"After Crete, Germany's overwhelming shock and awe tactics (later dubbed 'Blitzkrieg') would see the adoption of airborne night-time insertions, used to great effect."
Welcome back to the dev diaries. Today's subject is the German Fallschirmjäger as he might look in 2044, which is to say a WW2 paratrooper with eighty years of gear evolution bolted on and the same job description: Jump out of planes to put an end to pesky ideas like Greek freedom and democracy.
AFTER CRETE, THE NIGHT BELONGS TO THEM
In the WW2044 timeline, Crete is still the turning point, just pushed forward a century. The historical airborne assault on Crete in 1941 was a strategic win and a casualty bloodbath, and it more or less scared everyone off mass daytime drops for good. My 2044 version takes the opposite lesson: keep the airborne doctrine, but move it into the dark. Modern optics make night the safer time to jump, not the scarier one.
So the design language for this guy is "you do not see him until he is already inside the wire." Face covered, low-vis plates, quad-tube night vision. I build these in greyscale first because it forces me to solve the silhouette and the values before I get distracted by colors. If he does not read as a threat in flat grey, no amount of colour is going to save the design.
IT ALWAYS STARTS WITH THE FG42
You cannot design a German paratrooper without answering the rifle question, and for a Fallschirmjäger the answer is always the FG42. The Fallschirmjägergewehr 42 was purpose-built for airborne troops: full-power 7.92x57mm Mauser in a package light enough to jump with, select-fire, side-mounted magazine so a prone gunner keeps a low profile. It was ahead of its time and a maintenance headache, which is exactly the kind of thing I love (must be the German half of me).
Timing was funny here. Call of Duty Warzone dropped the FG42 into the game right as I was working on this, so half the reference I was staring at was other people's renders. If Treyarch is quietly reading these diaries for ideas (I would be flattered): call up your boy when CoD WW2044 gets greenlit.
STANDING ON KOWALSKI'S SHOULDERS
Here is the part where I can't reinvent the wheel. Marcin Kowalski (https://akinaro.artstation.com/) already did a modernised FG42 that nails the brief, so rather than pretend I had a better idea, I cited his work directly and used it as my base. Credit where it is due, that is the whole reason this rifle looks as convincing as it does.
What I added was the night-operations loadout. Up top, a holographic sight with a flip-to-side magnifier behind it, the same hybrid setup real shooters run so they can go from close-quarters to a bit of reach without swapping optics. Hanging off the rail, a Steiner DBAL-style laser and illuminator unit. The important nerd detail: that box is not there to make the gun quiet or to look cool, it throws an infrared laser that is only visible through the goggles. Naked eye sees nothing, the man wearing the NODs sees a clean aiming dot. That is why the whole kit only makes sense in the dark.
NATO KIT WITH A GERMAN ACCENT
Honest confession: the kit is heavily based on real NATO equipment, because I have yet to find a genuinely distinct "German" modern look beyond my Modern Stahlhelm helmet concept. Real militaries all converge on the same solutions, plate carriers, chest rigs, modular pouches, so a near-future German trooper ends up looking a lot like a near-future anyone. I lean into that rather than fight it, and then I let the small stuff carry the national identity.
The one unambiguously German thing left on him is the Reichskriegsflagge on the plate carrier and the black-white-red markings on the arm (before you ask, yes, you can order that as a real custom flag, since making flags is the day job that funds the drawing). Little identifiers like that do more work than a whole redesigned uniform ever would.
THE GOGGLES, AND THE BAD GUY STARING BACK
The goggles are the one part I did not borrow. They are a personal design, and they come straight out of two obsessions of mine: dieselpunk hardware, and the specific cinematic pleasure of a bad guy staring dead into the camera. Real quad-tube night vision already looks faintly inhuman, four glowing eyes where two should be, so I nudged the housing a little heavier and a little more menacing.
'Kaiser Six, going dark'
NOTE TO SELF, MAKE IT A GAME
Some comments from the other day. A few of you keep saying WW2044 should be a game, an RTS or a tactical shooter or a Squad mod, and after enough comments the idea has fully colonized my brain. So I may do a few screenshot overpaints (we've done similar things in Arma) to try out how that would feel
It is concept work, not an announcement, so please do not start a wishlist 😅. But concept art is a fun way to stress test the world building, so I am looking forward to exploring more 'What if' WW2044 posts in the future. Vincent out!
- V
About the Author
Vincent 'VincentDN' De Nil is an artist and developer specialized in the reproduction of historically inspired flags, propaganda posters and artwork. He is the founder of Flagmaker & Print and the Kaiser Cat Collective. KCC is a global coalition of content creators united in the mission of creating high-quality narrative alt-history content, set in the great What-Ifs of alternate timelines.
Personal site: https://http://vincentdenil.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentdn/
Kaiser Cat Cinema: https://kaisercatcinema.com/about
Flagmaker & Print: https://flagmaker-print.com/pages/about-vincent
ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/vincentdn
Discover our alt-history projects
What if there had been an American Medieval age? https://american-kingdoms.com/
What if there had been a Second American Civil War? https://dividedstates-project.com/
What if WWII had happened in the 2040s? https://kaisercatcinema.com/s/about-ww2044
What if there had been a three-way cold war? https://kaisercatcinema.com/s/about-coldwarproject