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Why? It successfully managed to stay out of WW2, and the military was fiercely conservative. After the collapse of Greece and the victory of the communists in the Greek civil war, however, the Western support for Turkey intensified and the country was admitted into NATO shortly thereafter. It...

The lightest blue signifies non-NATO countries which, however, closely co-operate with NATO military planning. For all intents and purposes, they are allies. They include neutral Sweden and Austria, and the still Francoist Spain. The different shades of blue and red in case of Poland are there...

It would be kind of hard to make it anything but a joke, considering it is a small enclave, mostly devoid of any actualy Germans by the end of WW2. In the end, the USSR took its spoils and the rest went to People's Republic of Poland, pretty much like in OTL. After revision, I do not have one...

I posted a map way back for an Alternate Cold War, where the division of Europe ended up a bit different as result of a faster and more decisive Allied advance into German-occupied Europe in 1944. I decided to revisit that project and here's the revised map: Thoughts and questions are...

A few corrections here. REL have not tested SABRE, the engine has not yet been developed and built. What was tested are the pre-coolers, i.e. the most crucial, sine qua non part of SABRE. 60 million pounds from the British government (not ESA, which has funded REL's work before with grants in...

Thanks, this will help a lot.

From that post it seems the X-30 will never really get anywhere as in OTL. The X-40 seemed much more promising... --- Totally derpy question - is there a table of contents somewhere with links to the individual update posts?

I apologize in advance for quoting only parts of your post, but I don't want to waste more space in this thread ;) Of course I've read it all. On the other hand, without the bad experience with the STS, wouldn't the Kubrick-Clarke-ish ideal of reusable spaceplanes live on? The way I think...

Slightly OT, but consider it a possible source of inspiration for Part III and IV of this timeline: Esa study examines Skylon space plane ;)

You might want to (re)read e of pi's last couple of posts for the answer.

Ah, I love these hand-made drawings. I am looking forward for the final version (and nixonshead's later pictures of it).

I totally forgot about that. (I guess I am too stuck in OTL thinking :o ) Which incidentally pretty much precludes any serious Russian participation in the project later on, even if the West was interested and the Russians abandoned Mir to its fate.

Australia? I guess that's because it's largely empty, but it's very far. Couldn't they have agreed on landing somewhere in the US (or Canada)? Better infrastructure, closer to Kourou. BTW, if I recall correctly, one of the imagined evolution designs of OTL's Energia* was to be called...

Ah yes, thanks, I knew I saw it somewhere. I noticed, nice touch! I am very much looking forward to that. And here I want to say that you're doing this timeline a great service - it's always nice to have pictures to connect with names and numbers in your head. A picture really is worth a...

Let me drool for a minute... mmmm... Okay, I am done, and now I have questions: 1) Why "Minotaur"? Is it just a random mythological designation you picked, or is there any significance to it? I ask because to me personally, Minotaur(us) is rather a scary mythological creature, so I...

Lost along with all my data in the laptop accident I mentioned ;) Essentially, I'd move the story into the 2060s. Leonov would look a bit more white and realistic, and it would be a product of international co-operation headed by Europe and Russia. The events of 2001 (in this version set...

Just a comment on this. I've seen the film once (a loooong time ago), but I've read the book many many times (Clarke's best, in my humble opinion). Clarke in general was always a bit brief when describing the propulsion on ships in his fiction, because he was well aware that the kinds of...

We can start small - build a sub-scale (one or two metres in diameter) centrifuge module completely housed within a pressurized ISS module and have mice live their happy short lives there, while we're adjusting the spin rate to simulate various levels of gravity. This alone should give us an...

Microgravity is dangerous. We know that and in my opinion, further proving that with progressively longer and longer stays of our lab rats astronauts in zero-g environments is both unnecessary and ethically questionable. What we *desperately* need data for is low-gravity; i.e. how much...

Oh I wish it were possible. But since then I've experienced a major mishap with the hard drive on my laptop, so the ground texture I was using to make pictures of the planet as well as the original fractal map I based it on, all my notes, thousands of historical spaceflight pictures, and other...