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The government could always have sold the land itself. That's one of the ways the railroads were expected to acquire financing.

All that's true, but this is a soft alternate history scenario given the question posed.

Why did the United States pay for land it annexed from Mexico and Spain when it acquired those as a result of wars it decisively won? Most other wars of the era ended with the loser having to pay a war indemnity, so it doesn't really make sense for the United States to have paid for lands in was...

Alaska was really out of the way until recently. If it remains Russian its not going to make for a "completely different" course of history, at least not before the Russo-Japanese War, at which point it would be a secondary front at most. As soft alternate history goes this is really mild...

Most of the petroleum and coal in Alaska still hasn't been developed for environmental reasons. Even Prudehoe Bay might not have been developed if the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act hadn't passed at the height of the energy crisis in November 1973, ceasing all legal challenges against...

Here are some maps of the land grants. They are so massive that they can still be seen today in land ownership maps, especially in Wyoming and Nevada.

Waterways are government owned, as are most roads, highways, and air and sea ports. Water and electric utility systems are a mixture of public and private ownership. Railroads seem to be the only major form of transportation or really national infrastructure in general that doesn't have some...

There's also the Fourth Fleet Incident shortly after the Tomozuro capsizing, in which the Imperial Japanese Navy's Fourth Fleet encountered a typhoon that ripped the bows off destroyers, seriously cracked the hulls of cruisers, and badly damaged the flight decks and superstructure of the light...

They also skimped on things like center of gravity and engineering tolerances. The torpedo boat Tomozuru capsized because its center of gravity was too high (from overloading with weapons), and upon further review the Imperial Japanese Navy found that most of their warships suffered from a high...

They didn't use airships or dreadnoughts for tactical fire support though, or at least it was very rare for dreadnoughts (Queen Elizabeth and Inflexible did participate at Gallipoli).

Which was more winnable, the United States intervention in Vietnam or the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan?

In addition to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska has other energy options that might be pursued, such as National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. There's also the massive Chuitna coal reserve with an estimated 1 billion tons of recoverable coal and the proposed Rampart Dam...

It would have been better than some of the forced ahistorical oddities they had in game. It's one thing for a model of rifle or even aircraft or tank to show up a year or two early in fiction, but it's really glaring when it's an entire capability like anti-tank rifles. You know what happens if...

Control over the Persian Gulf was certainly a source of tension heading into World War I, and within a few years it very well could have become a potential cause of World War I as the extent of the petroleum there became clear. All the industrial powers had enough coal to meet domestic demand...

The Japanese actually converted the third Yamato class battleship, Shinano, into an aircraft carrier. It even retained the heavy armor.

Petroleum and nuclear energy didn't really take off in the United States until the 1963 Clean Air Act, so something similar might be needed to give it a boost in Germany. Germany has a lot of lignite/cheap soft coal too, unlike the United States, so that could give coal an advantage. Even with...

It depends how you define commercial. The first civilian power reactors (although also producing plutonium) were the Calder Hall units in 1956, while Dresden (Illinois, United States) was entered service in 1960 using entirely private financing.

Germany already has vast coal reserves, so how would petroleum speed electrification any further? It would be less expensive to use petroleum and cheap heating and power would boost German economic growth, but Germany wasn't lacking fuel.

Natural gas is definitely an option. Big Inch and Little Big Inch, the world's first petroleum pipelines, were converted to natural gas service shortly after World War II and continue in that role to this day (Little Big Inch was converted back to petroleum in 1957 though). It didn't cost much...

If the Central Powers win World War I it seems unlikely they would not demand Kuwait submit to Ottoman rule. It's the natural terminus for the Berlin-Baghdad Railway in the Persian Gulf, and the 1899 Anglo-Kuwaiti Treaty just sets bad precedent. There would certainly be a successor to the 1913...