Yeah, I just figured you could pretend they're mounted and deploy them anyway.
You can open up a ticket in the MekHQ tracker to keep it on our radar. Seems like an annoying and unnecessary restriction to me.
Whoop, never mind re: random units. That's only for the "special missions", not the "big battles". For "big battles" you pick the units yourself.
The civilian riot is why I like to keep the small laser on the Awesome. Sure, it's a lumbering 80-ton assault mech with three PPCs, but it's got one small laser so it's perfectly suited to riot control. ::)