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The poll really needed to be limited to the 3rd generation battleships completed immediately before and after the beginning of WW2. And there are really only two options: the Yamato-class and Iowa-class battleships. It is really impossible to compare these ships on an even playing field...

All well and good, but if congress could routinely impeach and convict a president over serious policy disagreements by a simple majority then congress is no longer "co-equal" but completely superior to the Presidency. In effect, the president becomes a government minister who can be removed at...

Effective at what? And how do you really assess effectiveness when most public executions took place prior to the 20th century. Were they effective in deterring crime? Perhaps. But that is not the reason public executions (as well as other forms of public punishment like flogging or stocks)...

This soon after the Holocaust, a complete Arab victory in 1948 would only increase the sense among surviving Jews that they simply cannot depend on Europeans, the United States, or Euro-centered International Organizations (such as the UN in 1948) to protect them. Those who favored Zionism might...

This is all true. But that does not mean abolition couldn't occur peacefully as technologies developed that made intensive un-skilled human farm labor inefficient and expensive. Put yourself in the mind of a relatively humane plantation owner in the early 1900's. Slaves are a very...

If such a plan went through it would come with so many restrictions that there would be no "Bundeswehr" unless it was so heavily monitored by the Allied Powers that it was little more than an internal federal police and border-protection force. It would have no military aircraft, no ocean going...

The problem with this is that the Southern plantation culture and even the legality of slavery was never a "fringe" ideology in the US until after the Civil War. Why would members of the Southern Plantation class see the need to "skulk" in the shadows planning a rebellion when the entire nation...

Unless you butterfly away the rise of western Europe to its position of global technological, economic, and scientific prominence by the mid 1800's, it is almost impossible to imagine any true "lingua franca" not being at least based on a western European language that uses the Latin alphabet...

You might want check on your autofill function better. Yes he did become a material being

Any is better than OTL. The two most idiotic things to put on a national or state flag are the (1) name of the place, or (2) its geographic shape. I prefer the state flag redesigns because they keep the tradition and overall design (which isn't bad) but ditch the name. However if Tennessee...

Obviously he was a very talented orator and group motivator for the times (it really doesn't seem like his style would translate well today, though). He also had an excellent sense for the visually dramatic. Leni Reifenstahl's propaganda films, Speer's architecture and light shows, and the...

The Italian airplane was a non-starter and technically wasn't even a turbojet powered plane. It used a piston-engine powered fan embedded in the fuselage and some combustion to produce an augmented ducted-fan thrust. It also barely exceeded 200 mph on its test flights.

You are a new poster so I'll go lightly. The topic of earlier German jets has been discussed many times and the board consensus is that a 1940 date is totally implausible for anyone to introduce effective jet aircraft into squadron service. Prior to 1944, jet engines were just too unreliable...

"CSA" is not really an exercise in alternate history and it is pointless to speculate on what the rest of the world would look like. It is a satirical/ironic polemic about the OTL USA.

Rommel was a loyal German officer and was killed, not for participating n the July plot, but for only tacitly approving of it by knowing about it and keeping quiet. I don't see Rommel defecting unless he was first captured or forced to surrender to the Allies. Rommel only turned against...

I don't know much about internal Ottoman politics in the 17th century, but what on earth would be the reason for a Mediterranean/Near Eastern eastern power to raid the northeastern coast of North America. Was there once an interest among the Ottomans to exert power that far from home?

I tend to agree with those who say that if Fort Sumpter is not attacked, the Federal Government and Southern States who seceded might find a way to tiptoe away from war and negotiate some sort of reunion that explicitly preserves the right of Southern States to keep slavery (perhaps even a...

I don't really think generalizations based on how relatively impoverished and/or oppressed populations live and think necessarily translates to how average people in an advanced modern society would fare if it adopts an "insane educational policy". First one has to define what constitutes an...

"Primitive" simply connotes first things and simplicity. A hunting technology based on chipped stone spear points or carved ivory harpoons is primitive when compared to one based on complex production techniques such as forged steel or firearms no matter how sophisticated or artful the stone...

The Far Right was a reaction to "far left" social and military policies current in the mid-late 1970's Democratic Party. Abortion Rights, dis-engagement from foreign adventures, pacifism, and other "counter-culture" stuff. They aren't called reactionaries for nothing. One way to minimize...