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Hi :) I am not going to read through this enitre thread so I apologise if this subject was covered already; I am writing notes for my own "extension" of White's Medieval America, and these are my preliminary thoughts on California and Scientology, purely for purposes of sharing/entertainment ;)...

Possibly. Also, even the natural dialectal split and language shifts would eventually change these "Classical English" terms into something hardly recognizable for us. One more vowel shift would make English sound very different, and if spelling then followed the pronunciation, we'd end up with...

Once more on the administrative/noble ranks, just briefly. Land title -> ruler -> ~real-world medieval European equivalent N/A -> deputy -> ~(landed) knight. (Most common among the warrior-nobility of feudal America. Landed deputies usually rule from a small rural fortress and protect the...

Well, for instance I don't understand why England has two overlapping circles - both are equally possible and/or so close it doesn't matter? And what exactly qualifies as 'unsuitable' terrain - especially Italy looks... strange, while Hungary pretty quickly became feudal once the Magyars settled...

Before that, I'd like to ask about these from the collection of White's maps. Have they been discussed? Can somebody tell what method was employed here and what the conclusions were? What the numbers/letters on the one depicting Europe denote? I think I understand the principles (mark areas...

What ivory? Elephants are almost gone, and I don't think they'd survive the Downfall of modern civilization (even if it was not cataclysmic, White mentions that 4/5ths of the US population succumbed to famine. It would be similar in Africa and even worse in India, so I imagine the hundreds of...

Well, the difference is they did so by essentially "island-hopping" to Shetlands, the Faeroe Islands, and then to Iceland (first more or less by accident). But you're right, oceanic travel is not impossible even with very primitive technology (after all, the Polynesians settled practically...

Based on what? England is a stone throw from the European mainland, indeed it is a part of the same continental massif. The seas which connect it with Europe are essentially 'coastal', but even the North Sea was historically a lot of trouble to cross (it took the Norse some time to figure out...

Yeah, but what? Nowadays the "spices" (i.e. products of the subtropical/tropical zone) have spread around the globe. What can be produced in tropical America can likely be produced in tropical Africa and tropical Asia; for instance the two main producers of cocoa, a plant native to America, are...

Or abandoned altogether due to phonetic similarity with a certain term of abuse ;) I must have missed it on the blog. Anyway, I'd imagine that with medieval-level technology, crossing ocean expenses would be very dangerous, and hardly worth it (I mean, what's in Europe America does not have...

I understand that. I am just wondering what title (the name of the aristocratic rank) would usually be used for rulers ruling small countries-as-administrative-units (where applicable). I mean, who 'rules' a county in present-day America? That's not the point. Sure that the descendants of...

Yes, I would also think that "the Union" would be this world's equivalent of the Empire, i.e. the ideal of unity, law, and order people looked up to with almost superstitious awe in the dark ages and afterwards. Commonwealth in White's take is IMO just a fancier name for a State - right now...

Sorry for bumping this thread and asking inane questions, but I haven't had time to read trough both the threads. If this had been discussed already, feel free to ignore this post. Has anybody thought about the names Medieval America would use for various aristocratic titles & noble ranks...

I think the only situation when a negotiated "peace" (or rather, a cease-fire for a few years) can happen is a) Stalin becomes convinced that the Western Allies will not offer any 'serious' help - by that he means a second front against Germany. He now thinks that the Westerners are happy to...

Somebody else will build it. Again, the underlying physics means that anybody with a sufficient understanding will know nuclear explosives are a possibility. It's not like the Manhattan project uncovered something nobody knew before; rather it developed the practical technologies necessary to...

True, but the issue is whether the US is willing to maintain a massive conventional army in peacetime, in Europe, to sufficiently deter the USSR. The American military was largely de-mobilized even before nukes became a really important factor (~1948/49). I assume the USSR would postpone...

Well, how are you proposing to make A-bombs impossible? They're grounded in physics. Unless you somehow alter the fundamental physics "software" of this Universe, A-bombs will be built sooner or later. But okay - let's say *MAGIC* prevents A-bombs, while allowing other uses of nuclear energy...

If the German military morale in the West collapses due to faster WAllied drive, it's possible.

And a possible outcome of such a fast end of WW2 would be something like this ;)

I am not planning a detailed timeline; this is just a sort of a Q&A form of thread. I know what happened in a rough outline, but I do not have it written down. For instance, there was a mini-war between Socialist Slovakia and the C.F.R. in the early 1950s for the little bit of Slovakia...