Why I Built DropShip Manifest

By DropShip Manifest · 2026-07-01

I've been collecting BattleTech material for a long time. Not just the rulebooks and the minis, but the odd stuff too: the German-language novels, the old FASA sourcebooks with cracked spines, a MechWarrior: Dark Age click or two I swore I'd never buy. At some point my spreadsheet stopped being enough. I couldn't remember what I owned, what I was missing, or which "Technical Readout: 3050" on the shelf was the reprint and which was the original. So I built this.

DropShip Manifest is that spreadsheet grown up. It's a catalogue of BattleTech products going back to the FASA days, through FanPro and Catalyst, plus the licensed odds and ends, and a way to track what's actually on your shelf.

## What's in here

The catalogue runs to more than twenty categories: core box sets, sourcebooks, rulebooks, technical readouts, record sheets, maps, novels, magazines, miniatures, the MechWarrior clix game, the collectible card game, decals, apparel, and a pile of promotional oddities. Sub-categories roll up sensibly. The miniatures split into BattleMechs and vehicles, the foreign-language material is bucketed by language, and so on.

For each item you can mark what you own, how many copies, and the condition of each one. Not just a checkbox. If you've got three copies of the same box in different shape, you can say so. There's a wishlist for the things you're still hunting. And because the same product often turns up in different printings or blister packs, items can carry variants, so a reprint doesn't masquerade as a duplicate.

## Seeing the gaps

The part I use most is the completion view. It shows how much of each category, and each subcategory, you've actually got, with a percentage and a bar. It's oddly satisfying to watch Technical Readouts creep toward 100%, and a little grim to see how far off the novels are.

## Pictures matter

A catalogue without cover art is just a list. There's a shared image gallery everyone sees, with an in-browser crop-and-rotate tool so the covers actually line up, plus a private gallery for your own photos of your own copies. If you've ever tried to tell two similar box sets apart from a bad thumbnail, you know why that's worth the trouble.

## The bits under the hood

A few things went in because I wanted them myself:

- **eBay price history** on each item, so you can see what things actually sell for instead of guessing. - **Sarna wiki links**, matched automatically, for when you want the lore behind a unit. - **Google Sheet sync**, because my collection lived in a spreadsheet for years and I wasn't about to throw that away. Ownership syncs both ways. - **Curated lists** for themed collections: a starter set, a faction's worth of decals, that sort of thing. - An **activity log** that quietly records your changes and lets you undo an accidental edit.

## Where it's going

This is a hobby, so the roadmap is mostly "whatever's bugging me this week." I want better and more complete images, cleaner category organisation, more of the rare and strange items that make a collection worth browsing, and writeups actually worth reading. If you spot something wrong, a missing item, a bad match, a typo in a novel's title, the contact form on the About page comes straight to me.

Thanks for poking around. Now go find out how incomplete your Technical Readouts really are.