Highlander
Banned
Just wanted to put down some ideas and try out a new basemap and style. I like this modern map feel.
Map Thread V
- Thread starter Ian the Admin
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Would Maine really be part of the Maritime Union? I'm not sure I agree with that, if NH and MA are part of a separate New England- I think the populated parts of Maine are inevitably going to fall under the Boston sphere, as the population centers of the Maritimes are further away.
Follow the link: it actually _is_ a giant serpent. (Where is Fernir, may I ask?)
Bruce
The world of “If Drouet’s Cart Had Stuck”, http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/label.html?id=belldrouet
Some thirty-odd years have passed from the Austrian-boot-licking ending of the story. It’s 1960, and things have changed. The final reduction of the United Kingdom’s remaining liberties, after Parliament rejected new treaty terms that would have stripped the UK of what little independence from the “European Commonwealth” it had left, led the more democratic governments of Canada and Australia to reject the authority of the new Austrian-approved monarch, and after the Prince of Wales fled to Canada, a new Imperial Union was declared. The government of India joined: the British elites running the place were a conservative bunch, but although they might go along with the “New Absolutism”, they weren’t going to obey a king that was a puppet of the Catholic, German Holy Roman Emperor.
With the help of Russia (still peeved over the loss of it’s western territories 1932-1933) and the American states (united for once in fear of an Imperial presence right next door) the first effort to bring the British Empire under imperial control failed, but the time for a final showdown is approaching. Technological and industrial progress, long stymied by an ultra-conservative Europe and a fragmented North America, have been moving forward at last, in the Empire-in-Exile, in a now economically unified North America, and Russia, which is now a parliamentary republic, albeit a turbulent and obnoxiously nationalistic one. (The Russians will occasionally in private express some gratitude for the events of 1932-1933, since they led to the downfall of Czarist absolutism: in public, never). The secret-police-ridden, everything-censoring Holy Roman Empire, where the teaching of evolution is forbidden and in many places geology can only be taught if the age of the earth is carefully avoided, is falling behind: a decision must be forced soon. Russia, at least, must be destroyed.
Not that the HRE has been letting the grass grow under it’s feet in the meantime. France has been fully absorbed into the Empire, the Holy Land liberated from the Ottomans (a neutralized rump state surviving as a buffer between Russian and HRE territory), and much of Africa opened up for trade and Christianization. More problematically, a vigorous effort to revive Catholicism in France and Spain has led to considerable popular unrest, and the Protestant Prussians (a second-rate power since their great defeat by Russian-Austrian forces in the 1820’s) are increasingly unhappy with what they see as unfair religious favoritism on the part of the supposedly evenhanded Imperial center.
Technology has progressed to an early-20th century level, the still sail-powered ships of the 1914-1918 conflict having been replaced by hulking steam-powered steel battleships. Rails have been thrown across Russia and the HRE and the kingdom of Canada, and new chemical industries have sprung up from Prague to Houston. Telegraphs link the nations of the world, and some Russian and US scientists have been mucking with the almost unbelievable notion of wireless transmission. Nobody has come up with the theory of relativity, but several scientists are circling around the idea. (Some fields are a bit more advanced: computer _theory_ was developed as early as OTL, and although the hardware isn’t there, there have been some quite remarkable developments in the field of mechanical computing). Oddly enough, there are no zeppelins.
Coal is the principal power source, and the pollution is pretty bad in a lot of major cities, although Vienna is kept clean by zoning laws. Steam-powered cars are just starting to come on the market in the Kingdom of Canada, and ocean liners are getting pretty impressive. A major German scientist has just come up with an indisputable mathematical proof that heavier-than-air flight is impractical: various inventors abroad ignore him and continue messing about with kites and teeny steam engines.
The four successor states to the old USA haven’t entirely patched up their differences in the face of foreign menaces, but N. America is a free trade zone, and no passports are required to cross borders. The old US is a rather meddlesomely “progressive” republic, the world’s most heavily industrialized nation, with multiethnic machine politics and turbulent labor. It looks down on the Confederacy, a corrupt, oligarchic and political assassination-prone Apartheid state whose inhabitants are known for their touchy pride, and if black, for their annoying tendency to leave and look for jobs elsewhere in N. America (slavery finally ended in the 1930’s, but life’s still no picnic for blacks in the CSA). The Confederacy’s European-educated elites, OTOH, look down on the Texans - Texas, in their estimation, is inhabited entirely by crackers, Indians, Mexicans, and free blacks (although it had slavery until the 1890’s, Texas nowadays probably gives a black man a better break than anywhere else in America north of Mexico). Texans, who are nearly as wealthy as inhabitants of the US and perhaps the most “can-do” people on the planet, don’t care what Confederates have to say, although they find the very white, very Christian “Jeffersonian farmer’s republic” of Freedonia a bit comical themselves.
Other nations belonging to the loose anti-Habsburg alliance are the Brazilians, who have their own royal family in exile, not to mention the Anti-Pope in Rio [1]: the independent Dutch state in the South African interior, which has no desire to join a cape republic now a puppet of the HRE: and the House of Saud, whose origin predates the POD, and who now rule a dirt poor (oil is only just starting to become important) theocracy which would just love to give a thumb in the eye to the principal oppressors of Islam (the Russian occupation of western Iran doesn’t bother them that much - the Iranians, after all, are a bunch of dammed Shi’a heretics.
China is a bit out of the general conflict. Having thrown off the British “protectorate” during the 1914-1918 war, under the new Hong dynasty China has made energetic steps to modernize: in this backward TL, it didn’t have to go as far as OTL, and China is now a fairly formidable power, if not yet of the very first rank. If war happens, nobody is sure which way China will go: it was bullied in the past by Russia and the British, but the Chinese don’t particularly like the arrogance of Holy Roman ambassadors and have no desire to see the HRE in India or Southeast Asia. Japan, which only got out from under the British thumb during the HRE invasion, is still a fairly backwards place, although strong enough to avoid reconquest by the Empire-in-Exile.
The world is pretty sexist, although women have the vote in New Zealand and some of the states of the US, and female scientists are not unknown in Russia and the HRE. (A bill to allow women the vote in Russia only narrowly failed in the Duma: there are high hopes for the future). It is also racist, although lacking the more nastily “biological” aspects of OTL’s early 20th century. (Evolutionary theory is banned in most of Europe, and Social Darwinism never took off to the extent it did OTL in the English-speaking world.). Some nasty ideas about “inferior races” are, unfortunately, fairly popular among some sections of the Russian intelligentsia.
Anti-Semitism is also common: although there are no official legal disadvantages to being a Jew in the Holy Roman Empire, there is a definite glass ceiling to advancement to those who don’t convert, and among states not fully assimilated into the Empire, such as Roumania and the Ukraine, there are laws putting limits on Jewish ability to own property without a Christian partner or to fully participate in the political process. Still, nobody is committing pogroms, and the Yiddish Community of Letters flourishes.
Dress is conservative, skirts are long, hats de rigueur. Architecture is currently in a florid stage after the “neo-neo-Classical” revival of the 30’s and 40’s, and a drug-hazed, mystical-minded artistic movement, a bit Dada and a bit Surrealist, is currently spreading across the world from Russia. “Classical” music still flourishes, as does Opera, although it must be said that although the HRE produces great orchestras, its closely-monitored theatrical community tends to produce somewhat bland theatre, compared to such cultural centers as, say, Lima or Montreal.
[1] A number of Cardinals, particularly the Italian ones, eventually got entirely fed up with Imperial meddling in Papal elections…
Bruce
Some thirty-odd years have passed from the Austrian-boot-licking ending of the story. It’s 1960, and things have changed. The final reduction of the United Kingdom’s remaining liberties, after Parliament rejected new treaty terms that would have stripped the UK of what little independence from the “European Commonwealth” it had left, led the more democratic governments of Canada and Australia to reject the authority of the new Austrian-approved monarch, and after the Prince of Wales fled to Canada, a new Imperial Union was declared. The government of India joined: the British elites running the place were a conservative bunch, but although they might go along with the “New Absolutism”, they weren’t going to obey a king that was a puppet of the Catholic, German Holy Roman Emperor.
With the help of Russia (still peeved over the loss of it’s western territories 1932-1933) and the American states (united for once in fear of an Imperial presence right next door) the first effort to bring the British Empire under imperial control failed, but the time for a final showdown is approaching. Technological and industrial progress, long stymied by an ultra-conservative Europe and a fragmented North America, have been moving forward at last, in the Empire-in-Exile, in a now economically unified North America, and Russia, which is now a parliamentary republic, albeit a turbulent and obnoxiously nationalistic one. (The Russians will occasionally in private express some gratitude for the events of 1932-1933, since they led to the downfall of Czarist absolutism: in public, never). The secret-police-ridden, everything-censoring Holy Roman Empire, where the teaching of evolution is forbidden and in many places geology can only be taught if the age of the earth is carefully avoided, is falling behind: a decision must be forced soon. Russia, at least, must be destroyed.
Not that the HRE has been letting the grass grow under it’s feet in the meantime. France has been fully absorbed into the Empire, the Holy Land liberated from the Ottomans (a neutralized rump state surviving as a buffer between Russian and HRE territory), and much of Africa opened up for trade and Christianization. More problematically, a vigorous effort to revive Catholicism in France and Spain has led to considerable popular unrest, and the Protestant Prussians (a second-rate power since their great defeat by Russian-Austrian forces in the 1820’s) are increasingly unhappy with what they see as unfair religious favoritism on the part of the supposedly evenhanded Imperial center.
Technology has progressed to an early-20th century level, the still sail-powered ships of the 1914-1918 conflict having been replaced by hulking steam-powered steel battleships. Rails have been thrown across Russia and the HRE and the kingdom of Canada, and new chemical industries have sprung up from Prague to Houston. Telegraphs link the nations of the world, and some Russian and US scientists have been mucking with the almost unbelievable notion of wireless transmission. Nobody has come up with the theory of relativity, but several scientists are circling around the idea. (Some fields are a bit more advanced: computer _theory_ was developed as early as OTL, and although the hardware isn’t there, there have been some quite remarkable developments in the field of mechanical computing). Oddly enough, there are no zeppelins.
Coal is the principal power source, and the pollution is pretty bad in a lot of major cities, although Vienna is kept clean by zoning laws. Steam-powered cars are just starting to come on the market in the Kingdom of Canada, and ocean liners are getting pretty impressive. A major German scientist has just come up with an indisputable mathematical proof that heavier-than-air flight is impractical: various inventors abroad ignore him and continue messing about with kites and teeny steam engines.
The four successor states to the old USA haven’t entirely patched up their differences in the face of foreign menaces, but N. America is a free trade zone, and no passports are required to cross borders. The old US is a rather meddlesomely “progressive” republic, the world’s most heavily industrialized nation, with multiethnic machine politics and turbulent labor. It looks down on the Confederacy, a corrupt, oligarchic and political assassination-prone Apartheid state whose inhabitants are known for their touchy pride, and if black, for their annoying tendency to leave and look for jobs elsewhere in N. America (slavery finally ended in the 1930’s, but life’s still no picnic for blacks in the CSA). The Confederacy’s European-educated elites, OTOH, look down on the Texans - Texas, in their estimation, is inhabited entirely by crackers, Indians, Mexicans, and free blacks (although it had slavery until the 1890’s, Texas nowadays probably gives a black man a better break than anywhere else in America north of Mexico). Texans, who are nearly as wealthy as inhabitants of the US and perhaps the most “can-do” people on the planet, don’t care what Confederates have to say, although they find the very white, very Christian “Jeffersonian farmer’s republic” of Freedonia a bit comical themselves.
Other nations belonging to the loose anti-Habsburg alliance are the Brazilians, who have their own royal family in exile, not to mention the Anti-Pope in Rio [1]: the independent Dutch state in the South African interior, which has no desire to join a cape republic now a puppet of the HRE: and the House of Saud, whose origin predates the POD, and who now rule a dirt poor (oil is only just starting to become important) theocracy which would just love to give a thumb in the eye to the principal oppressors of Islam (the Russian occupation of western Iran doesn’t bother them that much - the Iranians, after all, are a bunch of dammed Shi’a heretics.
China is a bit out of the general conflict. Having thrown off the British “protectorate” during the 1914-1918 war, under the new Hong dynasty China has made energetic steps to modernize: in this backward TL, it didn’t have to go as far as OTL, and China is now a fairly formidable power, if not yet of the very first rank. If war happens, nobody is sure which way China will go: it was bullied in the past by Russia and the British, but the Chinese don’t particularly like the arrogance of Holy Roman ambassadors and have no desire to see the HRE in India or Southeast Asia. Japan, which only got out from under the British thumb during the HRE invasion, is still a fairly backwards place, although strong enough to avoid reconquest by the Empire-in-Exile.
The world is pretty sexist, although women have the vote in New Zealand and some of the states of the US, and female scientists are not unknown in Russia and the HRE. (A bill to allow women the vote in Russia only narrowly failed in the Duma: there are high hopes for the future). It is also racist, although lacking the more nastily “biological” aspects of OTL’s early 20th century. (Evolutionary theory is banned in most of Europe, and Social Darwinism never took off to the extent it did OTL in the English-speaking world.). Some nasty ideas about “inferior races” are, unfortunately, fairly popular among some sections of the Russian intelligentsia.
Anti-Semitism is also common: although there are no official legal disadvantages to being a Jew in the Holy Roman Empire, there is a definite glass ceiling to advancement to those who don’t convert, and among states not fully assimilated into the Empire, such as Roumania and the Ukraine, there are laws putting limits on Jewish ability to own property without a Christian partner or to fully participate in the political process. Still, nobody is committing pogroms, and the Yiddish Community of Letters flourishes.
Dress is conservative, skirts are long, hats de rigueur. Architecture is currently in a florid stage after the “neo-neo-Classical” revival of the 30’s and 40’s, and a drug-hazed, mystical-minded artistic movement, a bit Dada and a bit Surrealist, is currently spreading across the world from Russia. “Classical” music still flourishes, as does Opera, although it must be said that although the HRE produces great orchestras, its closely-monitored theatrical community tends to produce somewhat bland theatre, compared to such cultural centers as, say, Lima or Montreal.
[1] A number of Cardinals, particularly the Italian ones, eventually got entirely fed up with Imperial meddling in Papal elections…
Bruce
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As nice as the map is it doesn't make sence that you are clipping away the *Canadian and *Mexican states. Its like posting an OTL map of the USA that doesn't have all of Maine and Florida.
Quite a cool concept. One question, though: Why are the Albertan oil fields in the middle of Saskatchewan?
Please do more maps from If it Had Happened Otherwise. I'd love to see your interpretation of the "Napoleon Escaped to America" Scenario.
So I finally got Paint.NET today... messing around with it, here's what I came up with.
This is a letter virtually every American twenty-something gets after they graduate college. It's your typical spam recruitment mailing from everybody's favorite slightly-sinister Third-World transnational protectorate, the UNARC. Join today!
This is a letter virtually every American twenty-something gets after they graduate college. It's your typical spam recruitment mailing from everybody's favorite slightly-sinister Third-World transnational protectorate, the UNARC. Join today!
Wow, it took me a good couple of months to figure out what apparently took you a day in Paint.net.
it looks like you've been doing it forever, better than anything i could do.
also, you misspelled constant in the first paragraph.
Trouble is that story doesn't get too far from the POD: different states in Latin America, but the long-term butterflies are unpredictable...
Bruce
Valdemar II
Banned
the point is that those Island is Spanish already, so even if a lot of people has died they open to refugees and the governments which survive there is Spanish already.
Maybe the Churchill one? Possibly the best Anglowank ever and illustrates how a DBWI is supposed to unfold.
My memory of the scenarioes I've read is kinda blurry. Perhaps the Granada-takes-over-Spain AH too?
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