Search results

It's easy to write law based on idealised principles. If there's a permanent lunar base, something that looks an awful lot like 'territory' will inevitably be established. If nothing else, because having someone else establish their base in your landing zone is going to be awfully unpleasant for...

Possibly tied in with some weird rhetoric from the right about cutting jobs in Southern states - most of the NASA manned spaceflight effort being based in former Confederate states, and the identification of that program with national pride, it's not hard to see a plausible sequence of events.

The second thing would be reopening closed training establishments. Which is another reason there's no real advantage to building overseas: if you have umpteen shiny new warships, but nobody to crew them, you've just wasted a huge wad of money. And you can't really solve the training problem by...

The ability to spend the money is certainly there, if someone decides that it's of critical national importance for some reason. The ability to build that many ships, less so. It would require an increase in industrial capacity to between three and four times its' current level; achieving that...

In 1951, Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh proposed a deal with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to share profits 50/50 between the company and the Iranian government, in line with existing arrangements between oil companies and the governments of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. The AIOC...

I have a TL in the works where the Soviet Union does undergo limited market reforms. In 1976, after fifteen more years of Stalin, two limited nuclear wars, and a disastrous famine. The result is major ideological fault lines in a Soviet Union that's increasingly held together by a charismatic...

I'm sure I've seen an assessment somewhere that the US actually has something like seven major political groupings. As mentioned by Hcira1, FPTP only dictates that individual races will stabilise as a two-party contest. There's therefore absolutely no problem with any number of parties being...

I don't know the history of it, but apparently in the US it's illegal for anyone other than the Postal Service to deliver to a mailbox, and illegal for anyone other than the recipient to take it out. Bearing in mind, of course, that American domestic mailboxes are generallylocated at the street...

Even using conductor rail, the issue is the diagonal members that - as I understand it - intrude on the upper corners of the pantograph dynamic envelope. It may not be an issue, or else a solvable one, but it's apparently something that will make a consultant lots of money need careful study.

The problem with electrifying the Forth Bridge isn't electrical, it's mechanical. The bridge structural elements seriously restrict the envelope in which a pantograph can operate, to the point where a 25kV pantograph won't fit. Historic 1500V pantographs have been even larger, so the problem is...

If cunningly designed, that could get you interchange with Queen Street bus station, Queen Street low level railway station, and Buchanan Street subway station.

On the subject of inadvisable African waterworks: the Jonglei Canal proposed to bypass the Sudd wetlands in South Sudan. Supposed to avoid water being 'wasted' to evaporation in the Sudd, making for an increase in water availability for the lower Nile. Of course, that means that the Sudd...

I have a rough outline for a timeline where the National Parks movement gets started a century and a bit earlier in the UK. Part of that sees a small herd of Białowieża wisent sent over as a gift from Russia - pretty much inconsequential at first, until after WW1 when the British wisent herd...

Not necessarily, there are many small locomotives. In fact, I could see fuel cell locomotives having a niche for industrial uses where heat/flame needs to be avoided. If the technology can get in place, they offer advantages over both battery locomotives and fireless steam locomotives.

In the middle of Nebraska, it doesn't matter at all. In the centre of a major city, it matters quite a lot. If that weren't the case, nobody would build skyscrapers. Ultimately, cities exist for people, not for cars. Making it easier for people to use the city may involve improving access for...

Put enough water into the Chad basin and it'll fill up to the point that it has an outflow. When this has happened in the past, that outflow was via the Mayo Kébbi into the Benue and then the Niger. That's the lowest exit from the basin; directing the water anywhere else would need major...

One small blessing, if you can call it that, is that it would probably be deep and wide enough that only the edges would be teeming with mosquitoes. The middle would just be a giant dead zone.

This part of the plan requires a novel take on the hydrology of the Chad basin. Even assuming that damming the Congo and redirecting it northwards would actually work, the Chad basin would outflow into the Niger river, not northwards. Changing that would require a dam that would make even the...

No love for Albania? They certainly seemed to have a damn good go at it IOTL, after all.

40 acres and a mule to anyone who applies for it might have helped with acceptance. That might make sense if someone wanted to try and create a class of yeoman farmers in the place of the conquered Southern aristocracy, but is probably a bit of a stretch. It could equally see some white...