Hey Folks We’re playing a little bit of hooky today. As part of Thanksgiving Week, we’re goofing a bit, (we’ll have a full boat of our normal content again next week). Following up on the well received Void Krakens, we’re giving you another new Clan. Behold, the Joy and Horror of the Steel Crabs.
As stated, this is a FAN PROJECT. This is not official CGL material, nor is it endorsed by the powers that be at BattleTech, but it is something that I find interesting. It’s also a “My Dudes are cool” sort of project. Like the previous project, this is an Ilclan Era expansion of the Homeworld Clans. Let’s see how this plays out, shall we?
So, what the hell is Clan Steel Crab, why are they, and where do they come from?
Why Clan Steel Crab?
Our strength is a fellowship, and it is long since time our numbers grew again. I submit that each of our clans will apportion warriors, technicians, merchants, laborers, and scientists to grow our fellowship, and return our numbers. For far too long, we have been four. Now we shall be eight.
Illkhan Hannibal Bannacek,
January 9th 3101.
Clan Steel Crab was spun off from the Coyotes following the Illkhan’s declaration. Taking 2 line clusters, an oversized Watch Cluster, and approximately 35% of the other castes, Clan Steel Crab was also gifted with Albion as a homeworld. One of many worlds abandoned by the clans following the Reaving, Albion’s Enclaves were mostly bare when the Crabs investigated the sites. It took them nearly a year to return the Enclaves to functionality, but the Herve supply facility had hidden foodstuffs and other material to get the civilians operational. The Warrior caste celebrated, actively guarding their new territory from a Stone Lion Cluster on training maneuvers.
The Lions and the Crabs engaged one another in a running series of trials throughout Albion’s coastal flats, and nature intervened. A 7.2 seaquake went undetected by the Steel Crabs and the Stone Lions, and a Tsunami hit the coastal flats they were battling across. The Stone Lion’s Dropship was lost with all hands, and barely a trinary of warriors on both sides of the conflict walked out of the disaster area.
The Steel Crabs spent nearly three weeks recovering machinery and the bodies of the deceased, while a second Stone Lion transport arrived in the system. The Stone Lions leveled an accusation at the Steel Crabs for allowing their opponents to die in disgrace. This accusation made it all the way to the Grand Council. Watch Agents from all 8 clans examined their recordings of the weather event, and concluded that while it was a tragedy, the Steel Crabs were not responsible for the loss of the Stone Lion’s personnel. A trial of refusal was declared and fought between the Crabs and the Stone Lions. The Crabs won a close fought victory and the Grand Council considered the matter closed. The Stone Lions would hold a grudge for the next thirty years.
A Most Severe Mission
The Tsunami that had nearly destroyed their nascent alpha galaxy had also revealed an unexpected discovery. Unbeknownst to the previous inhabitants, the Society had constructed a massive complex on the coastal shelf. Steel Crab Watch Officers and members of both the Scientist and Technician Castes investigated the complex. After disabling a dozen booby traps and other failsafes, they were able to access the complex’s databases.
They found a network of former Society facilities and personnel. The Watch officers brought this to Khan Ariel Winson. She spent nearly a week in consultation with her Loremaster and Sakhan before coming to the hardest decision of her young tenure. The Steel Crabs would hunt these outstanding facilities and chase down any of the at large Society members unaccounted for.
She brought this to a closed session of the Grand Council and presented their collected evidence and the decision. A vigorous debate ensued, and through a narrow vote (The Coyotes and Stone Lions voting against, with the Void Krakens, Cloud Cobras, and Thunder Ants abstaining) The Steel Crabs were granted this task. They also accepted a rotating assignment of Watch Officers to ensure Oversight from the Council.
Trials in the Dark
With their mandate, the Steel Crabs went on the offense. In the ensuing twenty years, the Steel Crabs Alpha and Beta Galaxies struck across the Kerensky Cluster and beyond. Often in Cluster sized and smaller formations, the Steel Crabs hit like the wrath of Kerensky himself. Across toxic swamps, airless asteroids, and even stranger combat zones, the Steel Crabs engaged the people who’d damaged the structure of clan society. Several hidden Society cells were rooted out in the process, but the Steel Crabs paid for their expertise in blood.
The two Galaxies reconvened on Albion, battered shells of themselves. Of the two full galaxies that had departed, barely three understrength clusters returned to their home. Ariel saw the toll their mission had taken, and deactivated both Alpha and Beta Galaxies, relying on the strength of Iota, Kappa, and Lambda Provisional Galaxies to garrison their holdings while the survivors of Alpha and Beta recuperated and trained new warriors to fill their depleted Touman. The three Clusters were broken down into their trinaries, and those trinaries were used as the core of new Clusters.
Ariel allowed the Void Krakens to build an Orbital station as a peace offering for an incident involving one of their civilian ships and a supply ring supplying a Dark Caste outpost in one of the outlying systems of the Cluster. The two clans remained cordial, if not friendly. Thus, when the Krakens relayed notification that an unknown group of ships had entered the system, the Crabs prepared to defend their home.
The Battle of Albion
Thirteen unmarked dropships burned towards the planet while 30 fighters provided a tight screen. The Krakens launched fighters of their own and were able to peel off most of the fighter screen. Coupled with the Crabs own fighter wings, they were able to force the invaders into the coastal flats away from Albion's Enclaves and industrial complexes. The Crab fleet of three ships engaged the Invader transports and after a fierce battle, disabled a Potemkin transport and its escorting Essex destroyer. The Crabs ship Horseshoe took a bracing shot from the Essex that detonated its magazine, leaving it adrift, (The Void Krakens would help the Crabs salvage all three ships, but it would be into 3138 before all three would return to service).
The Invaders used a combination of Protomechs, Battle Armor and Society designs in their assault. In addition, Society members spent nearly a week introducing toxins and other contagions into Albion’s biosphere. The fighting was absolutely brutal, with no quarter given on either side. The two nascent clusters of Beta Galaxy were able to lure the invaders into a trap on the same coastal flats that had been the death of the Stone Lions nearly thirty years earlier. A concentrated artillery barrage of Arrow IV missiles was a signal. Iota and Kappa galaxies had used the former society complex as a staging ground and leapt to the attack, drowning the Society personnel in a tidal wave of Elementals and Battlemechs. The beleaguered Beta Galaxy suffered nearly 30% casualties, but the attack had broken the back of the society force. With two remaining Warships returning to orbit, and the Void Krakens ready to shoot down any fleeing ships, the remaining Society crews surrendered. The warriors who’d undertaken this mission had died to a man.
Intel would be gleaned from the assault, but it would be slow to process, and the Steel Crabs spent even more time repairing the damage to their biosphere. The Thunder Ants proved invaluable, as their terraforming expertise helped remediate a lot of the issues. Unfortunately, Ariel Winson was a casualty of a targeted bio weapon and succumbed to her injuries.
Vengeance Deferred
Khan Hondo Kufahl felt the call of his entire clan to strike back at the invaders who’d done so much harm to their world and taken their Khan, but he calmed them with a simple truth. They were unaware of the home of the strike that had taken these dezgra actions against them, and rather than lash out blindly in the dark, they would bide their time, replenish their strength, and dig deep into where these invaders had come from.
As 3139 dawned, Khan Kufahl had overseen the aggressive growth of his touman and their enclaves throughout the Cluster. The Tau Provisional Galaxy alongside Tripwire Galaxy of the Clan’s Watch had broken up into mixed binary formations and settled into former society bases throughout the Cluster, often garrisoning empty worlds with small scientist and technician teams conducting follow up research on whatever the Society had been doing in those locations. While not performing the horrendous and abhorrent biological research that the Society had undertaken on unwilling lower caste members, research was being performed in several fields (Under the watchful eyes of Clan Watch officers from other clans).
Further, their remaining Galaxies had come online, and Alpha and Beta were joined by Gamma, Delta and Epsilon as frontline formations while Lambda and Mu joined their second line formations. The Watch also maintained a Galaxy level formation of Warriors in addition to Tripwire, and these forces, in trinary sized formations, roamed the Cluster, chasing leads and looking for further points of concern. With their navy also restored, the Steel Crabs were finally presented with the opportunity to strike back.
Vengeance
Through careful analysis of the databanks of the transports captured nearly a decade earlier, the Steel Crabs had learned that the Society had hidden inside a large Dark Caste Settlement in the region near the Tanite systems. While not in the Tanite system proper, these pirates and thugs frequently returned to the Tanite worlds to collect junk, harvest what few survivors they could find, and acquire additional resources.
Dropping into the system with Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Watchdog Galaxies, the Steel Crabs fell upon the surprised dark caste with the fury of Kerensky. A near miss by surface to space nuclear missiles almost ended the fight before it began, but the Crab aerospace forces intercepted and destroyed the missiles before they caused any appreciable damage. The ground battle is where things took a bizarre turn.
The Society forces launched wave assaults in Star League era mechs, with a tight core of new Society designs directing traffic on the ground. They’d been industrious, and had established an interconnected series of Castle Brian complexes across the planet’s northern pole. The Dark Caste tried to flee, but were caught between the grounded Steel Crabs and their orbiting warships. The campaign lasted nearly an entire year before the final fortress was breached and the true horror of what had happened was revealed.
Genetic records revealed that the majority of this Society cell had been Steel Vipers, and were far more twisted than even their abhorrent counterparts in other clans. Seizing upon a shameful moment in the history of the clans, the scientist in charge of this group had acquired a genetic sample from both Kerensky founders and were rapid cycling batches of sibkos mingling their genetics with a variety of Steel Viper bloodlines. To add insult to injury, they’d also been straight cloning the Founder, and it was with abject horror that the Steel Crabs realized that most of the pilots that they’d killed were either clones of, or freeborn children of Nicholas and Anderry Kerensky.
Every Scientist in the complex was put to death with extreme prejudice, but the Steel Crabs were left with a terrible mess to clean up and eventually, they brought the matter to the Grand Council. They collectively decided that the Kerensky bloodlines were abused and tortured so badly that the genes would be locked away for two hundred years, upon which time the Clans of that era could revisit the decision. Surviving Freeborn civilian caste members were sterilized, but put to work by the Steel Crabs. Those who wished to remain warriors were given the opportunity to test up into the Steel Crab Warrior Caste.
Of the ones that did, approximately a third succeeded and refilled losses sustained during the cleansing. The others didn’t survive their trials. With that stain removed from their collective honor, the Steel Crabs took the world that the Steel Vipers had used as a new Enclave and used it to keep eyes on the surrounding area. Their vigil over the Cluster for new threats would continue.
Steel Crab Touman
The Steel Crabs maintain five frontline Galaxies, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Their Watch also maintains Watchdog and Tripwire Galaxies, though those formations are rarely seen in the field as a unit. Their primary world of Albion is defended by Iotta Provisional, and Purgatory (the world they claimed from the Steel Viper Society) is garrisoned by Kappa Provisional. Lambda and Mu Provisional Galaxies guard Enclaves scattered across the rest of the Cluster, while Tau is distributed throughout the Cluster alongside Tripwire.
Steel Crab Navy
The Steel Crabs use small groups of HPG equipped Jumpships to move Watchdog and their attached forces along their mission routes. The merchant Caste maintains a robust fleet of trading vessels moving Steel Crab goods (and Watch agents, according to other clans) through the Cluster. They maintain a small Warship Fleet.
King (McKenna Class)
Horseshoe (Sovetski Soyuz Class)
Snow and Blue (Congress Class)
Cake (Potemkin Class, salvaged from the Society)
Claw (Essex Class, Salvaged from the Society)
Combat Doctrine
The Crabs have developed their combat doctrine around their usual targets, Society and Dark Caste holdouts and hidden bases. Their equipment is usually geared for a hostile environment with advanced filtration gear for Chemical and Biological attacks, and they’ve tailored their combat to siege warfare, fighting in close quarters. They tend towards heavy equipment, with a propensity for Heavy Lasers and ATMs with short range warheads. They also deploy disproportionately high numbers of artillery vehicles to soften a position before advancing.
Against other clan forces, they show respect and honor, preferring long ranged weapons to keep the affair…civilized.
They do use a unique formation inside both Tripwire and Watchdog. These “Watch Stars” are a pair of Battlemechs, a point of Elementals, a point of fighters, and a point of Combat Vehicles. Further, these formations are reinforced with a duplicate set of gear for the warriors, often in a different weight class than their primary. The flexibility of being able to switch between light scouting equipment to heavier gear for the actual battle is seen as a net positive for the Clan.
Freeborns make up approximately 35% of the total Touman, with more serving in Alpha, Beta, and Gamma galaxies than the remaining units. .
Steel Crab Culture
The Steel Crabs see their self appointed task as a grave responsibility. The Society had dealt a dolorous blow that almost destroyed the Clans. They can be a tad overzealous in their prosecution of that task, and it has led to friction with other clans. Khan Kufahl has slowed the zeal a tad among his warriors, and this has eased relations in the intervening years.
The Crabs are in a mostly one sided feud with the Stone Lions (who still haven’t forgotten about the death of their warriors on Albion). The Lions have engaged in petty feuds, declared trials, and otherwise attempted to interfere in the Crabs business on innumerable occasions in the last fifty years. The Crabs generally ignore this, though for the 30th anniversary of the incident, they did recover the wreck of their dropship and had it delivered to the Stone Lions as a “Peace” offering.
Steel Crab civilians are scrutinized by other clans, because the Crabs have an active Watch that is…energetic about the prosecution of their duties. Crab Civilians often get dragged along on these assignments to help provide cover, an extra set of eyes, or a conversation partner. They seem to tolerate this behavior around other clans, but it has caused friction at home on more than one occasion. When the clan Factors have had to intervene with the Khans, it hasn’t been a pleasant experience.
Steel Crab Colors
Most Steel Crab units are a combination of Blue and White, with Blue as a Primary and white as an accent. Watch Units use a combination of Steel to silver with White Accents for Watchdog, and Blue Accents for Tripwire. .
(So, that’s what I've got for Clan Steel Crab for right now. This is an alternate future for the battletech timeline of what “Could” be happening in the clan homeworlds in the aftermath of the Reaving. Does this sound cool? Would you like to know more? Should I continue working on this idea? Let me know folks.)
Y’all have fun, and i’ll have something more official for Wednesday. Love you all, travel safe for the holidays those of you that are traveling
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