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I don’t know if this has been asked yet, but looking at the Hound Dog on the previous page, why not give it a Merlin engine? Since the CSA is a British ally and all.

Scotland is still Protestant in the book (the Spanish send a lot of troops to garrison the border). I’m curious about Ireland—the fact that Irish troops make up a big part of the Spanish occupation force in England implies that the Spaniards very firmly planted a Catholic aristocracy in place...

Dark horse candidate: France. They also had a great deal of talent in nuclear physics and an incentive to develop a source of electrical power separate from their coal mines (so inconveniently located near the German frontier).

Yes, the difficulty is that it’s difficult to invest an audience in people whose day job is shoving trainloads of people into gas chambers. Maybe a one-season miniseries adaptation of *This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,* bringing Borowski’s recollections of life in the camp to the...

I don't recall it ever cropping up again, but that might just be that the Spaniards, who have been in Florida for a century at this point, just laughed and figured out the guy was compromised. Maybe a Spanish agent strangled him off-screen. I confess I haven't read up on them since 1635: The...

The United Kingdom is a multiethnic state and it's held onto Scotland even to this day. Given another few decades of Tsarist rule, who's to say that Polish separatist sentiment won't eventually become a minority ideology even in Poland itself? That can be accomplished either with the stick...

I'm inclined to say that the 7th Doctor is the earliest time a woman can be cast in the role. Sadly, such a move would be seen as last-ditch floundering to save the show after the hiatus, the change to the 25-minute format, and the general decline it hit in the 1980s, and the actress, no matter...

Wasn’t so much mine as some others’, but I agree. The other thing to consider is that the Soviets were happy to encourage abortion as a form of contraception (a legacy that persist to this day in that the Russian Federation has the highest per-capita abortion rate on Earth), which is not a...

Worse, maybe not. As bad, definitely. If Poland is independent, it is as much an ideological threat and source of disloyalty for Poles under Muscovite rule as IOTL. The same incentives for the Muscovites to exile Poles en masse to Siberia or even just to massacre them as separatists will still...

Attribute soldiers and civilians murdered by Germans to Stalin. Seems legit. Even the 20 M figure is obsolete, written as it was in 1989, before a systematic study of the Soviet archives could be performed. More recent studies, by Snyder, Conquest, Pipes, and others, do not exceed 15 M, and...

10 M, per Timothy Snyder’s count. Let’s be realistic here—if Stalin really killed 1/3 of the USSR’s entire population, there wouldn’t have been enough people to carry guns against the Germans later. And what Stalin did to the Ukrainians, a White regime would do to Jews and Poles. Especially...

A funny irony would be if the US tried to get out of paying tribute by screwing their own economy the way post-WWI Germany did. To which the Germans can answer, "We've seen this before. We can do this the easy way, or we can start demanding tribute in the form of slave labor."

Stephen Baxter has an interesting scenario with one of the aforementioned natural nuclear reactors harnessed by an iron-age neo-African (post-apocalyptic) kingdom to power simple steam pumps. Copious amounts of slave labor are destroyed by manually inserting burned logs (control rods) to the...

My inclination is to say that Buckliger was a party bureaucrat tasked with the typical loot-and-extract behavior after the conquest of America, maybe a Speer-camp ‘moderate,’ at which point he did the math and realized that a German economy based on tribute and looting would sooner or later...

Much depends on how it interacts with Napoleon. I can’t see it siding against him—it has too much to gain, not much left to lose. So it’ll probably be punished if/when he loses—a forced change of monarch? Personal Union with Prussia or Muscovy?

Per Turtledove’s tendency toward Parallelism, Japan might be viewed as a TTL *China—the psychotic militarists of old have gradually lost power to a new wave of technocrats and business-oriented men more interested in turning the empire into a productive and profitable unit. The average Chinese...

The Mississippi is, of course, navigable for most of its length, and as the US Navy showed in the American Civil War, oceangoing ships of the nineteenth century had no trouble going up. The issue is whether New Orleans could be fortified so as to deny navigation. The Confederates were none...

Damming the Oresund wouldn’t work. The Baltic is a net outflow of water to the North Sea—trying to dam it would just drown the surrounding countries. Only the Med and Red Sea and Persian Gulf are real candidates for an Atlantropa-type project because they have such a large evaporative loss of...

Superman with a mullet? Now *that’s* dark.

Maybe another season instead of ‘The New Batman Adventures.’ Maybe the original art style also persists—I wonder what Superman would look like in the original BTAS style. Sadly, this probably butterflies Batman Beyond. At this time, Fox was also airing a Spiderman cartoon—could Batman’s...