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Granted, man-portable ATGW could make a real mess of any frigate or destroyers that was foolish enough to come within range, but would be rather less of a threat to a fully armoured battleship (although don't neglect the damage that could be done to the superstructure and upperworks). Honestly...

Umm, okay. So why is a battleship appropriate for this task, but a few artillery batteries or destroyers with 127mm guns are unable to handle it?

Sorry, but I'm having trouble seeing the logic here. Any potential enemy who is at the point of mounting an amphibious invasion of the United States will only do so under conditions of overwhelming air and naval superiority, right? So how is a single obsolete battleship expected to get close...

I have no idea what the effects are, but I just want to say that I love this PoD. It's something different to the normal stuff we get, both in area and period. If you mix this discovery with some of Sternberg's other beliefs, it could be fascinating.

Agreed - the Macchis would be a far better bet in a situation like that. NZ is simply too small too have specialist platforms like the OV-10, I think. If we're going to have an air combat capability it has to be more than just some COIN aircraft, although I guess having more of a 'niche force'...

Okay, you may not know this, but the Mirror is a British tabloid newspaper known for lurid journalism of the worst kind. They are in NO WAY a reputable source! If it claimed the sun came up in the east, I would immediately start looking for independent confirmation of that fact. Using them as a...

The Skyhawks and Aermacchis are all in storage while the government looks for buyers. Things were looking good in August of 2001 with a private buyer offering to take the Skyhawks, but then the US DoD got all squirelly for some reason about individuals having access to fast jets so the sale was...

I don't know the answer to your question, but even modifications to the way the bombing campaign was conducted could have had significant effects: RAF Bomber Command suffered an appallingly high casualty rate, with deaths at well over 40% and comparatively small chances of merely being wounded...

A selfish request, but I'd love to know what happened to New Zealand. I was in the army back in 1997, it'd be good to know if we had an easy time or were busy pulling people out of rubble.

Thanks for explaining that, I feel like I have a better idea of the thought process now. I agree that the Harrier was never particularly great, which is why the idea of replacing it seemed strange to me. Even for other navies with small carriers it was a distinctly second-best solution, viable...

But did they? I can accept that the USN needed a "stealthy" multirole aircraft, and that the USAF needed something to take the place of all the retiring A-10s and F-16s (I'm not convinced the F-35 is the right airframe for both roles, but let's leave that aside). However, although I don't know...

Surely it's better to have no more than you can adequately support, train, and equip. Numbers do indeed provide advantages, but if you can't get them where they need to be and they can't do anything useful once they get there then you might as well not have bothered.

The thing is that Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia form the geostrategic core of ASEAN - any form of ASEAN that's recognisable to OTL has to take that into account, and by virtue of that their security concerns will tend to dominate. This doesn't have to mean they co-operate (they only do so...

It's still a solution in search of a problem. There just aren't any plausible use cases for launching a few thousand tonnes at once instead of in many smaller launches (which can be done as needed, and allow you to benefit from economies of scale). The costs of Orion are also not-inconsiderable...

Citation needed. We still don't know how to make a fusion reactor that uses He3, and may not for decades or centuries. Even if we did, wouldn't it be easier to get He3 from Earth - it's in the atmosphere and mantle - than to get it from the moon? Finally, we're talking a massive lunar...