Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again

[Indicus]

That's a strange use of the term "Prohibition". Nice work, Thande.

 

[Ed Costello]

This is really cool - submersible technology ITTL is one of those things where it feels fantastic, but it's presaged and explained in such a way as to be eminently plausible. Likewise with the previous update (which I completely neglected to comment on), which also had the benefit of being informative about areas of OTL I had no inkling of before!

 

[Alex Richards]

Thanks and they are, I previously mentioned them in an earlier update. I've always been annoyed by how people think 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea means depth rather than the distance the Nautilus travels, so I decided to put in an analogue whose actually is meant to mean depth Verne's work did help inspire the Challenger expedition in OTL so it's a neat parallel.

I just updated the text because I realised I forgot to add a reference to the invention of the torpedo.

Yeah, the distance/depth thing is something I've picked up on before as well with some people.

 

[Thande]

Whilst the 19th century estimate was about 8km, isn't the modern one more like 11 (which would be 6,000 fathoms)? Given submarine exploration seems more advanced here, it seems likely they would have a more accurate figure by now.

It's meant to mean that the writer's guess was close to the actual measurement made by the voyage his novel inspired, though I take your point.

Great stuff as usual, of course (though I think hard and soft are transposed in the footnotes).

Well spotted, have fixed.

 

[Finn]

I laugh every time I see "12 Inventions That Changed the World" and we're on what feels like the 25th. Excellent running joke.

Edit: Never mind, apparently you're only on number 9, if I've counted right. Odd, it feels like so many more.

 

[Thande]

I laugh every time I see "12 Inventions That Changed the World" and we're on what feels like the 25th. Excellent running joke.

Edit: Never mind, apparently you're only on number 9, if I've counted right. Odd, it feels like so many more.

I was surprised myself it wasn't more when I counted. This one doesn't count, mind you, because it's a continuation of one of the inventions we already had an excerpt about (as said in the first footnote).

 

[B_Munro]

Fun stuff, Thande. Are the Ondine humanoid, or more along the lines of the Creature from the Black Lagoon or Lovecraft's Deep Ones?

 

[Thande]

Fun stuff, Thande. Are the Ondine humanoid, or more along the lines of the Creature from the Black Lagoon or Lovecraft's Deep Ones?

I was thinking humanoid in the fay sense, i.e. they seem somewhat humanlike at first but are utterly alien in values beneath that veneer of apparent similarity for shock value.

 

[TheInnerMoon]

So, I took a dive in this latest update (pun intended) and I must say that it was great as always! These tech-related updates are quite interesting, and the overlap this had with cultural developments was a nice refreshment. However, I have a small backlog of questions with regards to TTL, so without further ado, here goes...

1) is there a certain logic to the difference in tech development between OTL and TTL? While the more biology-related changes flow forth from the earlier theory of evolution, are these more mechanical developments just randomly set back or put ahead of the curve?

1.5) Could I make a request for rocketry to be put ahead of the curve relative to the development of the transistor? OTL the miniaturisation of satellites kind of ruined the dream of man-tended orbital platforms. To see the Combine, ENA or whatever states exists by the 30s-50s TTL give it a try would be one of those 'alien, but not implausible' developments that Look to the West is famous for!

2) In a world that is absent of OTL's obsession with economy-based ideologies, how will psychology/alienism develop? While I could certainly see freaky Freud-analogues existing ITTL, would the development of game theory and other abstract value-based modelling be set back?

3) speaking of the social sciences/humanities, any chance of an update on the main philosophers of TTL? I feel that the history of philosophy is absent from almost every timeline, unless it is somehow related to world ideologies. It would be nice to see the alternate ways of thought come together in the work of philosophers ITTL though.

4) What stunted the development of South America IOTL compared to the success of the UPSA? Is it just that with their republican government, they managed to gain the reputation of 'new kid on the block' that the USA had IOTL?

5) Lastly, in the preface of Volume 1's Kindle edition, you mentioned an oft-unmentioned 'cold war' between parliamentarism and monarchism in the 18th century. Have any history books been written from this angle? I would be delighted to see someone turn this neglected era into some thrilling Cold War analogue!

The list is done, I shall cease my questioning. For now...

 

[Thande]

So, I took a dive in this latest update (pun intended) and I must say that it was great as always! These tech-related updates are quite interesting, and the overlap this had with cultural developments was a nice refreshment. However, I have a small backlog of questions with regards to TTL, so without further ado, here goes...

Thanks for the praise and commentary, I will try to respond to your points below...

1) is there a certain logic to the difference in tech development between OTL and TTL? While the more biology-related changes flow forth from the earlier theory of evolution, are these more mechanical developments just randomly set back or put ahead of the curve?

I try to make it logical where possible, though obviously it's a hugely complex field and in real life technologies don't link one to the next as neatly as on a Civ IV tech chart. To summarise the changes in technological development in TTL in terms of broad trends:

- The dramatic assassination of King William IV by riflemen spurred a greater interest in and acceptance of rifle technology in Europe (which, as Meadow keeps reminding me, I seemed to mention over and over in about fifty footnotes and I had to keep editing down in the Kindle release of Vol I )

- Cugnot avoided his OTL embarrassing experimental accident and France has a different king at the time, hence the greater exploration of steam technology which comes to a head (no pun intended) under Republican France, where ideology fuels even further development;

- Because of the earlier steam carriages being a recognised idea, it takes longer for railways to catch on (as opposed to OTL when, though steam carriages did exist, it seemed to be a choice between trains and nothing; in TTL many people see it as 'carriages which can go on existing roads vs. having to lay down rails'). So railways remain associated only with mining for quite a while before eventually proving themselves, though they are then often rolled out in a less haphazard and more consistent way than OTL. Russia has a leg up on other countries because they adopted railways from Trevithick early on before steam carriages really got established.

- The more iconic use of balloons in battle (though this did happen in OTL too) combined with earlier steam research means that steerable balloons (dirigibles) predate their adoption in OTL, though often it's a case of what were flawed prototypes in OTL being compared to mainstream developments in TTL.

- You have already mentioned the reasons for the greater interest in biology, especially the economic impact of the quinine plantations in Africa. At the same time, Mendelian inheritance got short-circuited in TTL because the researchers didn't happen upon the same simple examples of inheritance that Mendel observed.

- Electricity is the main thing retarded in TTL compared to OTL, largely because I've always felt the Galvani/Volta breakthroughs in OTL were very arbitrary, happenstance events and could have easily been butterflied. Galvani in TTL had a different fate which I have written about. As a consequence, the equivalent breakthroughs did not happen until the end of the 1820s, and then their impact was delayed further by the Popular Wars.

- This means electrical telegraphs (Lectel) are delayed a bit compared to OTL, though their initial dramatic use at the start of the Great American War means they have received interest soon enough. This also means that Optel has had a chance to really get itself embedded as a standard capable of fighting this new upstart to a limited extent, hence the Telegraph Wars. In OTL, France was the only country where semaphore telegraphs were a serious large-scale institution, and they weren't there for as long before electrical telegraphs appeared to supplant them.

- It will also impact on later electrical and electronic technologies. While it seems as though lots of things are ahead of OTL, electricity is such a fundamental core area which so much depends on that the situation is actually more complex than that.

1.5) Could I make a request for rocketry to be put ahead of the curve relative to the development of the transistor? OTL the miniaturisation of satellites kind of ruined the dream of man-tended orbital platforms. To see the Combine, ENA or whatever states exists by the 30s-50s TTL give it a try would be one of those 'alien, but not implausible' developments that Look to the West is famous for!

That's sort of what I was already going for. Rocketry is already slightly ahead of OTL (though only slightly - we tend to forget the 19th century use of rockets in war) while electronics, as said above, are going to lag behind.

By the way, if you like apparently schizophrenic technology combinations, check out The Plague Policeman on Sea Lion Press by Tony Jones (set in his Clive-less World timeline which is available online); he is the real master of this and was my main inspiration in this area.

2) In a world that is absent of OTL's obsession with economy-based ideologies, how will psychology/alienism develop? While I could certainly see freaky Freud-analogues existing ITTL, would the development of game theory and other abstract value-based modelling be set back?

It will likely be different for the reasons you mention, but I will get into that later.

3) speaking of the social sciences/humanities, any chance of an update on the main philosophers of TTL? I feel that the history of philosophy is absent from almost every timeline, unless it is somehow related to world ideologies. It would be nice to see the alternate ways of thought come together in the work of philosophers ITTL though.

Good idea. I have talked about TTL's philosophers in passing, but an update focused on them might be worth doing.

4) What stunted the development of South America IOTL compared to the success of the UPSA? Is it just that with their republican government, they managed to gain the reputation of 'new kid on the block' that the USA had IOTL?

Primarily it's a case that in OTL South America was both disunited and its successor states were subject to internal unrest and coups (as Bolivar observed, 'many tyrants will rise on my tomb'). So the continent had a lot of potential but often its resources ended up being developed and manipulated by external imperialist powers (cf. the Anglo-Argentine relationship) rather than working for itself. In TTL, the Second Platinean War produces a state big enough to be powerful but small enough to be mostly united (the later loss of Peru aside) and it becomes independent more than thirty years earlier than the South American revolutions of OTL, giving it some of the advantages of the US in OTL. In some respects the UPSA was inspired by the common observation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries of OTL that Argentina never seemed to live up to its potential; one reason for this was the constant internal dispute between federalists and confederalists. I tried to get rid of this in TTL because Argentina (Platinea) is only part of a much bigger country and federalism predominates from the start because of more credible external threats to unite against.

5) Lastly, in the preface of Volume 1's Kindle edition, you mentioned an oft-unmentioned 'cold war' between parliamentarism and monarchism in the 18th century. Have any history books been written from this angle? I would be delighted to see someone turn this neglected era into some thrilling Cold War analogue!

I first came across this approach while studying History and Philosophy of Science as part of my undergraduate degree, specifically I think from Patricia Fara who was my tutor and has written several books on the history of science. I don't know if anyone has ever pitched it as the primary angle of a book though. What's important is to realise that, a bit like the modern culture war in the US, lots of apparently unrelated issues were tied to belonging to One Side Or The Other. On one side you had Bourbon enlightened absolute monarchism coupled to Cartesian philosophy and science (such as Descartes' theories about all motion being due to impacts between particles, with no action at a distance forces) and the centralised mercantilist economic policy of a Comptroller-General; and on the other side you had British parliamentary monarchy with representative government (not democracy) coupled to Newtonian philosophy and science (invisible forces, etc.) and, later, the industrial revolution. A bit earlier there was also a political angle to how there was a rivalry between two new proposed technologies to power mining: steam engines in parliamentary Britain and perpetual motion engines in the absolutist Germanies. You had these ideas being tied to an ideological cold war rather than being analysed rationally - French rebellious students thought British parliamentarianism was cool, so therefore they also had to believe in Newtonian science over Cartesian theories, etc. It's really a period that deserves to have more written about it.

 

[TheInnerMoon]

Such a swift and detailed reply, amazing!
I won't bother you with such another list, just want to mention that I'm very excited about the direction of TTL! It is very much turning into a hyperdetailed Tony Jones-like world, and that's saying much considering how extensive I found his world. I have actually purchased The Plague Policeman, will be excited to read it.
The knowledge that you might be doing an update on ATL philosophy warms this philosophy student's heart! Also curious to see what you'll be doing to psychology.
By the time that TTL gets more into space and rocketry, will you consider the help of one of this forum's many space experts? I'm sure that they'll be willing to render you some nice pictures of a Societist moon landing, or whatever you have planned...
Lastly, what would you consider the right background to write a timeline like LTTW? I've considered writing a timeline myself, but I find myself lacking the know-how.

Oh dear, I might have slipped some new questions in there. Don't let it distract you!

 

[Grand Prince Paul II.]

The German opposition to the Ironsharks is very odd.

The plausible German response to the Scandinavian ironsharks would be German ironsharks which would cause an ironshark arms-race in the Baltic and German Sea because Germany would benefit far more from the introduction of ironsharks than Scandinavia whose navy is already superior and which is thanks to its geography much more vulnerable to the naval ironshark-warfare than the continental German Federal Empire (Ironsharks cannot defeat the Germans on land, but they can defeat the Scandinavians in Kiel).

The German effort to prevent the proliferation of ironsharks seems more like an attempt to make TTL Germans more different from IOTL Germans who became (in)famous for their submarines rather than being a credible response to a hostile power with submarines.

 

[Shevek23]

Speaking of credibility, I was skeptical at the notion that ITTL manned suborbital bombers are the intercontinental nuclear (excuse me, "threshold") weapon delivery system of choice, as opposed to one-shot ICBMs. I'm still skeptical, but if as TheBatafour pled and Thande has already been headed, electronics falls behind while rocketry surges ahead, I have to admit that there might indeed have perhaps been a window for such a phase. The chief reason for skepticism that ICBMs could be practical in the years immediately after WWII was that the prospect of aiming them close enough to their targets (even if the weapon so delivered would be an atom bomb) to be effective seemed fantastic. And might well have been before the development of solid-state electronics (though perhaps someone can show the job can be done with clockwork, sufficiently precision machinery, and the kind of electronics that could be accomplished without transistors or vacuum tubes). OTL of course the projects of making rockets powerful, efficient and reliable enough to deliver multi-ton warheads across intercontinental distances went hand in hand with revolutionary developments in electronics. If there were somehow to be a gap of some decades between sufficiently powerful rockets and sufficiently lightweight, robust and capable computing machinery (and sensors etc) then there might be nothing for it but to put a human pilot aboard to steer the damn thing.

Of course, unless one takes the Ts'alal solution from DValdron's Green Antarctica, and....it is too creepy to say, let's just say it involves raising up a strongly motivated and capable but very lightweight human suicide pilot--or only somewhat less macabre, a more normal sort of kamikaze, putting a pilot on a missile generally means making at least some gesture toward their surviving the mission and coming home again (if only to fight another day) and enabling that would probably enable the return of much of the weapon carrying system, which is to say it becomes a true suborbital bomber of the type dreamed of both in the Pentagon and the Kremlin (not to mention earlier Teutonic dreams). To do that means launching a hell of a lot more mass toward the enemy, then somehow the majority of that mass doing some sort of U-turn or skip maneuver that almost certainly requires the expenditure of a lot of propellant just to bug out from the strike zone and get to some more or less safe friendly base. So while I might be persuaded to believe, if not in Victorian or Edwardian, but anyway 1930s Buck Rogers era rocketplanes (just perhaps) be advised they'd be monstrous huge things.

Unless they used some ATL idea for thrusting in the atmosphere perhaps. It happens I've been musing on a fringe idea for achieving high thrust with relatively modest mass expenditure in certain phases of an orbital launch--but this notion (ejector rockets) is mainly good for the low end of such a trajectory, at speeds between Mach 1 and Mach 6; while such a thing might greatly economize the initial launch, I don't think it can help with the fancy footwork necessary at the target, and if the incoming craft gets down to airspeeds low enough for an ejector rocket system to be practically helpful, it would be in some trouble, a sitting duck for vengeful defenders to shoot at. Whereas skipping off the atmosphere is theoretically doable (presumably one lobs the bomb at target while on approach, then hits the atmosphere shortly afterward and maneuvers) it would involve tremendous amounts of heating (making one's bomber glow like a neon sign to infrared trackers) and still involve enough loss of speed and momentum that one still needs a hefty amount of propellant to get back onto a track anything like as energetic as the one one came in on.

In the previous post, I forget how long back, where Thande informed us that if the attempt to ban "ironsharks" was a pathetic failure, the attempt to ban unmanned ICBMs on moral grounds was successful, and long-distance delivery of threshold weapons is done via gentlemanly and noble suborbital bombers instead, I could only justify it as a stable reality as an Orwellian gentleman's agreement between the leading Diversitarian and the Societist leadership, presumably with rogues and wildcats in each sphere being dissuaded or restrained or punished by the greatest powers, one purpose being to make threshold weapons delivery so very costly that it serves as an effective substitute for arms limitations.

Just pushing rocketry ahead of cybernetics would be necessary to create a plausible infrastructure investment in manned suborbital bombers, but not sufficient I think; one needs clever solutions to the problem of maneuvering in atmosphere at nearly orbital speeds, which means either development of extremely high-temperature capable materials, some means of ablatively cooling more reasonable materials (which would probably involve carrying prohibitive masses of coolant) or perhaps some very exotic technologies (electromagnetic manipulation of the plasma formed by shock heating, perhaps, which might be in the cards someday in the future OTL) which would make these "spaceplanes" look and behave rather differently than the classic 1940s-50s concepts of OTL.

I also suspect that even if you delay the development of microelectronics, then still sufficiently capable alternate technologies might be able to get the job done well enough to greatly reduce the cost of delivering a given threshhold bomb, or for the same budget supporting a few squadrons of suborbital bombers, launch orders of magnitude more one-way missile strikes.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

It was Cusworth’s native Britain that launched the first explicitly oceanographic mission in the form of HMS Explorer, an obsolete bomb-ship which had been hastily renamed from her original name of HMS Explosion.[7] Despite what public perception of the mission then and now has suggested, the Explorer did not take a submersible with it, only a diving bell—a modern and innovative one, but not a powered submersible.

Hmmm... Inverse, of a sort, of the RN's Walther cycle sub, OTL? (HMS Explorer being called HMS Exploder due to all the peroxide accidents.)

That's a strange use of the term "Prohibition". Nice work, Thande.

Yes, that's a Thande trademark, alright.

 

[Thande]

The German opposition to the Ironsharks is very odd.

The plausible German response to the Scandinavian ironsharks would be German ironsharks which would cause an ironshark arms-race in the Baltic and German Sea because Germany would benefit far more from the introduction of ironsharks than Scandinavia whose navy is already superior and which is thanks to its geography much more vulnerable to the naval ironshark-warfare than the continental German Federal Empire (Ironsharks cannot defeat the Germans on land, but they can defeat the Scandinavians in Kiel).

The German effort to prevent the proliferation of ironsharks seems more like an attempt to make TTL Germans more different from IOTL Germans who became (in)famous for their submarines rather than being a credible response to a hostile power with submarines.

You raise a reasonable point and there probably is some truth to your final paragraph--I debated over this one but I decided that it would be justifiable if it was Scandinavian revanchists who started going on about secret weapons destroying the German Occupiers (of which ironsharks would only be one example, and as you say far from the most logical one given the naval situation, but part of a list) in well-publicised fiery rhetoric and the German response is part of a broader propaganda offensive in which they are attempting to come across as the adult in the room. As you imply, once ironsharks are an established part of the military equation and their opponents have given up, it is true that it makes things better rather than worse for German naval capabilities.

 

[Cynric]

Top work as always Thande, and while i meant to post this much earlier, Volume One on the Kindle was superb. I eagerly await the next installment. I had a question though. With German control of Jutland being to the extent it is, will this affect the development (and placement for that matter) of the Kiel canal? Since Kiel (if memory serves anyway) is currently a Scandag exclave, I'm assuming the canal wouldn't run near there. Or with all this pronounced rivalry between German and their neighbours, does the whole idea for a canal never make it off the drawing board?

 

[Admiral Matt]

2) In a world that is absent of OTL's obsession with economy-based ideologies, how will psychology/alienism develop? While I could certainly see freaky Freud-analogues existing ITTL, would the development of game theory and other abstract value-based modelling be set back?

What a remarkably good point. Can you imagine how something like Paris Syndrome would be taken by these people?

 

[Makemakean]

Good update as always, I really liked the notion of a War of the Worlds-style novel but with an underwater civilization as the enemy rather than an extraterrestrial one. Also, liked the Californian submersible disguised as a 'regular' ship. You'll have to forgive my complete lack of knowledge in as far as ocean-going vessels are concerned, but have such submarines ever been invented and used in our timeline?

I also like how you build up the story. While it's more or less now a Fixed Point in Time that there will be a Pandoric War at the end of this century, with every update you seem to be making it look more and more like such a cataclysmic disaster will be adverted. Americans and Meridians are beginning to get along, as are French and Germans. I really wonder what is going to cause this great catastrophe That Changes Everything...

Also, owing partially to me myself having some Jutland Danish ancestry... obviously not liking these continued references to a future Kulturkrieg that seems likely to permanently Germanify Jutland.

 

[Thande]

What a remarkably good point. Can you imagine how something like Paris Syndrome would be taken by these people?

Indeed, and that's a particularly good example.

Good update as always, I really liked the notion of a War of the Worlds-style novel but with an underwater civilization as the enemy rather than an extraterrestrial one.

While it's not all that similar, I slightly stole this from our old member GBW in his thread here. I've actually always wanted to do a similar scenario myself, though I wouldn't want to tread on his toes.

Also, liked the Californian submersible disguised as a 'regular' ship. You'll have to forgive my complete lack of knowledge in as far as ocean-going vessels are concerned, but have such submarines ever been invented and used in our timeline?

I believe it has been done but typically not in great detail (the Californian demo was obviously a set-piece thing where it was meant to stand up to daylight scrutiny). More usually it's just things like running a U-boat on the surface with appropriate lights so it looks like a merchantman from a distance: worked better in the days when submarines looked more similar to surface ships than modern ones do, as in the case of these early U-boats from OTL:

Weird fact of the day: the one on the far right was once visited by Georg von Trapp of The Sound of Music fame during WW1.

I also like how you build up the story. While it's more or less now a Fixed Point in Time that there will be a Pandoric War at the end of this century, with every update you seem to be making it look more and more like such a cataclysmic disaster will be adverted. Americans and Meridians are beginning to get along, as are French and Germans. I really wonder what is going to cause this great catastrophe That Changes Everything...

Well, you could say that about OTL as well: there's a reason why terms like Gilded Age and fin de siècle exist.

 

[Grand Prince Paul II.]

You raise a reasonable point and there probably is some truth to your final paragraph--I debated over this one but I decided that it would be justifiable if it was Scandinavian revanchists who started going on about secret weapons destroying the German Occupiers (of which ironsharks would only be one example, and as you say far from the most logical one given the naval situation, but part of a list) in well-publicised fiery rhetoric and the German response is part of a broader propaganda offensive in which they are attempting to come across as the adult in the room. As you imply, once ironsharks are an established part of the military equation and their opponents have given up, it is true that it makes things better rather than worse for German naval capabilities.

That makes sense.
After the victorious, but costly Unification War, the German leadership seems to favour non-military measures (WeltFest) in order to gain prestige and security, even when it is not a wise decision like in this case.

With German control of Jutland being to the extent it is, will this affect the development (and placement for that matter) of the Kiel canal? Since Kiel (if memory serves anyway) is currently a Scandag exclave, I'm assuming the canal wouldn't run near there. Or with all this pronounced rivalry between German and their neighbours, does the whole idea for a canal never make it off the drawing board?

The Scandinavian control over the Skagerrak makes the creation of the canal a necessity for Germany.
As for the alternate placement, there are other Baltic outlets for the canal available.