A new challenge: Plausible-er possibilities for published PODs

Thande

Donor
I like alliteration. ;)

Alright, the idea here is this. On this site, we usually (modestly :rolleyes: ) claim that most published AH is implausible and then cite reasons. Taking those discussions as a starting point, then, I'm going to post some 'classic' PODs used by published AH works, and I want posters to reply to any of these PODs they like with a short sketch of what they think a PLAUSIBLE outcome of that POD would be.

It is literally just the POD itself, e.g. the one for Turtledove is not 'the Lost Orders aren't and the CSA wins the Civil War', it's just 'the Lost Orders aren't' - go from there, and if you think that that's not enough to let the CSA win the Civil War, say so.

Alright - the PODs. (the published works they are from is in brackets)

1. Franklin D Roosevelt is assassinated in 1933 (The Man in the High Castle)

2. Adolf Hitler assassinated in 1924 (Command&Conquer: Red Alert)

3. The Lost Orders aren't lost by the CSA (Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series)

4. The Spanish Armada successfully invades England (Ruled Britannia, Pavane and some others)

5. The Netherlands joins the American Revolutionary War two years earlier than OTL (Stirling's Draka series)

6. Napoleon wins the battle of Waterloo (various)
 

MrP

Banned
6) Wellington is forced to fall back on his LoC. He is separated from the Prussians, who suffer another defeat at the hands of Boney, and are also compelled to retreat. Boney notes the advance of the Austro-Russian armies, and fall back in the direction of Paris. The badly damaged Prusso-British armies are in no state to attack. However, they divert a portion of French troops while the Austro-Russians defeat Boney in the final battle of the Napoleonic Wars. Lessened prestige for Wellington - will he ever be PM ITTL? Prussia is also less respected and feared.
 
The Lost Orders aren't lost and McClellan doesn't begin moving against Lee until Lee has entered Pennsylvania. The armies clash at Gettysburg and the battle is a Union tactical victory. McClellan, however, is relieved for his failure to pursue the battered Confederate Army. A series of indecisive Union offensives take place, and a series of mediocre generals are relieved until Lincoln, fed up, appoints Ulysses S. Grant in command in 1864. The Confederate States finally give up in 1865 after a long and bloody Virginia campaign.
 

Thande

Donor
Those are both good examples of the sort of thing I'm thinking of: if we take any POD and consider it baldly, the effects are probably going to be much less dramatic than what results when an author uses it to try and tell a story.
 
Those are both good examples of the sort of thing I'm thinking of: if we take any POD and consider it baldly, the effects are probably going to be much less dramatic than what results when an author uses it to try and tell a story.

So you are saying literature is unrealistic.

Can we talk about unrealistic movieplots too on this thread?;)

I think this is true, the most likely thing is usually what happens and the least interesting to write about. But history is full of lost chances and also narrow victories.

F.x. south manages to get free is unlikely pretty much no matter what, but you just need a slim chance to justify a book. Life is all about slim chances you know:D
 
Well, it seems to me there's more than one Drakaverse POD. I'll assume so: The Netherlands enter the war early. Ferguson's rifles are successful and fairly well used in the Revolutionary War.

The naval balance of power is unlikely to shift dramatically enough to completely change the war. It's actually a reasonable assumption that the British would take the Cape - they made an attempt in OTL, after all. One thing I think you are likely to see is no Yorktown, as such. The circumstances that led to that had a lot to do with lucky timing on the availability of the French fleet. With the Dutch fleet operating two years earlier, the chess game of the naval war will probably not have the pieces set for Yorktown when necessary.

Let's assume Cornwallis is cornered there still. He calls for help, and his troops are successfully evacuated to the Deep South. The latter is more firmly in control both due to Ferguson and the less severe defeat in Virginia. Still, North Carolina is lost, and the Loyalists and Englishmen are on the defensive in South Carolina.

The war ends on time, though hostilities on land continue at higher intensity for longer. The Americans are making some Ferguson rifles. It's up in the air whether the Cape is returned to the Dutch - the British did it once in OTL - but after a humiliating defeat keeping it might save a little face. So they do. There are more Loyalist emigrés from the Deep South in this TL. Most of them end up in the Bahamas or Jamaica as in OTL, with a fair bit going back to England. It matters in the Caribbean, but in America it's a drop in the demographic bucket.

The first English settlers are Loyalists. Somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand of them arrive by 1786, most from the northeast via Nova Scotia or the Deep South via the Caribbean. They outnumber the Dutch settlers by a fair margin, and for the first couple generations there will be a great deal of hostility. [Incidentally, this bumps the population of the Cape ahead a good 30 or 40 years] Relations with the natives are very bad. They are driven ahead of the pale of settlement in a series of very messy wars. Some are enslaved, many more simply left as a permanent underclass. Most slavery is based on the household model of the Dutch, but there is limited plantation slavery once the frontier moves into the Natal. The pattern of Dutch in the countryside, English in the cities never becomes as clear as it was in OTL.

The population of the Cape colony and Natal grows a bit quicker than OTL, mostly because of the established English-speaking population already being on the ground. When slavery is abolished in the mid-1830s (I imagine more vested interests would delay it) there is a lot of hostility to the measure. Plantations on the coast turn to various systems; mostly debt slavery or indentured Indian labor. Many farmers on the interior, who share very much in perspective with our Boers, do just what they did in OTL. They trek.

Since the edge of settlement would be further along, the *Boers settle across the Vaal River rather than anywhere closer. They are mixed English and Dutch speakers, and haven't been driven as radical by British policy and barely-victorious wars. One of the attempts to reabsorb them peacefully will probably succeed. The big diamond deposits are found around 1850, and the gold within a decade of that. A big rush of population comes into the area, including a hefty number of former Confederates, assuming there ever are such creatures.

These South Africans will get their hands on OTL Namibia and *Rhodesia, and will eventually pressure Britain to snatch up Mozambique. I doubt they'll get it, but it's not impossible.

As I see it. *shrug*
 
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oberdada

Gone Fishin'
I'll take Number 2:
There isn't much difference till 1929.
THe NSDAP, SA and SS are still formed, but they lack a leader.
But "Mein Kampf" appeares as manuscript, edited by Rudolf Hess, it is much shorter (easier to read).
Due to party organisors like the Strasers, the NSDAP grows as a party, gaining 8% in the 1930 elctions (18,3% OTL, the KPDa and DNVP get better results in this TL).
After this success, the party brakes appart due to conflicts between the socialists and the conservatives, most conservatives go to the the DNVP, Otto Strasser later leads the party into the 1934 election, gaining only 2%, the NSDAP never becomes an important power.
Brüning becoming Chancellor could be butterflied away, but I don't think so.
Hindenburg wins the second round of the presidential elctions, against Thälmann, and an SPD Candidate (likely Otto Braun or Otto Wels). Alfred Hugenberg did well in the first round, but didn't run in the second. He supported Hindenburg then. (Much like in OTL, only this time, his followers really voted for Hindenburg instead of Hitler).
Any NSDAP candidate is irrelevant, so they also support Hindenburg in the second round.
Hindenburg is very pleased with the results, Brüning stays chancellor and continues to govern (pretty much as in OTL between 1930 and 1932) with presidential decrees till 1934. Shortly before the 1934 elections President von Hindenburg dies...
 
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The biggesr problem with AH.com is that its members forget that actual history is pretty implausible, too. ^ ^
Yes, but for all the greatness of Red Alert (the original game, not Red Alert 2), I do doubt Einstein would have built a teleportation machine, unstable though it may be, in a Hitler-dead-in-'24 TL. And the Tesla Coils or the Iron Curtain aren't that plausible, either.
So that one can certainly make more realistic (though probably less fun).
 

Thande

Donor
I admit, I didn't find this, in broad detail, particularly implausible.

Well, if you ignore all the stuff LordInsane mentioned, no. A military regime in Germany, a pan-European alliance against an expansionist Soviet Union (presumably you'd have to avoid Stalin's purges for the Red Army to be so evidently effective) and an isolationist USA are all far from impossible...but the way they leapt into it halfway through makes it hard to tell how they reached the immediate prewar situation.
 
Interesting idea Thande. Taking on FDR's assassination, I'd say that a likely outco me is that Garner serves as President of the United States, winning an elected term of his own in 1936. While I'm no expert, I can tell you that his programs would have been different than FDR's domestically. Internationally, I'm not sure where Garner stood, but I can say that there were U.S. discussions among some in the 1930's to come to some sort of accomodations with the Japanese. That in itself could have a huge impact on things, but would not lead to the Axis conquest of the planet.
 
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