Recent content by Simon Darkshade

The cost of ground troops is hundreds of thousands of casualties. It can be argued that there are very real practical and political problems with that prospect as well. Even with the war situation being held back a year, Allied control of the air is both well established and inevitable to grind...

Do we see the same shut down occurring as in @ with an active war against a better positioned Nazi Germany? I’m not so sure. Some of figures I have seen refer to 3 plutonium bombs and 1 uranium bomb per month, and more...

Post 1900. I’m loathe to defend that 2009 story, but it did have a single PoD, as well as a very clear authorial declaration that it was being muddled through to get the story going.

In answer to 22000 Kevin: As I said in my most recent post above, that is like an 8 year old asking someone “I had an amazing dream last night about outer space! Describe what you would do if you appeared halfway through it, just after the jug-eared alien.” There is nothing inherently wrong...

So, additional PoDs upon PoDs upon fictional German admirals, followed up by further changes? That seems fine for a story, particularly an ASB one (and I have liked the author’s previous works), but the approach is perhaps parallel to what is the more rigourous one cultivated in Post 1900. It...

A floating PoD isn’t a real one, but many, many ones. Further, by focussing on individual trees, we miss the forest. The Germans were out by very large amounts of scale - 5 million Reichsmarks is a princely 2.5 million USD, for example. Resources include electricity, manpower, steel, cement...

That is still well behind the Manhattan Project. From viability to an actual production effort of a working bomb that yields tangible results is a different thing. The Germans considered they would need five years to separate the necessary isotopes...

Delivering the blows in one swoop in a compounding series of hits. Not only have they lost more killed than WW1 in a space of hours, but it has also had the same psychological effect as Hamburg, twenty times over, from single weapons that can't be defended against. The Ruhr is gone - a...

Set against that scenario is that the development of the Bomb was aimed at the Germans, who were the greater foe and threat and were the most direct target of unconditional surrender. There was the thinking then, in 1943 and long before that point, that no agreement with Hitler and the Nazis was...

For those reasons, if the Americans did elect to go for a nuclear attack on Germany, it makes more sense from their point of view to throw the kitchen sink rather than drop one or two, then wait a week for retaliation/distributing industry/shifting in hostages. If the aim is to make Germany...

With 15-20kt weapons, around 200 would effectively remove Germany as any sort of modern state, given that they would be ostensibly deployed against military/industrial targets, but the effects of that type of weapon would take out a decent sized city. The geography of Germany would have some...

I nicely approve of vagueness and happiness, which as you say is in keeping with Wodehouse and his world. Africa wasn't a money sink in real terms, costing a few hundred thousand in budgetary terms. The military commitment was very, very minor, consisting in 1939 of 3 battalions in the Sudan...

How much capital spending do you believe that Britain spent on the South Pacific colonies; the Indian Ocean islands; and indeed the Empire in general? This may be a light hearted timeline (and Jeeves and Wooster get a gold star), but there seems to be a line running through the previous TL post...

An earlier and heavier break towards nuclear power would go some small way towards the goal, but I'm not sure it could be done without a concerted goal by all Great Powers pre WW2, which is a tad unlikely. If we look at this pie chart from the EPA: A.) We can see that power generation is only...

No, not specifically. If there has to be a Joint NATO MBT (and there are many reasons why this isn't a good idea, as Fred the Great mentioned), then in an ideal world, it will be a mix of the best gun, best armour, best engine, transmission and suspension and so forth. Actually getting that will...