...And yikes, the LTTW world will eventually build rockets, ICBMs and spaceplanes !
The former two seem rather late in coming, considering that as early as the French Revolutionary era the TL seemed to introduce quite advanced machinery remarkably early--we now, by the end of the North American civil war, have both airships and submarines in operation, as well as mobile rapid-firing heavy guns. All of them are presumably pathetically primitive compared to say a Gato class sub, the Hindenburg, or a WWII tank--but all of them are operating decades before the end of the 19th century!
Now this might all be a sort of optical illusion; Thande could instead be making the case that with an understanding of science and with engineering and material technology not fundamentally more advanced than Victorian, we could have done more OTL than we actually did. It seems clear enough in hindsight, but the hindsight is part of our more advanced states of the arts.
Still, I can believe in an effective dirigible that uses steam engines, for instance. OTL the Besler steam powered airplane of the 1930s worked well enough--within some severe limits. Internal combustion engines are inherently more efficient and also can more easily be developed to very high power, but consider that efficient IC engines use a four-stroke cycle, only one phase of which develops driving power--expanding steam in cylinders cuts the cycles in half, and making the cylinder double-stroke permits another halving of the number of cylinders, offsetting the fact that the cylinders need to be heavier to develop a given power, because they are constantly at high temperature as opposed to being so only momentarily, and in a restricted area at that. Steam cannot be heated to the same temperatures attainable by IC engines of the spark-ignition or even diesel type, so it is thermodynamically less efficient. But overall I believe power densities competitive with early 20th century IC engines can be developed in cylinder expansion steam engines (or for that matter variations on the idea such as trochoidal chamber and rotor engines, such as the Wankel), even taking into account the need for a boiler--steam automobiles developed low-weight flash boilers after all. What the Besler plane omitted was any attempt to recondense steam once used--the steam was once-through and then vented; this meant that not only was the range and endurance limited by faster fuel consumption, it was much more severely limited by boiling off the water.
But if there are no good IC engines to compete, such an engine could power an airplane--for a relatively brief flight to be sure, but still long enough to be useful. It couldn't fly across large oceanic distances, but it could serve as a war scout, as a short-range bomber, as a fighter--all the roles of WWI warplanes and 1920s civil applications.
A dirigible could perhaps afford to carry a decent condenser, in fact the application of steam to aerostation is a whole other subject. The catch is that the modern visionary I am familiar with who (back some time ago when I corresponded with him) was developing steam as a lift gas relies on the modern materials made available since the 1950s that enabled the revolution in hot air ballooning of the past half century or so. Suitable lightweight materials to contain steam might not be available in anyone's 19th century. But I still think a condenser would be feasible. Airships reusing their water supply for steam engines would still be more limited than those equipped with comparable IC engines, but airships are limited in speed by structural strength rather than engine power--putting too much power on an airship will simply break it up. At the limited airspeeds they can operate at (with 40-50 knots being an empirical practical minimum learned from OTL early 20th century experience, to handle likely contrary winds, and 80 knots being the extreme speed ever reached, maybe 90, 60 knots being a good speed to be able to maintain) their power requirements are remarkably modest, allowing for the possibility of long endurance despite inefficient engines, and for engines to be relatively heavy compared with what an airplane would want. Expansion steam engines could be remarkably well suited to the purpose actually, since they have a good range of speeds they can be operated at.
The submarines we've seen have been remarkably primitive, not really a lot better than OTL attempts in the 1860s.
So is the high tech of LTTW an illusion? I think not; it may not be as sweepingly advanced as it looks at first glance, but again and again we get references to various technical milestones being reached earlier. It may be that we have here a TL where a given technology can be farther from perfection than OTL and still adopted, but that still ought to imply a faster pace of progress, since using even half-baked technologies to their limit should accelerate development of solutions to their obvious problems and faults, and progress in one field should feed back into progress in another.
So at a glance the TL seems to be 50 years or so ahead of OTL; cut that in half and it is still a quarter century or so ahead on a solid basis--which makes the quasi-Maxim guns the USPA expeditionaries employ against the ENA, and the ironclad duels, and even dirigibles, seem a bit more plausible.
On that timetable, I'd expect "threshold bombs" to be first exploded by 1920, maybe 1930 at the latest if we allow for a phase in world politics in the 10s and 20s where tensions are very low. And I'd expect solid work in liquid fueled rockets before 1910 and IR missiles by, again, the 1930s.
It has been suggested that the TL may be more retarded in some respects, such as microelectronics. I don't see why though; one field drives advances in others, by providing solutions to other field's problems and by posing demands for other fields to solve.
So actually I'd have expected ICBMs by say the 1940s at the latest, whereas ITTL they are considered rouge technology and presumably anyone developing them will risk severe sanctions up to invasion and devastating strikes from the spaceplane bombers. Which strike me as absurd because the morally mandated extra capability (being able to direct strikes precisely onto wherever troops have moved to in the twenty minutes or so since a robot missile could be launched) would come at a very very steep cost. A manned suborbital spaceplane bomber will need to recover to a safe landing base once it has carried out its strike mission, so one would need a combination of aerodynamic maneuverability that can conserve most of the suborbital energy and/or rocket (or some more exotic means of achieving thrust, I suppose) that can make up the energy and momentum lost in target approach. All this involves very high sophistication of hypersonic design, advanced high-temperature materials, either major sacrifices of launched mass to chemical propellant for rockets or something extremely ambitious like some sort of airbreathing system that can work at near-orbital speeds. I know the USAF and their Soviet counterparts contemplated such things in the late 50s, but they were about as far from being able to actually do them (we can see in retrospect anyway) as the "astropropulsion" big single stage flight to Venus and back contemplated in the spaghetti-space opera "20 Million Miles to Earth."
Well, I suppose it is conceivable that the US might have made something to technically fit the bill come 1970 or so, with a whole lot of expensive effort, but what they'd get would be very expensive compared to a simple one-shot, one-way ICBM. Which is also to say that long before the suborbital bombers would be operational, the ICBMs would be potentially at hand.
In fact the excerpt specifically mentions intermediate range missiles that deliver non-nuclear weapons--presumably HE, possibly poison gas or bioweapons.
Presuming the former, without means of targeting far more precise than even first-generation intercontinental missiles of OTL could achieve, von Braun et al proved conclusively how uneconomical and impractical firing missiles shotgun-fashion was with the V-2. There's not much point in firing what amounts to an artillery shell and missing by even twenty feet--unless the name of the game is to terrorize. So, either these people are very silly to use missiles to deliver conventional warloads, or these missiles are capable of very good precision indeed. The argument against using nuke missiles is not so much then that targets can't be hit with precision, but that the only legitimate targets are mobile, so one has to be able to divert the strike to a changed location at the last minute.
But the blast radii of nuclear weapons are such that a tactical target would have to move very fast to run from where they were at launch to a safe new location! And while ballistic missiles do fundamentally have to go pretty much to the point they were boosted toward, the atmospheric reentry phase seems to offer opportunities to divert them some miles off their original target and toward wherever one's legitimate target may have fled to--assuming there is someone near enough or with a clear enough view (say, from low orbit) to direct fire accordingly. For the suborbital bomber to aim its warload appropriately either its pilot (or some other crew member) has to do the job of locating that target, then the onboard munitions must be directed at them, or else the same third party who might as well serve as a spotter for an incoming unmanned warhead is the one who guides them. If the bomber can carry ordinance that can do the last-second maneuvering needed to clear the bomber's own recovery path and hit a target some distance from that, an incoming missile on a ballistic path can launch the same final-phase boosting submissile--and indeed can assist it by aiming the whole bus at the center of the target cluster, kamikaze-style, instead of having to allow time to veer off.
The suggestion then that the people of the ATL would categorically reject unmanned missiles on purely moral and thus political grounds seems rather silly to me. Even if there was great revulsion at the outcome of some power attempting an anti-city strategy to either terrorize a foe into surrender or simply devastate them until they no longer posed a threat, unmanned missiles are still just as feasible as manned bombers to threaten legitimate targets, whereas there is no guarantee save morals that an enemy who invests only in manned strike bombers will in fact reserve their fire for these legitimate targets; they might just as well use their bombs to destroy cities instead.
There is an unspoken difference of course--the bomber system is so insanely expensive compared to straightforward development of unmanned one-shot missiles that if everyone did comply on the ban on missiles, then hardly anyone could afford a large nuclear arsenal. (I'd use the ATL term, but the post is too far down for me to reread it and remind myself of what it is). This is presumably why the great powers have literal handfuls of the bombers, which I suppose might each carry perhaps ten or 20 bombs (which must really be short-range missiles, to reach targets sufficiently far from the bomber's flight path for it to survive its mission) so even the Great Powers have only a hundred or so bombs each--if that is we assume this is the only mode of delivery.
But what is to stop someone from breaking the consensus and simply develop a missile arsenal anyway? A great power could afford ten or twenty times as many weapons; if they only got a tenth of the way along the secret buildup program when someone discloses it, they could still defy foreign displeasure with an arsenal as effective and large as anyone else's, which would also be far cheaper. Or, a smaller power--California say, or the possible Adamantine republic we were once long ago told might arise in La Perouse--could quietly do it, stretching their budgets to the limit to be sure but posing a strategic threat to match the greatest powers.
If we suppose that little substantial conflict exists between the Diversitarian powers, so that they can readily come to consensus among themselves and have sufficient mutual intercourse that verification is not considered a problem (and they pose a united front against any maverick small power that dare enter the "threshold weapon club" without the right equipment) there is still the matter of the allegedly great gulf fixed between them and the Societists. It has always been made to seem, in all this TL's references to the situation as of the early 21st century, that this is a divide at least comparable to the OTL Western/Communist split, with both sides deeply suspicious and fearful of the other. The Diversitarian Great Powers (whom I gather could be listed, more or less in order, as Russia, the ENA, Feng China, Germany, France and England) might be able to keep California or Bengal in line, but what can they do to discipline the Societist behemoth, which they would destroy utterly if only they could? Even if the wicked, evil Sanchezites send embassies that very plausibly protest that they too think threshold weapons can only be morally launched against legitimate military targets a sufficient distance from major population or agricultural centers, and therefore will only deploy a handful of suborbital bombers of their own (for did not Sanchez denounce war as such, and in toto?) can the Diversitarian powers believe them? Do they not control vast swathes of territory holding billions of people who have no regular contact with the Diversitarian El Norte, in which they can carry out all manner of projects unobserved? If the Diversitarian powers can launch satellites (presumably manned, in the spirt of their retro-50s in OTL terms weapons program) to spy on them, I would think the Societists have ample space lift capacity of their own to match, and it would still be possible to disguise an ICBM program until it is well established.
All of this makes me pretty cynical about the alleged differences between the blocs. Just about everything we've ever heard about the Societists comes from their sworn enemies. It would seem pretty clear by this point that the basis of the Societist empire is the USPA, a nation that clearly up to this point has occupied the place of the USA in our own timeline--it gave refuge to Priestly, and other refugees from European extremism. It was founded by a mass rising of popular classes against the pretensions of a European colonial elite; its power spread via empowerment of indigenous underclasses; it has functioning mass democracy. I am pretty upset at their cynical decision to uphold a slaveholding power in North America, which parallels a similar relationship to Guyana. But it seems highly unlikely to me they would replicate Burdenist anti-African racism (though that is in the cards I fear). At their very worst, the USPA seems likely to evolve into something very much like the OTL "American Century" USA-supremacists, perhaps embodying a casual racism, more likely hewing to a line of "aristocracy of merit" and claims to general meritocracy that masks the aristocracy of inherited private wealth. This is a sad come-down from the republican idealism of the union as it was in the mid-19th century to be sure, but hardly anyone else in this TL offers a more inspiring and comprehensive humanism. Everywhere, the power of elites seems entrenched, except perhaps in the Adamantine republics (of which we see just one so far, California--which seems to be shaping up into a gratifyingly nice place to live).
I have to wonder then if the status of the Societist realm, as perceived by the manipulated subjects of the Diversitarian sphere, isn't just the ultimate elaboration of the rather silly system of "Heritage points of controversy" and "everyone has their own truth" ideology of the northern powers--perhaps the Societist south is far less aggressive and dangerous than they are represented to be, and with Orwellian cynicism the two blocs agree to make enemies of each other for the sake of keeping the masses in line with stirring propaganda. And in the spirit of
1984, the two blocs pretend to war on each other, but their elites agree to keep it on a manageable and mostly harmless level.
Hence the agreement to rely on impractically expensive war machines to maintain a token hostility, while in fact the ruling elites of both sides have enough intelligence and shared interest to know the other side won't break the agreement.
