That's all fair game. But I personally would not bend the whole background around having the G11 featured in the core rules. I mean, I love 'Kraut Space Magic' as much as every other grognard, but that might be too much.
It's not just the G11. As you implied a couple of posts ago, the progression of changes in Eastern Europe that by extension led to the collapse, first of the Warsaw Pact, then the Soviet Union, and subsequently to all the "End of History" idiocy, with Western politicians cashing in on the "Peace Dividend" etc, had started long before 1991.
By the time of the game's current point of divergence, this process was already an avalanche — by then, it was really much, much too late to try to alter its course in any significant way. Given the circumstances — not least the sheer momentum of what was going on — the August Coup never had a snowflake's chance in Hell of succeeding.[more] Saying that just out of the blue, it somehow did anyway ... well, for me, even with my suspension of disbelief already cranked up to eleven, it just blows the fuses.
If you want to alter the historical timeline — without bending historical plausibility very much beyond the breaking point — in a way such that you have a shooting war by 1997, I strongly believe you must start nudging at stuff a lot earlier.
And that will mean that a lot of the hardware that was cancelled in order to get at the "Peace Dividend" ... suddenly won't be. And the G11 is just one of many, many such things — things that by their presence could make the setting every bit more interesting.
The Kraut Space Magic is just icing on the cake.
