Delranes Fighting Ships.

 

Where it all begun, a pure fluff book with canon and non-canon designs with artwork done by Matt Plog, Shimmering Sword and Colourbrand. This book has both the WarShips that feature in TRO2750 and 3057 including the cannonical first generation of Inner Sphere WarShips and the ships used by the Clans.

PDF Link  - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c6CDj_IhfmjOjGkVJ2jryRWylbHXXOqH/view

Project Zhukov.

Background.

Project Zhukov was never really meant to be a 'thing' and that's the honest truth! It was never meant to be an AU or anything beyond what had originally been intended as a one off book with Delranes Fighting Ships. 

I'd never really liked the art of the TRO3057 WarShips, and to me the Clan Refits made very very little sense. Why? Because unless you're Clan Snow Raven or Cloud Cobra, WarShips are there to get Warriors from Point A to Point B and little else. With the Trial based combat the Clans had evolved, actual WarShip combat would be very very limited unless things got truly out of hand. Such as with the Mongoose Absorption which saw the biggest naval battle in Clan Space since Operation Klondike.

Secondly the massive changes of the 'Clan Refits' would have been hugely expensive and the Clans are limited by bottlenecks in facilities and experience to actually refit their WarShips. And there was even art that said that Inner Sphere WarShips also somehow looked like the Clan ones. In the cannonical art of the CSS Invisible Truth you see the Cameron class Battlecruiser have the same visuals as the Clan refit instead of looking like the TRO2750 one.

So in my mind, the aged art, the inconsistency in the lore and the lore itself that would argue against such sweeping refits made me go in my head. 

"The Clan refits never happened."

And after finishing Delranes, I thought that would be that. But then I got to thinking, which is always dangerous with me. There's often an alarming grinding noise and the smell of melting plastic.

At the time I got to thinking about the book that would become Project Zhukov, it was well before a lot of the ilClan stuff or the Kickstarter that helped breathe so much life into Battletech.

In my mind unless your Clan has; Bear, Wolf, Falcon, Jaguar, Cat and MAYBE Shark in its name, the other Clans despite their lore were basically interchangeable. You might as well have them distinguished by their various different coloured hats and that was it.

And to me one of the biggest examples of this was Clan Hell's Horses. The 'Tank and infantry Clan!' that had basically nothing unique to them in those areas beyond one hover tank in TRO3067. Otherwise, they use the same generic tanks as everyone else, the same OmniMechs as everyone else, their hat is red with flames on it but if that falls off, then you could mistake them for anyone else.

And that got me asking that most dangerous of questions.

What if?

And boy did that lead me down a rabbit hole which turned a thought experiment into a full blown AU. And that's why I hope you're here to have a look and see what made up the AU and to enjoy the books i've worked on over the years.