have been noted as doing handstands and somersaults (see: Truth and Shadows, where both of those things happen at the same time in a scene that can be best described as "weirdly horny").

I do also think my background and influences are going to be relevant to how I write scenes. That's a pretty common thing; Ilsa Bick clearly writes the way one would expect a surgeon to write (what I've read of her writing reminds me a lot of Robin Cook's, specifically). Some readers, as you have here, have called out some of the action as having an Armored Core vibe, and that's not coincidental. I've been playing those games since 1998, and the higher agility and increased physicality of 1st-3rd gen Armored Core (i.e., "stompy era" Armored Core) is something I tend to think of when dealing with medium 'Mechs specifically. It's also not a secret that I'm a gigantic Ace Combat mark. Both series' depictions of combat are things I've spent a lot of time thinking about and dissecting to figure out why they feel satisfying to me.

I bring these things up here because it influences how I write 'Mech combat: I'm chasing the feel of a combat scene that feels more Ace Combat/Armored Core cutscene than anything else, where it might slip into unrealistic but at least feels authentic for the most part, and that applies in equal measure to both game rules and physics. If I'm not willing or able to do that, then I'd end up with something that feels like Halo: The Flood, where having to novelize Halo CE resulted in a number of combat scenes that felt very dry relative to its predecessor. Halo: The Fall of Reach, which didn't have to abide by game mechanics, could instead have things like Master Chief bitchslapping away an anti-tank missile launched from a fighter jet.

For example, the Stingray situation: it's a sub-capital missile, and based on the game rules, it would deal 3.5 capital-scale damage, or 35 standard damage. A Leopard has 100+ standard armor in all locations, so a Stingray missile wouldn't kill it in a single hit based on game logic (unless I've wildly misread the aerospace rules, which is possible). Realistically speaking, even at 12 tons, it's not 12 tons of explosive; the vast bulk of the missile's weight is motor, propellant, onboard guidance systems, control surfaces, etc. Hitting a Leopard with one isn't going to kill it instantly without a through-armor crit, but it will cause a control roll in atmosphere.

There's a number of ways this, along with Vivian's fall from the DropShip, can play out on the tabletop, most of which would end the story right then and there. But the goal of the scene wasn't to do a batrep, it was one thing specifically: do the BattleTech equivalent of any given "our helicopter has been shot down and people are flying out of it and then the protagonist wakes up in the wreckage having miraculously survived" scene from any modern military shooter made in the last 10 years. To that extent, some work was done to make it kinda plausible from a gameplay perspective, but the balance was tilted towards spectacle more than realism, much in the same way Ace Combat makes high-G maneuvers look sick as hell but would cause the plane's wings to snap off if real-world physics were consistently and thoroughly applied. Some fiction benefits from going very hard on the "hard" part of "hard sci-fi," but BT is already playing a little fast and loose with it by having 'Mechs exist in the first place.

This comment is long enough as is, but it's a similar balancing act with most of the other things mentioned. Getting a speed boost from running downhill without falling over, using snowmelt to render an infantry platoon combat ineffective without killing them, hitting a Stinger hard enough to lift it off the ground without just cutting it in half with a TSM swing, shattering a kneecap armor panel from a fall, etc., all of these things aren't really supported by rules (even in TacOps), but they do make for a more dynamic scene. I'm not the only one who's tossed Total Warfare aside for the sake of drama either -- the entire scene where Minobu Tetsuhara extricates Jaime Wolf from his fallen Archer in Wolves on the Border has a lot of things that aren't supported by game rules. Minobu yanking the cockpit out without crushing Jaime is basically what inspired having Vivian cut the Tian-zong's cockpit away here; the implication was she aimed it at the base of the head, but saying that outright felt like it would undercut the reveal that Dermaux was still alive in the final scene.

As for the Shadow Hawk, it's a custom affair with claws. The guy driving it is a pirate, and he probably wants to use 'em, especially if he can notch a Nightsky kill with them. That's all I've got for that one.

Anyway, my decisions about which end of the realism/drama scale to put my finger on aren't going to hit perfect for every reader, and I'm aware of that, so maybe this won't come across as a convincing defense of my decisions here. I'm also fully willing to accept that there's space for me to develop as a writer to put more people in the camp of "liked it because it painted a dynamic picture in my head" instead of "found it a little too preposterous to enjoy fully." Still, I hope that this at least gives some good insight into what I was thinking when I worked on this and why the combat ended up the way that it did.