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To oversimplify, medieval/renaissance monarchs generally had three major sources of revenue: Their own lands, which generated revenue like any other feudal holding Sale of offices, monopolies, charters, patents, etc Taxes Taxes differed significantly from the other two categories, since taxes...

At the time, France still aspired to its "natural border" on the Rhine. One of the big effects of giving the Rhineland to Prussia was that the territory was directly in the hands of another Great Power, making a major war almost automatic if France tried to seize the Rhineland by force. Even so...

The "greenboy" shells were specifically designed in response to post-battle analysis of Jutland, with harder armour-piercing caps, better fuzes, and a more stable explosive charge. They started getting delivered to the fleet in April 1918, and had completely replaced the fleet's AP shell...

The British also had fixed their problems with shell penetration and ammunition handling that had hurt them badly at Jutland. Bad shells probably cost them several kills, and sloppy ammunition handling definitely contributed to the loss of three British BCs. Germany doing significant damage to...

It looks like the British CAs were used mainly for scouting and screening. In that role, they're still doing a useful job even if they don't engage enemy ships. In particular, they were useful in the night action: Black Prince was lost when the 1st Cruiser Squadron ran into a group of German...

Depends what you mean by "low cost". Lower than OTL is doable, if the shuttle program is targeted to a narrower set of intended missions. Dropping the sillier Air Force requirements (e.g. the ability to snatch a Soviet satellite out of orbit and land back at Vandenberg in a single orbit) is...

A less-brutal Congo Free State, one that obtained ivory and rubber through trade for European manufactured goods and extracted revenues for Leopold through royal monopolies or import/export duties, still could have been profitable. It would almost certainly have produced far less revenue, but it...

This article has a decent summary of the policy that was under discussion: The federal government would fund these accounts with annual contributions equal to 2 percent of the wage base used to compute old-age and survivors' benefits under Social Security. Workers’ payroll tax contributions...

Churchill's abilities as a strategist were dominated by two groups of traits, both of which could be strengths or serious weaknesses depending on the situation. One trait was his boundless energy and attention to detail, combined with a knack for understanding and synthesizing together the...

Ideology was almost completely different. The legitimizing principle of Imperial Russia was a combination of tradition (the Tsars had ruled for centuries, and their continued rule was considered the natural order of things) and religion (the Russian Orthodox church attributed the same role to...

I started to write a reply arguing that a big enough setback in the war might have been able to swing the midterm elections enough for Peace Democrats to be able to block funding for the war in 1863, but in researching it I found two big problems with my idea: It would have taken a huge setback...

The size of the "court" is one limiting factor: a medieval monarch's court was small enough to reasonably travel with him and set up temporary lodging and offices at any of a number of places throughout the country. But once governments start growing to anything like modern size, the scale of...

I don't know about the Soviet studies, but I'm guessing they were looking at the same scenario that lead to Nike-Zeus being cancelled before deployment. Basically, fire control radar was a huge bottleneck, so each ABM station could only engage one incoming warhead at a time, or at most one per...

Both the US and the Soviets had the technical ability for a limited ABM system by the mid 60s, both based on heavy SAMs with nuclear warheads (*): the American Nike-Zeus system and the Soviet ABM-1 Galosh. Reliably killing an ICBM warhead with a kinetic or conventional-explosive interceptor is...

I mostly agree with you on this. I'm not 100% convinced some kind of rollback of Imperial authority would have been impossible, but it's a very, very difficult needle to thread. The Late Republic had broken down for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest was that the size of...

For an early POD, have the Thirty Years War play out differently so the HRE winds up getting split between a Catholic Empire in the south and a Protestant Empire in the north. The Protestant Empire would probably initially be dominated by Sweden (depending on the exact POD), but there's plenty...

That's my impression, too. In 1918, he'd intended to abdicate in favor of a regency for his grandson (the eldest son of Crown Prince Wilhelm, 12 in 1918 and 32 in 1938), but he waited too long and events got away from him. He accepted the need to step down himself, and (at least according to...

His running mate would be sworn in as Vice President on March 4, then immediately sworn in again as President. The relevant text from Article II of the constitution: It only takes a slightly broad reading of this to apply it to your scenario: the elected President is dead, so the VP becomes...

Maybe. English Catholicism would certainly be in a stronger position than IOTL, but it's not necessarily enough to stop the reformation from taking hold eventually. IOTL, Henry's Great Matter and the Statute in Restraint of Appeals gave protestants a big boost: it lead Henry to put Protestants...

That's a tall order unless the Union bites at least Arlington and Alexandria off from Virginia: the White House and the Capital building are very close to the Potomac, about two miles from the Virginia coast of the river. That's well within the range of heavy siege mortars of the Civil War era...