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The use of parabolic mirrors to concentrate light was known in antiquity, as the apocryphal incident of Archimedes setting Roman ships on fire attests. Speculum metal, an alloy of copper and tin, was used for reflecting telescopes before the invention of silvering techniques. What if some...

Nicholas and his family were, of course, executed months before the formal beginning of the Second Polish Republic. But suppose events had gone a bit differently, and Nicholas had attempted to flee in 1918, evading Red forces in an effort to reach territory under German rule and throw himself...

IOTL, the NYC subway system stimulated the development of the Bronx, upper Manhattan, and Brooklyn, driving real estate values in the vicinity of (then-new) stations up dramatically. Alone of the five boroughs, Staten Island did not reap any benefit, since its railway is not linked to that of...

From the sixteenth century on, the Maghreb (sans Morocco) was largely dominated by the Ottomans, and the economy of the region is most known for piracy and extortion. Could that have gone differently, with an independent Maghrebi state forming an important power in the western Mediterranean with...

IOTL, the Spanish came close to the Australian continent when Torres passed through the strait that now bears his name. If they had discovered and claimed the continent, could they have set up a sugar planting economy in what’s now Queensland? The Great Barrier Reef makes navigation a bit...

Suppose the Pacific War never breaks out and the international relations in that region remain frozen in their 1940 configuration a few years longer—Britain and France supplying Nationalist China by way of Burma and Vietnam, American neutrality, no embargo on Japan, modest Soviet support of the...

The Orteig Prize IOTL famously went to Charles Lindbergh, for his solo transatlantic flight, and no woman even competed for it. But woman aviators were not unknown at the time. WI a woman won this prize instead of Lindbergh? Maybe a precocious Amelia Earhart (who IOTL took up solo flying after...

Suppose that Mussolini’s options for expansion in Europe were closed off for some reason. With Ethiopia subdued and the British and French not showing signs of weakness, what’s left for his New Roman Empire project? While contemplating this question, I began to wonder if the Italians might take...

"Voyage," by Stephen Baxter, is about a NASA mission to Mars in the 1980s in a world where JFK survives his assassination. The book ends on a high-ish note with NASA astronaut Natalie York walking on Mars at Mangala Valles, but Baxter being Baxter, most of the text focuses on the negatives--a...

Prior to WWII, revisionist zionists in Palestine and their correspondents in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and other countries with large Jewish minorities planned to evacuate millions of Jews to Palestine, ideally with British cooperation but also taking steps to drive the British out. Jabotinsky...

The traditional date given for the introduction of Christianity to Poland is 966, when Mieszko I was baptized into Latin Rite Christianity. However, there is evidence that the Slavic Rite (of Sts. Cyril and Methodius) had already been introduced to Poland prior to that year, and that Mieszko's...

The XF-11 and XF-12 reconnaissance airplanes were ordered in 1943, but neither flew until well after the end of WWII, by which point they were both unneeded and obsolescent due to the advent of the turbojet. The XF-12’s cancellation hit Republic Aviation particularly hard, taking the civilian...

In his memoir “And I was there,” Edwin Layton, chief of intelligence for Admiral Kimmel and then Admiral Nimitz, says that, had the oil tanks at Pearl Harbor been destroyed, the Pacific Fleet would have had to relocate to California for six months for want of fuel. As it was, the Japanese...

The main scenario I would like to discuss is the Axis invasion of Greece that, IOTL, led to the occupation of mainland Greece by April of 1941. Suppose that, somehow, some part of mainland Greece is free of Axis forces in early 1942--either the Germans don't intervene and the Italo-Greek war...

After WWI, Poland pursued various schemes to acquire colonies—from demanding some ex-German colonies to trying to buy off Liberia and Brazil. Poland also pursued, after 1935, a policy of encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine. Behind closed doors, Polish diplomats lobbied for Britain to take...

With a POD any time after his birth, is it possible to reunite Poland and Sweden under Charles XII? How would the religious issue be negotiated? What effect could that have on Eastern and Central Europe? Could Carolus Rex fix the manifold problems of the PLC?

Charles XII, while campaigning against Peter the Great and Augustus the Strong, deposed Augustus and named his own candidate, Stanislaw Leszczynski, to the throne of Poland-Lithuania. Leszczynski's fortunes promptly evaporated after Poltava, and Augustus returned, with Russian support. But...

Many discussions of a surviving PLC involve reforms that curtail the power of the Senate or install a strong king or hereditary dynasty. Is it possible to go the other way, and have the Sejm abolish the monarchy entirely, even as a fiction? To have Poland-Lithuania ruled by elected officials...

IOTL, there have been a number of proposals for rockets launched directly from the ocean. SLBMs are close to that, though most use a charge of compressed air to breach the surface before ignition. However, the Seabee, a modified Aerobee sounding rocket, was fired successfully in the ocean, as...

A spin-off from the Slavic Age of Exploration thread, since the POD proposed here is before 1400 and it's more focused on affairs in Europe: Olaf II, King of Denmark and Norway, died unmarried at the age of 17. His mother would go on to conquer Sweden and initiate the Union of Kalmar. Suppose...