Editing Setting:Tri-Sector (section)

=====Nomadic Clan Ironsights, Thimble=====
The millions of farmers, scavengers, and nomads who live in the barren, hostile wilderness of the planet Thimble exist in an ugly equilibrium. Some settlements do not need protection from raiders, but many do, and the population of raiders near the south pole is high enough that the PDF sometimes sorties to shield the farms there from roving packs of criminals.

Clan Ironsights may not be a real Clan like Ahad and Vorbach, but to the occupants of the wilderness, that is a minor distinction. There is no middle ground on the opinions of Ironsights among the wastelanders. They are either in awe of it, loathe it, or don’t care at all.

The Clan’s huge crawlers roam about the wastelands, collecting scrap and loose minerals from the wastelands, and taking their fill of the ruins of the hives that were too badly damaged to bother rebuilding. The raider gangs that dwell in the hive ruins fight back often, and have long preyed upon the Clan caravans. The roots of their struggle go unrecorded, but the clashes between them have spanned centuries.

The Clan rarely has reason to engage with the Houses and Clans that dominate the hives, but that may be changing. In the past few years, the raiders that have assaulted Clan Ironsights fuel depots and crawlers have had better weaponry and vehicles. There is no source for this equipment in the wasteland itself, which means that it is coming from the hives. Covert infiltrations of the marketplaces of the hives has revealed to the Clan that the only probably source of this weaponry is House Nailspitter, which has been stockpiling munitions themselves.

The Clan’s forces in the wastelands are hugely diverse, with the numbers and equipment they can deploy being situationally dependent on the climate of their engagement zones. Near the poles, where they face more competition from raiders, they tend to deploy more outriders and foot units. Near the equator, where they alone can operate with impunity, the Clan tends to keep to their huge crawlers. If they get wind of a major find of archaeotech that their crawlers are needed to loot in the hot zones, they dispatch forth, leaving their escorts behind. The crawlers are generally quite safe, but the escorts and outriders need to fend for themselves until the crawler gets back.

The foot soldiers of the Clan generally carry a mishmash of Imperial, pre-Imperial, and kludged weapons as available. Not being in the hives, they have few options for replenishing their stocks of weaponry. With the rising tensions between themselves and House Nailspitter, the Clan has had to spend more and more on modern weapons, with an emphasis on burst-fire rifles that can be fired from mounts. This has led them to charge more for their protection efforts on behalf of the settlers in the wasteland. The conflicts between Clan Ironsights and their enemies have grown large enough that the PDF has taken notice, and has resolved to simply shoot any raiders or Ironsights people sighted near the polar farms until they learn their place.

The Clan doesn’t bother with identifying insignia. Their hyper-white crawler shells are all the identifying markings they need.

The leader of the Clan is elected on a ten-year basis from the Captains of the individual crawlers. The incumbent at the turn of the millennium is Rieka bint Malati of the Silver Turtles caravan, but her term will run out in under a year.