Miscellaneous >1900 (Alternate) History Thread

Picture this...

Rocky VI with Mitt Romney returning as Rocky Smith

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McPherson

Banned
Probably get postponed into the Spring due to the general chaos of the situation, although casualties would be relatively few; the Soviets were extremely lacking in nuclear weapons in this era.

Article.

The discrepancy is probably because of the larger yields of U.S. nuclear weapons in the 1960s versus Soviet nukes in the 1980s, but also because at the time of the SAC report, Soviet nuclear forces were primarily bomber-based. The Soviet Union had between 300 and 320 nuclear weapons in 1962, all but forty of which were bomber-based. Bomber bases may have been closer to major population areas. A major draw of U.S. nuclear weapons to Soviet cities would have also been the presence of local airports, which would have functioned as dispersal airfields for nuclear-armed bombers. On the other hand, the Soviet attack would largely hit ICBM fields and bomber bases in low-population-density regions of the Midwest, plus a handful of submarine bases on both coasts.

That specific report was full of crap. The 1962 Russians had about 30 ICBMs that were city killers guaranteed to hit. Even in the 1960s a dozen of their ICBMs hitting the Boswash corridor was a guaranteed 30 million dead.

Not to mention the tactical air stuff IN CUBA or at sea with their submarine forces.
 
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If the Cuban Missile Crisis goes hot, what happens to the 1962 midterm elections?

They are very likely postponed and possibly for quite a while depending on how bad you want to make the War regarding how many Soviet bombers and ICBM's get through/work as intended.

@Amerigo Vespucci's excellent Cuban Missile War timeline has the midterms cancelled until the general.

In @Vaporized Cuban Missile War timeline, the midterms are also suspended, though take place in December.
 
Article.



That specific report was full of crap. The 1962 Russians had about 30 ICBMs that were city killers guaranteed to hit. Even in the 1960s a dozen of their ICBMs hitting the Boswash corridor was a guaranteed 30 million dead.
Not to mention the tactical air stuff IN CUBA or at sea with their submarine forces.

They had only 20 ICBMs available against hundreds of nuclear tipped NIKE ABMs, with said ICBMs having a failure rate of up to a third and a CEP measured in miles. Even assuming the Soviets geared them towards Counter-Value instead of Counter-Force to get their small bomber force a chance, you're only looking at a handful of cities, perhaps even just three or less, getting lost. I'd cap casualties at least than 10 Million for sure and certainly not 30; that's equal to the entire population of New York and Pennsylvania in 1960.
 

McPherson

Banned
That is not what the report actually says. That is the best information the Russians and Americans had. That is the basis of their planning and actions. NIKE, whatever iteration, was 100% ineffective against ICBMS BTW, so that assertion is just outright ridiculous, unless you can show me an Atlas intercept circa 1962? If that is the basis of the rest of your assumptions, then you definitely need to read the citation I supplied more than once to get a better more accurate estimate of the situation as they knew it than the one you seem to have?
 
What would be a good POD to keep Sea Launch / Land Launch doing well up to 2020 instead of fizzling out around 2010?

2014 actually :) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch)

Not re-building an oil platform into a launch platform? A generally workable idea to be sure but it was expensive to operate and maintain from the start. The main issue was that you can't/couldn't actually 'sea' launch a Zenit and the redesign/rebuild would have been expensive since it would not be a 'normal' Zenit but general procedures would have been less expensive. On the other hand you'd probably see more lawsuits as I can pretty much guarantee they will leak more kerosene than OTL"s Zenits which were bad enough.

Invest the ‘savings’ into another “SeaLaunch Commander” type ship so you can increase the launch cadence and maybe get more business but in general the operations costs were too much for the business plan.

Randy
 
In a lot of TLs you see references to "shipyard capacity" or "slipway capacity" or the repair of damaged ships preventing new construction.

Would anybody be able to recommend online resources for looking into various nations' dockyard/slipway capacity for capital ships (battleship and fleet carrier size) from 1900 to 1945? Google searches seem to only reveal tangential information and Wiki pages for something like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMNB_Portsmouth#Twentieth_century) show the ships constructed but not if they were built in sequence, if they were towed elsewhere to be fitted, or how many ships they could build/repair at the same time.
 

McPherson

Banned
In a lot of TLs you see references to "shipyard capacity" or "slipway capacity" or the repair of damaged ships preventing new construction.

Would anybody be able to recommend online resources for looking into various nations' dockyard/slipway capacity for capital ships (battleship and fleet carrier size) from 1900 to 1945? Google searches seem to only reveal tangential information and Wiki pages for something like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMNB_Portsmouth#Twentieth_century) show the ships constructed but not if they were built in sequence, if they were towed elsewhere to be fitted, or how many ships they could build/repair at the same time.

Axis History Forums. Start there.
 

marathag

Banned
If the Cuban Missile Crisis goes hot, what happens to the 1962 midterm elections?
Two possibilities:
1. They get postponed?
2. A lot fewer voters?
Depends how the CMC goes hot, and on what day in October
Soviet had roughly 300 warheads that theoretically get to CONUS.
Thing was, all but 40 or so were in the form of gravity bombs, that had to get past
hundreds of ADC and RCAF interceptors over Alaska and Canada, with US types having unguided Genie and guided Falcon AMM with 2kt warheads, plus the conventional Bomarc and Nike Hercules SAMs- with larger nuclear warheads, and ANG and more ADC interceptors in the lower 48
the chances of the Bears and Bisons getting thru are very slim.

That why the missiles in Cuba, the few ICBMs the Soviets had were above ground liquid fueled ICBMs, hours to fuel and could not stay fueled for long.
very vulnerable to SAC Missiles and Bombs. The USSR air defense network was very porous, no BMEWS or integrated SAGE network, and the Radars were pathetic(in both coverage and ability) vs what the US was running in Canada
 
Okay, not realistic, but...
If the world united into a single nation right now, what would its currency be called?
If Texas became independent right now, what would its currency be called (assuming it's not the "Texan Dollar" or something dumb like that)? Or would it continue to use the dollar?
If Canada, the US, and Mexico united right now, what would its currency be called? (I'm really hoping it's not the "Amero" or something dumb like that.)
If Asia (not counting Russia, yes counting Turkey, not counting Egypt, yes counting Indonesia, not counting Australia) unified right now, what would its currency be called?
What if Trump decided to introduce a new $200 bill into circulation with his face on it?
 
Alternate names for internet and WWW

If for some reason the development of the Internet were to be delayed by about 15 years, the terminology we use to describe it would be different. I'm looking for equivalents to the following:

Internet
World Wide Web - I've come up with Worldnet
email - I've got e-mess
hot link/hyperlink - I thought jumpmark
web site
web page
download/upload
browser
search engine - spider?
mobile phone - pocket phone or pocket (I believe in Germany its 'handy')

any others?
 
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Alternate names for internet and WWW
If for some reason the development of the Internet were to be delayed by about 15 years, the terminology we use to describe it would be different. I'm looking for equivalents to the following:
Here's some ideas:
Internet - since this comes from something like 'interconnected network' then you'd probably end up with something similar, but maybe 'connected network' could lead to 'Conet' or 'Connet'? (the latter could lead to interesting newspaper headlines about conmen using it!) Alternatively you could have something which implies both 'external' (as opposed to an internal network) and 'large': Exanet?[1] Or just use your 'Worldnet' idea below
World Wide Web - I've come up with Worldnet - that seems good, as a further development of the 'World (connected) Network' - though you could maybe use something like 'multiple meshed machines' to give you 'mmm'[2] in place of 'www'
email - I've got e-mess - maybe 'c-mail' for 'computer mail'
hot link/hyperlink - I thought jumpmark - iirc hyperlink comes from the 'hyper text transfer protocol' (http) so if you change that to, for example, 'super fast transfer connection' (sftc) you could have 'superlink'
web site - this is very dependent on what you call the internet/www - using my idea above you could have a 'mesh site'
web page - ditto - 'mesh page'
download/upload - downfill and upfill maybe?
browser - scanner? initially this would be 'net scanner' or 'mesh scanner' then shortened, just as 'web browser' became just 'browser'
search engine - spider? - that seems good - 'crawler' might work too - or maybe even use 'browser' for this, in a kind of nod to OTL?
mobile phone - pocket phone or pocket (I believe in Germany its 'handy') - Handy-phone or pocket-phone certainly works (though 'pocket phone' might fall out of fashion during the very-large-phone period). OTL 'portable phone' was used for wireless home phones which left 'mobile phone' for the ones which could be used outside - maybe you could switch these so the modern phone is a 'portable'.

[1] I've got Exanet in a footnote to my still-in-progress-though-never-quite-reaching-the-ready-stage TL on my computer
[2] ditto for 'mmm' though I'm still not too happy with it - I'd like to find a better same-3-letters combo.
 
Has there ever been a type of thread like a DBWI but instead of establishing the timeline, you just roleplay as people existing inside an already established timeline, talk about 'current' politics or other things.

It could be fun cause everyone would have more backstory to the scenario and I think could lead to interesting discussion. Just wondering if anything like that's been tried before.
 
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