Editing Clan Diamond Shark (section)

==Organization and Disposition==

The Clans had always enjoyed a somewhat mixed reception with Battletech fans, but one of the main problems with writing them is that there were just too damn many of them.  The characterization of several of the less popular Clans was quite shallow.  Clan Ice Hellion is the "I wanna go fast" clan, Clan Nova Cat was the hippie clan, Clan Goliath Scorpion was the ''other'' hippie clan I guess, um, there were a bunch of clans named after snakes and I guess one of them invented heavy lasers at some point?  Point was, some of the clans were interesting and popular, and others really weren't.

Of the original twenty Clans, five (Burrock, Mongoose, Widowmaker, Wolverine, Smoke Jaguar) had bitten the dust by 3071 and [[Clan_Wolf|Clan Wolf]] had split into two.  That left fifteen Clans, sorta kinda sixteen, and several of them just weren't that popular.  The writers rescued this situation with the Wars of Reaving, an absolutely ''glorious'' orgy of destruction starting in 3071 that whittled the remaining clans down to just nine... or ten... it depends how you count.  But, most importantly, four of the Clans that did survive got cut off from the Inner Sphere and thus essentially written out of the story, at least for the foreseeable future.  The Clans remaining in the Inner Sphere got cut off from their cultural homeland, and this gave a chance for their cultures to evolve and become more interesting.

Clan Sea Fox got re-written from being a proud warrior race with a hint of merchant savvy to ''ronin capitalist warrior merchants'' which is a heart-warming concept.  After getting booted out of the Clan homeworlds during the aforementioned Wars of Reaving, Clan Diamond Shark began a series of reforms which would ultimately culminate in the heavily de-centralized form in which they exist in the Dark Age era after Khan Mori Hawker's tenure starting in 3113.

As of the Dark Age setting, the re-re-named Clan Sea Fox no longer has a homeworld at all.  They have some land enclaves on planets, mostly manufacturing centers and spaceports, but the bulk of their forces and personnel live a nomadic existence in gigantic spacecraft called ArcShips.  These are modified WarShips that have most of the weapons stripped out and additional habitation areas and manufacturing facilities put in.  Per Field Manual: 3145, the bulk of the Sea Foxes' manufacturing might is in these gigantic faster-than-light ships.  Since the faster-than-light communications network in the Inner Sphere was 80% crippled in 3132, the true extent and disposition of Clan Sea Foxes' trade fleets are a mystery.

Clan Sea Fox is organized into five Khanates which are the largely autonomous sub-divisions of the Clan akin to Clan Galaxies.  Each of those Khanates is further subdivided into Aimags, which are still smaller administrative units similar to Clam Clusters.  What makes them different is rather than being merely military units, they’re wholesale nomadic groups of civilian and military clansmen. While the Sea Foxes hold very little planetary territory, very nearly the entire Inner Sphere is divided up into exclusive sales territories of the Khanates.  The rights to buy sell and barter in specific parts of space can be contested between the Khanates by various means including, you guessed it, trial by combat.  If the idea of annoying door-to-door weapons salesmen fighting honor duels among themselves for the right to sell arms to both sides of a particularly fractious part of space doesn't strike you as ''absolutely hilarious'' then I'm afraid there's no hope for your sense of humor.

Clan Sea Fox ''mostly'' stays out of local disputes, though the era sourcebooks dutifully note the few major exceptions.  There's a mention in some fluff text to Skate Khanate attempting to trade with a planet in the Capellan Confederation.  The Capellans tell the Foxes 'no, absolutely not', and start shooting at the Sea Fox forces when the latter attempt to land on their planet despite being told to fuck off.  Clan Sea Fox considered this ''so outrageously unreasonable'' that they promptly invaded the spaceport, shot up the defenders, and declared all the ships in the spaceport as well as anything valuable in the warehouses to be war booty.  That is what you get for not embracing the mutual benefits of free trade.

In short, Clan Sea Fox is ''goofy,'' but they are absolutely not ''harmless''.  The fluff in the 3145 sourcebooks notes that despite their capitalist bent, their warriors are top-notch and their force deployment table notes a higher than normal percentage of elite units, and more of their units are at or near full strength.  Still, their total military strength is about half that of, say the [[Clan_Jade_Falcon|Jade Falcons]] during the same period, and they're spread quite thin.