Separated at Birth: America and Drakia
- Thread starter Ephraim Ben Raphael
- Start date
Maybe similar to Transformers? Considering they had a (phyrric) victory in the Pacific War, I'm guessing the IJN and IJA weren't such a combo platter of senseless cruelty and poor decision making as OTL. But when has that ever gotten in the way of a good
They may have a higher percentage of servicemen which would have made them eligible for the Japanese franchise. And more importantly,
T H E E M P E R O R S H A L L R U L E T H E W A V E S
Anyways, I think this is going to be a nice fit in this timeline:
One does not simply walk into China (without expecting a quagmire).
One does not simply walk into China (without expecting a quagmire).
You know I think a "Free China ISOTed to the OTL 60s" spin off timeline would be quite interesting. I wonder what effect that would have on the New Left and what would be the fate of the rump PRC.
I wonder how Apartheid South Africa would react to Drakia once information about the other world begins leaking from China.
I wonder how Apartheid South Africa would react to Drakia once information about the other world begins leaking from China.
Space guns are not practical. Even leaving aside the issue of shock for anything less than a several thousand kilometer-long gun, you have serious issues with atmospheric heating if you try to get to orbital velocity from the muzzle (plus a wonky, lopsided orbit). The best way to solve this is to lower the muzzle velocity to something significantly less than orbital velocity and provide the payload with some kind of booster that it can activate to reach orbital velocity at a higher altitude...or in other words a rocket. And once you have to build an upper stage, there is the self-evident improvement of simply building a bigger rocket that can lift the payload to the same altitude and the same speed that the gun would, but without needing the gun. Thus leading right back to all-rocket launch.
There's really no way of getting around needing rockets to get into space. Every possible alternative either requires much more advanced technology than rockets, is demonstrably worse than rockets in important ways, or still requires chemical rockets anyway.
True.
Not true:
For comparison, a Scout A, which launchs 122 kg into LEO, weighs 17,850 kilograms, more than 64% of which is the first stage at 11,600kg. The third stage, fourth stage and payload would not only comfortably fit within 1797 kilograms, they would even fit down the bore.[URL='https://web.archive.org/web/20101119144359/http://astronautix.com/lvs/babongun.htm']astronautix: Babylon Gun[/URL] said:
So there's clearly convincing advantages to an initial gun stage. Not the least of which is that you don't need to throw away an elephantine first stage every launch: You build the gun once, it stays fixed to the ground, and you can use it for multiple launches.
EDIT: More to the point, it's what they have to work with. The whole field of rocketry is as theoretical and underdeveloped for them as their superguns are for us. If it can be made to work, they'll make it work.
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And an elephantine gun is better? Note that your quote states that the Project Babylon gun would have massed over 2 500 tonnes--that is, 2.5 million kilograms, or more than two hundred times greater than the Scout first stage! Moreover, anything it fires has to be shock hardened, it can only put 200 kg (a very small payload) into orbit, and it can only launch onto one azimuth. This makes it all much less practical than the Scout unless you want to send a lot of something that can be easily subdivided into one specific orbit. If you only want to launch a few payloads (and Scout was used for less than 100 over a forty-year lifespan), or you want to launch a wider variety of payloads into more orbits, then the rocket is better.
Ultimately, there's a reason why despite numerous proposals over the years for all kinds of systems that replace or supplement the first stage, the only ones that have panned out have been air-launched rockets, and then only in rather limited applications. If you're concerned about "throwing away" first stages, it makes more sense to reuse the first stages, as SpaceX does (and has been proposed even more often than firing payloads out of a gun or up the side of a mountain on a maglev or etc.) than to build a huge gun.
Yes? Because you don't have to haul the damn thing into the air?
The weight of the Scout A first stage is relevant because it has to haul all that weight up during the most grueling part of the ascent. The gun stays right where it is, and can be as heavy as it pleases. Heck, you can shore it up with compacted earth if you don't care about traversing it, and for early launches you probably don't.
So?
Equivalent to the Scout A in both 'era' and performance, then, in this timeline.
This is true...for the Babylon gun, an ancestor of which ITTL already has:
Is it so hard to imagine that a 'modern' space gun, a product of multigeneration evolution over this first step, would be capable of traversing?
It is, if you have that to work with.
Remember: rocket artillery never took off in this timeline, it was sidelined in favor of superheavy guns. There are no 'V2s' here demonstrating that a rocket can haul a sizable payload cross-continent, whereas their superguns can and do.
We use rockets because that's the solution we hit on first for slinging big payloads very far, so that's what we poured the money into.
They don't have artillery rockets. They do have superguns. That's where the money is going to go, even if the rockets are the more 'correct' choice, because that's what they have that works.
The weight of the first stage is not even slightly a problem (and is mostly driven by the weight of the higher stages anyway). It's easy to build rocket engines with very high thrust to weight ratios. The hard part is actually the upper stages, which have to provide most of the delta-V.
So, now you have to use expensive shock-hardened electronics for everything, and you can't launch a lot of payloads that people have, in fact, proven to be very interested in launching, such as people.
And the Scout A was a relatively little used vehicle that saw comparatively limited further evolution. The same has generally been true of similar later vehicles like the Pegasus--in fact, the most significant evolution of the Pegasus (an air-launched vehicle) was...putting it on top of a larger solid rocket instead of attaching it to an airplane, which more than tripled its payload capacity.
Compare to the Atlas, for instance. One variant of that rocket--the Atlas-Agena--was launched 109 times between 1960 and 1978, during which the Scout A was launched a whole...dozen times. And that's just one variant and not even looking at the whole Atlas launch history. Clearly, launching tiny payloads was only marginally interesting, as it has pretty much always been.
Yes, it is, because it's going to be a very large gun that will require substantial bracing and reinforcement.
The V-2 is irrelevant. The reason everyone abandoned superheavy guns IOTL had nothing to do with that, but rather with the fact that large guns become excessively heavy (therefore immobile) relative to their payload as you increase their range, in addition to having serious shock problems (particularly an issue for nuclear weapons, of course), barrel wear issues, and poor accuracy. Once you get beyond a few dozen kilometers, missiles are just plain better than guns. You can see this by the fact that the only "serious" attempt to duplicate Paris Gun capabilities after World War I was by Nazi Germany, which was trying everything to see if it stuck, and the fact that none of the allies seriously tried building superheavy guns during World War II (ergo, before the V-2).
Moreover, if you go back and read the historical record, you'll find that most people, especially in the United States, actually still thought that long-range ballistic missiles were impractical after World War II (and hence the demonstration of the V-2). But they didn't focus on giant guns; they worked on cruise missiles instead, which they thought would be easier to develop than ballistic missiles. It wasn't until all of those cruise missile projects failed completely that they eventually admitted that ballistic missiles were, in fact, the correct answer to the problem of hitting targets hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.
No. We use rockets because they are better. This has been studied time and time again. Guns are terrible for launching payloads into space. The only times when they become attractive is if you have a very large amount of stuff to launch and you're either willing to build a huge (~hundreds of kilometers long) linear accelerator so that you can launch fragile stuff like people or precision optics without breaking it or it's mostly inert stuff that doesn't care about enduring high gee forces like propellant. But those conditions simply don't apply to a fledgling space program, by definition; it doesn't want to launch a lot of stuff, and much of the stuff it does want to launch is fragile.
This is like saying "they don't have rockets, but they do have cruise missiles. That's where the money is going to go, even if the rockets are the more 'correct' choice." Well, as I pointed out above that's where the money did go for a long time, but they ended up refocusing on rockets anyway because they were so much better and easier to develop into true intercontinental weapons. This kind of argument only works where the alternatives are more or less equal in technical difficulty and performance; if you were saying that they probably wouldn't develop binary computers because they were quite happy with their trinary machines, I could accept that. But guns are much, much worse than rockets in this application. Even if they bang along with them for a while, they're almost certainly going to abandon them eventually.
Besides, as I already pointed out you need rockets to make a space gun work in the first place. If you don't have a fairly sophisticated understanding of rockets, it is simply not possible to launch payloads into orbit with a gun, because the only trajectories you can achieve with a gun alone are highly elliptical trajectories that will quickly burn up in the atmosphere. And if you have the technology to build an upper stage that can reliably work after being fired out of a gun and put something into orbit, then it is absolutely not a serious problem for you to use that knowledge to build a first stage. It make take some R&D, but it is almost assuredly going to be much less expensive than building a giant gun for just a few payloads, and anyone who is willing to fund a space program will notice that it has interesting "alternative applications" in military service.
Something I've just thought of is about how big the Russian dyaspore must be ITTL, OTL the white emigrè managed to become the majority in places such as Harbing, and in this timeline since Russia suffered much worse, and had a bigger population base we can assume that the emigrants would be bigger in number, and probably quite influential in whatever place they end up settling in.
So anyone wonders just different American English would be from OTL and what Drakian English would sound like?
Well we've talked a bit about Drakian English, and the settled answer is "incredibly British, with some Southern and French legacy in vocabulary" (and probably regional accent
) as for American English I would assume it's pretty close to normal American English, with Spanish as well as French and indigenous influences on vocabulary."Okay, OK" became a word well after the pod. Id guess that today it would be the most commonly understood term on the planet!?
