Clicking on your link gets me an error. 2:58pm, EDT.In thinking about my remark about stupidity here, I realized something. Most TLs are about fixing the mistakes made historically. Has anyone ever seen, or done, a TL where a mistake is corrected, but one that wasn't made OTL is? (That is, ATL they get it wrong when OTL they didn't.)
Go figger... Try this one.Clicking on your link gets me an error. 2:58pm, EDT.
Go figger... Try this one.
In thinking about my remark about stupidity here, I realized something. Most TLs are about fixing the mistakes made historically. Has anyone ever seen, or done, a TL where a mistake is corrected, but one that wasn't made OTL is? (That is, ATL they get it wrong when OTL they didn't.)
More a matter of "balancing the karma": getting something right instead of wrong, there's always the chance of bungling something else.I.e. one step forward, one step back?
I was thinking more of something like Rochefort guessing AF right; ATL, he doesn't, but that TL, the break in the maru code isn't blown before the war starts. (Okay, that screws Japan more than the reverse...It would be interesting to look for possible blunder-as-PoD WIs. There is a problem, in that since the action was not performed, one can't say for sure that it was an error.
Unless it was a really obvious error, in which case one must explain how the actors did it anyway. Maybe if there is evidence that they or he seriously considered it.
Those are good, but I'm thinking of an ATL where they'd both be true: Germans get the math right, Allies don't; Germans realize Enigma can be/is compromised, Bletchley is manned by idiots. (Yeah, that's hard.The German scientist that got the math wrong, and saved the world from a Nazi atomic bomb is a good example of OTL being spared from something far worse. As for the opposite, how about the Germans realise that their unbreakable Enigma codes have been broken, or that the allies just don't get their code breaking efforts to work?
...Those are good, but I'm thinking of an ATL where they'd both be true: Germans get the math right, Allies don't; Germans realize Enigma can be/is compromised, Bletchley is manned by idiots. (Yeah, that's hard.) Or at the very least, in the Enigma case, the realization/failure is smaller: BP doesn't get the cribs or bombes right, or doesn't build Colossus, & the Germans go with 4- or 5-rotor but not a whole new system.
That hurts, but IMO it won't completely cripple the effort.This is not hard: Simply have Alan Turing outed as gay before the war.
That would hurt...Also, if polish enigma machine is never captured or delivered to UK during September `39.
IMO, you'd need to balance his good call with a bad one by the Brits or somebody... Like Spruance continuing to chase Nagumo, despite the contact report from Murphy. (Or maybe Murphy never sends it? Or English doesn't forward in a timely fashion?)And this one is evil: Heydrich doesn`t go jumping out of the car and running after the british agents and survives assasination attempt in 1942.
I agree. It's easy to fix a mistake that's clear in hindsight. It's far less easy to imagine how that change might produce an outcome where a decision (correctly or well-made OTL) doesn't get made the same way, given the same facts. Except to say, TTL, the facts wouldn't all be the same. Because it's hard to imagine someone being stupid about something they weren't to begin with, this kind of thing is unlikely to be common... Maybe more TLs should try it.I look at it like baseball trades - when I do a baseball TL I'm careful to make sure it's more realistic. You could have, say, the Reds not make a mistake and choose to sign Babe Ruth, but is it realistic for them to then mess up on another trade that they didn't OTL? In some way, it's easy to say, "Oh, but humans are naturally fallible," on the other hand if a mistake wasn't made OTL, well, it can seem a bit convenient unless it's a mistake that is *almost* made anyway, which may cut down on some of those, but they are still certainly good PODs whcih have been used before. The typical "King X falls off his horse/dies in a jousting tournament at the wrong time" POD is very common, as long as the king loved riding/jousting it certainly fits. I'm just trying to think of one which has something like that *and* a mistake that is corrected.