WI Kitty Hawk didn't fly?

[Workable Goblin]

Precisely, Bill. Most of the time when you see major major engineering or scientific breakthroughs, there are actually multiple people or groups working on the same issue at the same time. Take calculus or natural selection (aka Darwinian evolution). In both cases two different people with essentially no contact with each other came up with basically the same idea at almost the same time. Killing off Newton or Darwin might have some interesting butterflies, but it isn't going to stop calculus from being invented nor natural selection from being discovered.

 

[derfelcadarn]

I never said stop, i said delayed. i think a 5-10year delay would have seen things done differently. should've phrased it differently, i suppose.

 

[August Akuma]

I never said stop, i said delayed. i think a 5-10year delay would have seen things done differently. should've phrased it differently, i suppose.

But the issue is that aviation progress really picked up at the beginning of WW1 on. As Bill said, no matter what, aviation is going to be roughly on par with OTL 1918.

 

[Bill Cameron]

I never said stop, i said delayed.

derfelcadarn,

I know you wrote delayed. What you're failing to comprehend is that your proposed delay isn't enough.

Someone somewhere is going to invent heavier-than-air flying machine some time during the first decade of the 20th Century. All the pieces were at hand and too many people had been seriously chasing that goal for decades for it not to happen.

Kill Wrights and it's still going to happen. Kill Santos-Dumont and it's still going to happen. You're gong to have to kill hundreds of people scattered from New Zealand to Austria to Wales to Canada and then you'll still probably miss someone so it still will happen.

And then, when the airplane gets invented in 1906 or 1906 or 1910, World War One is going to accelerate aircraft development like a rocket sled on rails.

Your POD doesn't work because there are far more people involved in heavier-than-air flight than you knew about and because you ignored that elephant in the room known as "WW1".

i think a 5-10year delay would have seen things done differently.

No one who posted here thinks that. Believe it or not, this is a topic that regularly comes up, usually with a zeppelin slant, so the forum has pretty much discussed this for years.

should've phrased it differently, i suppose.

It doesn't matter how you phrase it when it doesn't work to begin with.

You need to A) dial back or delay several fundamental technologies and B) prevent WW1 for that kind of delay in aviation progress you're considering.


Bill