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What if whatever flaw or whatever that caused the crankshaft of the engine of Percy Pilcher's triplane to break in OTL isn't present/doesn't occur and on 30th September 1899, instead of flying his glider for the final and fatal time Pilcher makes the first successful powered heavier than air...

Okay, I just read a short story where the first powered flight took place in the 1850s (well, sort of; it's complicated), using a very small and very hazardous steam engine for power. So I'm wondering, is that at all plausible and if it is, then what would be the consequences for the...

Would it have been possible for the ORP Piorun, a Polish destroyer whose main claim to fame in OTL is repeatedly charging in to attack the Bismarck at close range while signalling "I am a Pole", to have managed to sink or at least completely disable the battleship in question if they got really...

In 1600 William Adams, later known as Miura Anjin, ended up in Japan and opened the door to relations between the country of his birth and the one he'd spend the rest of his life in. In OTL however they didn't amount to much and came an abrupt end following the Amboyna massacre in 1623, with the...

In December 1914, the German navy shelled a number of towns on the northeast coast of England, namely Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool. Of the three the only one able to mount a defence was Hartlepool but due to a combination of the Germans having the element of surprise, bad weather and plain...

I know that the 1904 Dogger Bank Incident has been covered many, many times but I'm curious as to what the long term consequences, possibly up to present day, of the Second Pacific Squadron (aka the Baltic Derp Fleet) running even more afoul of the Brits than they did in OTL would be, rather...

In the world of soft drinks, there's the world conquering cola, a few other beverages that managed some degree of global consumption but are forever in cola's shadow, and a whole bunch of drinks that don't really exist outside of one country or small collection of neighbouring countries. In the...

As we all know, during the Columbian Exchange a lot of things crossed the Atlantic in both directions. However, for various reasons there were a lot of New World crops that remained unknown in Europe or indeed anywhere else in the new world until fairly recently, e.g. the pseudocereals, various...

Pretty much what it says on the tin. With a POD of your choice, come up with a way for the Thylacine, aka Tasmanian Tiger, aka Tasmanian Wolf, aka Tassie, to get domesticated instead of going exinct. The degree of domestication could be anything from total (eg, dogs, assorted livestock, etc), to...

I've read LoRaG and LoIaM and they got me thinking. Assuming that agriculture arose independantly in a few more places, what sorts of crop packages could have come into being? Are there any good potential domesticates that got ignored due to the spread of the OTL crop packages?