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Meanwhile, I have undertaken one of those wonky tranches I like doing. To recap what I think would happen in response to the OP, as noted, bottom line is I think it helps Bush win more than Gore. There is certainly no way either can withdraw from the campaign--if President Clinton tried to...

Living in the USA since I was born here in the mid-60s, I don't recall a lot of "terror attacks" of this type happening at all in the first place, unless you are referring to "lone gunman, judged to be insane, starts firing at a crowd" which we certainly had going back before I was born (lest...

"I will show you fear In a handful of dust..." Not to mention dust. You know, in putting forth proposals to slice open the ends of the tanks to provide larger hatches and alternate emergency egress other than the hamster tubes in the intertank, I had great fear and trembling about cutting...

Were you there, as an adult or older child who followed contemporary politics in the day? I was. We had a hell of a lot of division already and the Gingrich-Limbaugh school of right wing activism, well underway before 1992, was all about relentless attacks on the weakness and revolting nature...

This seems likely enough, and for reasons you outline, objectively a good thing. This is the part I dispute. Certainly among just about everyone committed to vote for Gore very strongly, this would be good for morale and be self-evidently good for all the reasons you outline. But...I fear that...

Why "probably?" I might not have boggled at "possibly," especially if it were made clear that this is a formal "suspension," the candidate himself diplomatically keeping fairly quiet, while proxies campaign relentlessly for him. But the general tone of Republican campaigning, particularly...

Being ambivalently threatening against possibly Britain is a terrible way to sustain a mutual anti-Comintern pact, not to mention running the risk of the Anglo-French Entente reactivating--not inconceivably in some sort of alliance with the USSR. After all, that is exactly the coalition that...

That's what I was thinking, so did they ever seriously look at the option of taking F-1A basic design and scaling it down? One definitely would not want to derate it by lowering chamber pressure, as that would make sea level flow more adverse. In this case, it means smaller dimensions. I'd...

Let's see, the spec for SSME chamber pressure is 20.64 MPa at 109 percent throttle, which is about 19 MPa for nominal 100 percent. Taking the latter as standard, I get chamber temperature of about 3600 K, nozzle throat molar mass of 14.17, throat mass flow of 8191.5 (I believe this is for a...

That would indeed be a direction NASA campus and contractors seeking glory might want to go in, but consider how gigantic the ET is just to supply 3 SSMEs. Booster burn is a lot shorter time than the sustained Orbiter burn, I think it is about a factor of 6, but hydrogen-oxygen propellant is far...

Exactly what I'd think would be the sensible thing to do. Not the politically predictable thing to do of course; the contractors and NASA campuses would like to have a clean sheet staged combustion thing with all sorts of fun bells and whistles. Note downsizing can include "downrating." The...

Agreed. The Germans really don't need to be building a fleet at all, beyond legacy stuff already built and with any additions being gauged to neutralizing the Soviet Baltic fleet. If the Anglo-German cooperation also brings in other Baltic states as junior partners, then Germany building a fleet...

While many have questioned the plausibility of Germany converging as rapidly as the author suggests on a post-Nazi liberal order similar to both the late 2nd Reich of OTL and the BDR postwar in the '50s and later, that is what is canon now. The new Kaiser is fairly liberal and somehow or other...

From subjective memory of the times leading up to the election, I'd expect a substantial shift of popular vote toward Bush, which would not be guaranteed to win him the Electoral vote without Florida--but a very small shift in Florida would remove all doubt that the honest majority in that state...

Well, impede it, shift the balance of opinion against the Reds. It is always wrong to attribute to a nation a single mentality. They are composed of different classes and parties with different ideologies. Some Britons are going to be hard left socialists and some of these are going to embrace...

But meanwhile, the F-1A is technology in American hands--I suppose the detailed specs, blueprints and test stand data are public record in fact, semi-free for all to use. Sort of--I imagine anywhere outside Soviet or Chinese spheres, there might be issues of patent claims preventing any...

Oh, good. I never was on board with the 2000-mid 2010s conventional wisdom that reusability was the mistake of STS. My guess is that the Orbital Propulsion and Avionics Module (OPAM) includes the OMS, and after separation from the ET continues to thrust the sidesaddle payload mounted right on...

Well, sure. Poland is inherently far less capable than Germany. However, if we had a version of the TL where the British government were more leery of allying with Germany, assisting Poland to be stronger would be the obvious thing to do. The actual case, where Halifax et al are willing to...

Certainly no Einstein-Szillard letter. Perhaps some more conservative American scientists will be alarmed at Soviet potentials along these lines--no one doubted the Russians were pretty good at basic science, a cultural tradition going back well before the October Revolution which the Bolsheviks...

If Britain had folded and come to terms with Hitler after France fell, leaving him in control of the Continent and via puppet France extensive colonial holdings world wide, I do think we'd have no grounds to predict economic collapse. Of course if one asserts only free market capitalism in...