Recent content by Dain

The fundamental problem of East block industry was that it was not competitive with Western corporations after mismanaging its priorities and failing to modernize for decades. One has to remember that most of the industry was operating at a severe loss after they suddenly had to compete on an...

Computing was a prestige issue for the Soviets (and the GDR), but they had a problem with economies of scale - turning their R&D prototypes into mass producible products. Doesn't really matter if your transistor is theoretically just as capable as the equivalent US product if you are only...

Oof. Their days of being horrible human beings have certainly come to a middle...

It didn't help but to be absolutely clear: Soviet industry was increasingly decrepit and only survived due to its closed off captive market. Due to socialist ideology, there was an enormous mismatch between the value of the labor performed by the citizens and what it was supposed to provide...

The infamous September Program is indeed your best reference here since it is a list of possible peace negotation demands compiled by some government official when it still looked like the war might be over quickly. That doesn't mean every single demand would have been pressed, but it shows...

It says something about how thorough and total the triumph of capitalism over socialism was that people now look at economic performance alone and conclude that the Soviet Union was doomed from the beginning. Back then that was not how people thought about this - alternative state ideologies...

Well, the description of their preparations did not fill me with confidence that they have considered this task from all angles. Let's see what they decide to do once they actually rendevouz with one of their target rubble piles. :D

A virus is not a magic spell, so theoretically you only need to remove the reservoir of carriers it is coming from. There has been no mention of cross-species infection yet so we are talking about a very limited -and presumably still dropping- population of British survivors. However, a...

Well, experimenting with asteroid mining would certainly seem like what the industry and politicians would focus on next. Landing on Venus shouldn't be feasible unless the spacecraft is explicitly designed for it. Conditions on the surface are far in excess of what regular ship components would...

Well, evidently people are volunteering for one-way trips to the outer solar system just to get away from Dortmund, so the more things change the more they stay the same. ;-)

The relatives I spoke to always explained the GDR in prison allegories. People just felt unfree even in times when materially everything was okay. It's little comfort to the prisoner that food, housing and even make-work jobs are provided for - it's still a life sentence. No wonder people...

They are doomed. :D

I'm pretty sure it makes no sense for a unit stationed in North-East Germany to use a military training area hundreds of kilometers away in South-West Germany. The Heer should own multiple training areas in Prussia itself this unit would exercise in. Of course it should - as mentioned in the...

This operation at Hammerhorst sounds like it is growing bigger and bigger. And now they are preemptively accumulating supplies and personnel. There must be thousands of people working there now. Do they have families on base? If it weren't for this pesky radioactive contamination issue Germany...

The usual bureaucratic gridlock in OTL Germany is that the local municipality will not begin renovations until it has secured most of the required funds from higher administrative levels under some development program or other. Ideally nothing has to be paid locally because the municipality...