Fria Ligans forum

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.

There were National Guard units in M113s until the late '90s,

Try early 2000's. I saw AKNG using them locally in 2002. Along with SUSVs (aka BV206). Probably only used locally, not on deployment.
Then again, I've also seen two M113s with civilian plates (and rubber treads) on Alaska's highways.

I saw a USMC combat cameraman go through a training system I worked (designed for immediate pre-deployment to Afghanistan) with an M16A1 in 2013. Of course there's a chance he wasn't actually deploying with that weapon, but...

Something more mundane but very relevant to the game would be the addition of iodine tablets for "combating" exposure to radiation. My brief research and understanding is that, in reality, iodine tablets only work to protect the thyroid from taking in a lot of radiation and wouldn't help if you were exposed to a nuclear strike but the mechanic of using iodine tablets could be fun to add another way to "combat" radiation sickness. With the radiation lingering in Poland and Sweden, iodine tablets could be a useful tool for survivors to seek and use.

Polish weapons mention the PMK-60 with rifle grenade adapter, but rifle grenades are not listed. The drawing shows a standard AK, as per the link below the barrel is different.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granat_nasadkowy

Poland also had the WZ. 1988 Tantal 5.45mm assault rifle in service, basically the AK-74, although the AKM would have remained the main assault rifle.

The RPG-76 Komar ATRL was also in service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG-76_Komar

For rifle grenades, I'm not sure they need new stats from the thrown ones, just a note about improved range.

Although basically a BTR, possibly the Czech/Polish OT-65 SKOT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OT-64_SKOT

Parachute flares. There are no hand-held parachute flares.

Should be blast power D, but what should the range be in terms of how far away you can put that flare?

Problem is that there is a huge range of parachute flares ranging from civilian distress flares up to military illumination flares.

I have several Para Red Rocket Flares for my boat that are designed to reach 300m and burn for 40 seconds at 30,000 candela. That is a standard civilian flare, so I can imagine military models will go higher, burn longer and light up more.

Standard military paraflares that I've looked up illuminate a radius of about 55 m, corresponding roughly to blast power D.

Not sure what altitude they reach, but the real question imo is how far away you can reliably put the illumination.

How long the flare will burn is determined by a die roll, which is just a way of getting away from tracking how many turns it will burn, but which in theory could lead to flares with ridicuious burn times.