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Iceland might fall under their rule, though it would be a minor territory. The Baltic is another region of interest, since Cnut’s family already had ties to the region through his Polish mother, and marriages between his heirs and future Piasts are a possibility. Per wiki, the total...

Oddly enough, the fact that the waves are huge is actually a plot point—the surfer dudes drive up there, in his explicit words, to ride the huge waves rolling down from Alaska. The Japanese just lucked out in that the waves weren’t there that day. It’s industrial-strength handwavium, but since...

One possible 'easy' way to do this would be to take one of the many actors who served in WWII and have them pivot to politics immediately after the war rather than back to Hollywood. President Clark Gable, perhaps? Spends more time in air combat over Europe, becomes a firm devotee of the...

The deepest point in the Aral Sea at present is a bit over 40 m. In 1989, it was 100 m. Depending on how much of Sea Dragon is above the waterline, it just might be deep enough. There is a more creative option than using existing bodies of water...

I'm not so sure that's the case. There was already a strong lobby within NASA and the USAF to pursue Low Earth Orbit applications, and a reusable launch vehicle. The dominant meme was that a reusable shuttle would service a system of in-space stages, allowing more economical exploration down...

The only way the Pact of Cartagena applies, I think, is if the Kamerun Campaign has German troops infringe on Spanish Guinea. Could that happen?

Could a Nicaragua or Panama canal have been built by a much more advanced Mesoamerican polity? The biggest difficulty would be locks to ascend the 30 m to Lake Nicaragua, of course--though perhaps something more like the Diolkos mentioned upthread could be built instead, whereby boats are...

Lances, also, were a huge feature of cavalry warfare into the 19th century.

That's OTL--Protestants reject the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament, while Catholics and Orthodox consider them canon (Orthodox Christians even have a few more books that Catholics don't use).

[Lyndon LaRouche would like to know your location] There has been some sense of this ideology in the US, in the science fiction fandom and some fringe political movements, but it was disjointed and fairly ineffectual in the grand scheme of things. How to give it broader appeal and make it a...

Maybe if Leningrad falls and the Finns threaten to cut off Karelia, he’d request some Allied divisions into Murmansk?

If one has the Saturn V production line open, why not use a Saturn INT variant for LEO ops?

IMO, Apollo 6 should be counted as a loss-of-mission due to LV failure. The point was to demonstrate TLI, the S-IVB failed to restart, so the primary mission objective was not fulfilled. Anyway, back to OP's proposal: There is a potential Option C: Daisy-chained upper stages. If you put a...

No air resistance and less gravity drop means all guns have much longer range on the Moon.

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...

Could be just some kind of art shot, like that scene in ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ where the first episode closes on Gemini-Agena pointed at the Moon while Buzz Aldrin straddles it. Payload bay doors are closed in the shot, so it might be during a launch. Still begs the question of ‘why.’ We...

Also one million more soldiers drowning in mud during the rasputitsa, one million more soldiers to stretch the supply lines, and a Soviet Union that doesn't dismantle its 1939 border fortifications and is likely on high alert. No, I think a Polish-German conquest of the USSR is a pipe dream...

Perhaps if one somehow gets Space Station Freedom done before 1991, so that instead of the International Space Station, the 1990s sees a joint US-Russian-European Mars program? Meeting the 1999 deadline would be tough, but not wholly impossible.

@alexmilman Is it true that, before Peter I's reign, weddings in Muscovy involved whipping the bride? The biography by Robert Massie says that that was one of the things he changed, going instead with the German custom of a kiss. Or is that another one of those legends? More broadly, the...

They did have some presence there--Jomsburg, whether it was at Wollin or elsewhere, is partially attested-to. It was toward the end of the period the OP proposes, by which point there was some interaction between the Norse and the Slavs (Cnut the Great's family links to the Piasts being one of...