To be fair to the writers: the online translate I looked up also read 'Daishi' as 'Cardboard' rather than Great Death. The Kanji in a Japaneses name apparently can make a big difference that's not always translated to English.
We-ell... it's a compound word, which isn't used outside of Battletech - you'd have to look up "Dai" and "Shi" by themselves to find it. From the "let's make a compound word!" angle, "ken" is a strong contender (can mean "sword," "The Way of" as in official samurai and Zen stuff, and "fist" has an archaic reading that comes out "ken" like Street Fighter's Shoryuken), but "ryo"...
There are two kanji read as "ryo" by themselves (instead of as part of a word, like "ryoken"), both of which are EXTREMELY archaic (hell, I didn't know about either of them!) but there's a whole HOST of "ryou" kanji to pick from. There are... well, OK, there are ways to find "ryo" in words that come out to "strength", but you'd have to know enough Japanese to realize that a word which comes out to "Way of Strength" or "Strength Sword" sounds just as dumb about 'Mechs in Japanese as it does in English.
Possible "ryou" kanji to pick from a dictionary include such goodies as "Hunt" (but not "TO hunt") and "Dragon". Making a compound word from the kanji for "Dragon Sword" sounded a bit too complimentary from the DCMS, and you sure as hell can't hunt with a sword!
That's why I
think they looked up something like hound dog or hunting dog, found it romanized as either "ryooken" or "ryöken" (both legit ways dictionaries used and still use to represent the long o sound), and simplified the name. Absent an actual writer's note like the ones for Hagetaka, Daishi, and Koshi, or actually convincing the writer to remember something he did a quarter of a century ago to fill a deadline, though, we won't know.
....This... really makes it seem like I spent a lot of time thinking about it, doesn't it? I haven't, really! Only about 15-20 minutes when my hikkokimori buddy asked me about it and we decided where it had come from, and maybe 45 minutes on these posts about it.
Uh, yeah. The Stormcrow is friggin' awesome. I hope that, for my birthday this Saturday, I'll have money to buy one for my Ghost Bears Cluster - definitely gonna mod it as running, but I'm not sure what variant I'll mod it AS. It's definitely going into the Nova, as its speed and armor makes it perfect for ferrying Bearhunter Gnomes into the middle of an enemy formation.
