I doubt Drakia will win the space race, as has been mentioned before they aren't leading innovators in many fields beyond those used to cause direct harm,
Separated at Birth: America and Drakia
- Thread starter Ephraim Ben Raphael
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So what do you guys think the Hetalia or Satw versions of in universe nations would be like?
Let's face considering what most nations are like nobody would respect in international space treaty. What's the point of going into space if we can't claim territory.
I'm more surprised anyone even tried ITTL.
The philosophical gulf between Drakia and what would become the Free World is wider and more deep seated than OTL's Cold War. The scramble for advantage is going to be intense.
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Oo, good question. The Chinese military pretty much defected whole cloth to the revolution after being ordered to fire on civilians, and managed to largely retain its old rank structure and organization. The People's Guard (formerly the Chinese Republican Army) is focused on national defense from possible invasion (whether by Japan, East Asia, Russia and Drakia, or others) and has a doctrine not dissimilar to the People's War of OTL. They're very decentralized- lots and lots of small, hidden supply depots and bases that are hard to spot from the air and are integrated into both cities and the countryside, with heavy industry distributed across China to make it hard to target. The PG does have a core of professional personnel armed with high-tech weapons, and it does have some offensive capability (including plans to get the Chinese islands back from Japan, and to invade the Confederation of East Asia) but these aren't its primary focus.
The People's Militia is a reserve force/national guard more directly descended from the Situationist revolutionary fighters with a lot of part-time soldiers and a much weirder rank structure.
Well I was thinking early Joker who was a lot less vicious and much weirder than the modern version.
I know, I know! I'll try and get you guys some demographic data with the chapter after this one.
Thank you! I'm very pleased to hear that you find my writing spectacular.
They did wander a bit further, but ultimately Drakia and Britain expanded faster. The Boers aren't totally assimilated, but you're on the money with "somewhat unusual subculture". There is a notable Boer diaspora though, composed of Boers who really refused to get with Drakia's program, and you can find Afrikaans-speaking communities in La Plata, Brazil, Australia, and the United States.
Not sure what you mean here?
The new year 5781 of the Jewish calendar starts tonight at sundown.
There are quite a few Honorary White Muslims, Sikh, and even a few Hindus who are technically citizens, but among the White Citizens you have to belong to one of the three approved Christian denominations.
Oo, good question. The Chinese military pretty much defected whole cloth to the revolution after being ordered to fire on civilians, and managed to largely retain its old rank structure and organization. The People's Guard (formerly the Chinese Republican Army) is focused on national defense from possible invasion (whether by Japan, East Asia, Russia and Drakia, or others) and has a doctrine not dissimilar to the People's War of OTL. They're very decentralized- lots and lots of small, hidden supply depots and bases that are hard to spot from the air and are integrated into both cities and the countryside, with heavy industry distributed across China to make it hard to target. The PG does have a core of professional personnel armed with high-tech weapons, and it does have some offensive capability (including plans to get the Chinese islands back from Japan, and to invade the Confederation of East Asia) but these aren't its primary focus.
The People's Militia is a reserve force/national guard more directly descended from the Situationist revolutionary fighters with a lot of part-time soldiers and a much weirder rank structure.
Well I was thinking early Joker who was a lot less vicious and much weirder than the modern version.
View attachment 584266
I know, I know! I'll try and get you guys some demographic data with the chapter after this one.
Thank you! I'm very pleased to hear that you find my writing spectacular.
They did wander a bit further, but ultimately Drakia and Britain expanded faster. The Boers aren't totally assimilated, but you're on the money with "somewhat unusual subculture". There is a notable Boer diaspora though, composed of Boers who really refused to get with Drakia's program, and you can find Afrikaans-speaking communities in La Plata, Brazil, Australia, and the United States.
Not sure what you mean here?
The new year 5781 of the Jewish calendar starts tonight at sundown.
There are quite a few Honorary White Muslims, Sikh, and even a few Hindus who are technically citizens, but among the White Citizens you have to belong to one of the three approved Christian denominations.
What happened to the Jews, again? The Drakian Jews I mean.
They went from a princely state (in Judea) and a suppressed or bonded minority (everywhere else in the empire) to, I assume, a suppressed and or bonded population in their entirety. I wouldn't be surprised if Judea is a military territory being flooded with White Citizens atm.
Pretty much, it was stated that Jerusalem Province is Citizen-plurality and the Jews and Arabs have been deported (although other indigenous ethnic groups like the Levantine Armenians, Arab Christians, and Druze are still there).
Don't forget any "definitely not Arab we swear" Egyptians (and the Yezidis!) Also the Kurds have a princely state separate from the Yezidi one. Are the Copts Honorary Whites or am I misremembering?
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Oh, by the way!
I don't know if ToughSF was mentioned here or not, but there's a nice blog post about momentum exchange tethers here that might be interesting. It's a poetically low-tech way to make interplanetary travel accessible without wonder materials or torch drives.
I believe so, and that's not even getting into the other changes wrought by Drakian conquest, such as the fact that they've imported so many Bonded laborers from Africa that they constitute a plurality of the population in Syria Province! Nationalist movements in TTL's Middle East are gonna look very different when all this is over.
Chapter 36
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Chapter 36
The Polemarch was, by Drakian standards, a moderate Societist.
During the Great Wars he had seen and done horrible things that had left him disgusted… and more committed than ever to ensuring that these things had happened for a reason. He agreed that cruelty was necessary to “correct” misbehavior by Inferiors or to advance the cause of the Final Society (because if it wasn’t necessary then that meant that he was an evil man, and Kobold could never accept that he or his cause was evil), but he was opposed to being cruel when it was unnecessary. As a general the man genuinely cared for the well-being of his soldiers, and they adored him in response. He loved his country, prayed to his god, was faithful to his wife (never remarrying after her death), doted on his children, gave to charity frequently, earnestly desired peace, deplored the horrors of war, criticized his fellow Citizens for mistreating the Bonded, acted kindly towards his personal Bondsmen, and fought loyally to advance the interests of a regime engaged in constant and massive crimes against humanity.
Kobold had been born under General Saxon's junta, and belonged to the last generation of Drakians in power who had not been raised in the Agoge. As such he was a loyalist but not a fanatic, he understood how badly the Empire had suffered in the Great Wars and that it needed a period of peace to recover, retrench, and prepare before it could afford to resume its wars of conquest.
For the handicapped Drakian veterans, the Kobold regime meant being “employed” by the state to father children with unwilling but genetically superior “antisocial” women from Spain, Sicily, Corsica, “Trans-Danubia”, and even Portugal. For the Bonded it meant reforms to industrial safety and better living conditions so that the BLS no longer devoured their lives at the rate it had in the past, even if practices such as addicting them to drugs, splitting up their families, and leaving them vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse remained unchanged. Discontent had been mounting among the Honorary Whites citizens over their “mostly equal except for not having any political power”-status and the Polemarch met with their representatives, appointed token Honorary White Citizens to higher positions, and smoothed things over even if he didn’t fix the underlying reason for their complaints. Rebellions that had erupted among the Bonded were crushed ruthlessly, guerillas in Arabia and Turkey could surrender or die. He regarded diplomacy as a valuable tool to further the creation of the Final Society, forming the Pact of Blood with the other Societist countries and reaching out to non-Societists with whom Drakia shared common enemies. With America focusing on internal matters since its defeat in the Great Pacific War, the Grand Alliance largely defunct, Tokyo and New Delhi at each other’s throats, and the Pan-European Pact exhausted and demographically devastated, Aurica had an unprecedented opportunity to seek global hegemony.
Ulysses Kobold did not intend to start the Secret War by annexing Antarctica.
Apollo Station at Hope Bay, the capital of Drakian Antarctica on the Antarctic Peninsula across the Drake Passage from La Plata.
While Britain, France, and La Plata all had territorial claims on the seventh continent, the Platineans had abandoned both of their research stations there during the Great Wars and the British whaling station on a coastal island had stood empty since the 1900s. The Polemarch hoped to satisfy the Societist hardliners in Aurica who disapproved of his moderate policies by presenting them with a massive new territorial addition to the Empire- an entire continent- while also using the annexation as an opportunity to demonstrate Drakia’s soft power and newly-found diplomatic might, and place his personal legacy on firm footing. Annexing Antarctica, he believed, could accomplish these goals without risking a shooting war that the Country of the Dragon could ill-afford.
And so it was that the Empire of Drakia established two permanent settlements/military bases in Antarctica (at Hope Bay and New Harbour), and with a stroke of his pen the Polemarch added a second continent to the Drakian patrimony on Easter Day, 1956.
In a sense Antarctic annexation accomplished Kobold’s goal of flexing his diplomatic power- the rest of the Pact of Blood recognized Drakia’s ownership (Britain dropped its territorial claims after the Situationist uprising when it finally joined the Pact in the 60’s), as did an assortment of neutrals. France and La Plata maintained their claims, but neither was prepared to risk war over the frozen south. However rather than intimidate Drakia’s enemies into paralysis and sycophantry, it instead provided the impetus to snap (some of) them out of their post-Great Wars funk. The fact that the Country of the Dragon had been able to so easily take control of a continent- even a continent as apparently worthless as Antarctica- was terrifying, and it demonstrated the need for a common front to oppose Societism. Platinean diplomats began meeting with Pan-European representatives in Paris, and with Japan in civil war the Jakarta Pact started to reorient itself to oppose the malign influence of Aurica. The First Paris Protocol (1957) did not establish the Alliance for Democracy, but it laid much of the groundwork for it by establishing a framework for anti-Societist co-operation in the areas of defense and counter-intelligence between the Pan-Europeans, France, La Plata, Brazil, and Ireland. President Ewan McKnight of America was still pushing back against isolationist elements at home and India was thinking regionally, but even if the global democratic bloc was not yet formalized it was unquestionably active.
Guns flowed to guerillas in Turkey, Arabia, and Societist Europe. A Scandinavian scientist who accepted a position to work with the Bureau for Technical Progress was assassinated. A supply ship headed for Artemis Station (Drakia’s base at New Harbor) was torpedoed by an unknown submarine. Societist parties and organizations outside of the Pact of Blood fell under suspicion and were forcefully disbanded. Radio and television stations broadcast anti-Societist programs to anyone who might be listening within the Empire and its clients. Antarctica emerged as the first major front of the Secret War, with La Plata and France sending teams to slip past the Imperial Navy and establish bases from which special forces could strike against the Drakian presence on the seventh continent. The Polemarch responded by sending out special forces of his own to seek and destroy the democratic bases, and by establishing new outposts of his own to more effectively control and defend Antarctica. The Franco-Platinean policy of “No Peace South of Sixty” fueled the emergence of the vicious, undeclared “Ice War” in which far more casualties were to the elements than to the enemy as small groups of elite soldiers launched no-quarter raids and counter-raids. The Drake Passage joined the Irish Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Strait of Messina as one of the world’s most militarized waterways.
Platinean special forces in West Antarctica pose for the camera. While the Ice War was relatively small scale- the largest battles involved less than two hundred soldiers- it was vicious, brutal, and miserable for all involved.
While the United States was still relatively focused on domestic issues, that didn’t stop it from taking a leadership role in the Secret War anyways. President McKnight (W) pursued a policy of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”- providing anti-Societists with weapons, funding, and legal cover to operate from or through American territory. As in OTL the USA hosted large communities of people descended from foreign immigrants, as in OTL many of those communities became major sources of recruits and funding for radical groups in their ancestral homelands, unlike OTL the American government chose to actively sponsor these activities to a degree it never did here. There were organizations among the African-American, Serbian-American, Albanian-American, Bulgarian-American, Arab-American, Turkish-American, Portuguese-American, Ukrainian-American, and Central Asian-American communities who sought to restore the independence of their ancestral homelands, and many even had contacts with resistance elements there. As a Whig and a Fascist McKnight might have disapproved of the existence of independent cultures within the American nation, but he was happy to make sure that the anti-Societist militants within them received plenty of anonymous donations, faced little red-tape when exercising their Second Amendment right to acquire guns, and were free from interference when training with those guns. After all, if a group of private American citizens completely on their own and with no help from the Black Chamber organized terror attacks against Drakian imperialists, well his administration condemned such things and promised to do what it could to stop them; wink, wink.
(Of course, as is always the case when sponsoring militant groups, not all of the lawyers, guns, and money got used by the people who were supposed to use them on the people they were supposed to use them on, but what can you do?)
The USA was also happy to lend a quiet hand in supporting France and La Plata in the fight over Antarctica, and of course it always backed the Spanish-government-in-exile, but memories of the Great Pacific War were too fresh for a more confrontational stance to be acceptable to the American people. The Mad Years of the 1950s were still ongoing and the tumult of new ideas, new ideologies, new art, new culture, and even new religious expressions, held their attention.
At least until the flight of the Seraph.
Drakia had been able to launch projectiles into sub-orbital space since 1937 when the God’s Own Sling multi-charge accelerating gun first fired a one-hundred-pound round, one hundred-and-twenty miles up. For a long time, this was little more than a scientific curiosity- the Empire couldn’t actually get its projectiles into orbit and the objects themselves were nothing more than dumb weight. Many outside of the Country of the Dragon questioned whether Drakian claims of having reached space were even true, and after its initial achievement the first ever space gun had little scientific value. God’s Own Sling was dismantled during the Great Patriotic War for its material, but after the end of the war the Bureau for Technical Progress approached the Polemarch with a proposal to build a new space gun. Technology had advanced since the thirties with concentrated research into rocketry (even if the Seperateverse was still behind OTL in that area) and advancements in the creation of electronic artillery fuses meant that it was now theoretically practical to fire a round into space and have sophisticated internal equipment survive the trip. This would require a great deal of further research, testing, and development, but the Bureau claimed that it would eventually allow them to fire projectiles into orbit and then have those projectiles deorbit to strike against terrestrial targets as hypervelocity kill vehicles. Kobold was impressed by the description of a weapon capable of striking anywhere on Earth with a multi-kiloton yield and no practical countermeasures, and so approved the construction of God’s Own Sling II in 1951.
God's Own Sling II. The idea was that with some work, Drakia would be able to fire a projectile into suborbital space, a small rocket engine on the projectile would able to push it into orbit, it would orbit until it was where it needed to be, and then its rocket engine would fire again to push it out of orbit to strike a target below. Their goal was to create an artillery piece with an effective range that covered the entire Earth.
To my OTL readers who grew up in a world with ICBMs and nuclear weapons this may sound overly-complicated and under-powered, so feel free to snigger a little at a TL that focused so heavily on refining and improving existing technologies that it dropped the ball a little on discovering new ones.
(There is one country in the late ‘60s putting resources into “impractical pure science” that is currently making great strides towards the creation of an atomic bomb, but I’m getting ahead of myself)
The biggest challenge that Drakia faced in making its space gun practical was ruggedizing the components in its projectiles that it needed to fire the small rockets that would take them from sub-orbital space into true orbit, and then do more complicated things once they got there. Doctor Richard Rémy (a defector to the Empire from France) decided to start simple. If they could get a true satellite into orbit with basic but functional electronics, then they could move on from there to more complex things. Seraph-1 and -3 exploded in mid-air, Seraph-2 and -4 through 6 failed to get their orbital rockets to even fire, Seraph-7 and -8 had their rockets misfire or fire only partly, and Seraph-9 made two complete orbits and most of a third, but its onboard radio intended to transmit tracking signals apparently didn’t survive the journey. The rest of the world was aware of the Drakian space program (these things are hard to keep secret) and the visible failures of Seraphs 7 and 8 drew derision, while the partial success of 9 drew international protests against Drakia violating the air space of the countries it flew over, and spurred France and the Pan-Europeans to announce their intention to start a space program of their own to match its accomplishments.
Seraph-10 launched on February 16, 1958 and was a complete success.
While it was larger than OTL’s Sputnik-1, Seraph-10 served essentially the same purpose- it was a proof-of-concept to secure continued funding, demonstrate the superiority of Drakian science over its foreign competitors, and lay the technical foundations for future advances in space travel. It orbited the Earth for a couple weeks while sending out regular radio signals that could used to track its location, and after its batteries died continued to orbit silently for a couple months before burning up in the atmosphere. Unlike Sputnik, Seraph-10 was also a somewhat explicit threat. While Drakia’s detailed goal of being able to launch devastating long-range attacks anywhere on Earth had not been made public, Seraph-10 was a projectile fired from a massive gun, and the possibility of this technology being used for warfare was not at all hard to imagine. Most of the Earth’s population was located such that they were able to see the satellite at least once during its journey- it was easily visible to the naked eye, and any radio amateur could pick up the signal it was broadcasting- and it passed directly over the United States, France, and India.
Different Seraph models, including Seraph-10 on the far left. (Actually they're Martlet projectiles from the OTL Project HARP)
It was an unmistakable message that the Empire of Drakia did not care about complaints by free nations that Seraph-9 had violated their airspace, that it was not afraid of them, and that it was not far off from being able to strike against the countries now organizing to oppose it wherever, and whenever it liked. Ulysses Kobold delivered a televised address in which he celebrated the achievements of “Superior Drakian science”, congratulated Dr. Rémy and his team on “bringing the Final Society closer to reality”, and warned “the foreign handicappers” that while “the unchained peoples of Societism” did not want a war, they were “better prepared than ever to defend themselves”. He then- to the surprise of Remy and pretty much everyone else- vowed that the Empire’s next territorial acquisition would not be of this world; the Country of the Dragon would embrace the “Lunar Imperative” and conquer the Moon, just as it had once embraced the Continental Imperative and conquered Africa.
Hey, he had annexed Antarctica, why not the Moon?
The rest of the world reacted by panicking.
For many years there was a (not inaccurate perception) that Drakia was struggling technologically to keep up with the rest of the world and had begun falling behind, and that it's few scientific accomplishments like the space gun were expensive boondoggles without practical application. The success of Seraph-10 created a fear that the Free World was falling behind the Societists, a terror in the United States that American technology had declined due to complacency until it was inferior to that of Drakia.
In point of fact they were wrong- American technology was not inferior to the Drakian Empire, the United States had just chosen to focus on areas other than space. Heavy investment into technological aids for disabled persons (particularly war veterans) had resulted in prosthetic limbs more advanced in some aspects than those commercially available in OTL 2020. Cochlear implants predated Great Wars, the first Auditory Brainstem implant followed not long after they ended, and crude bionic eyes had begun to enter use. Research into early powered exoskeletons had grown out of this focus on using technology to address physical disabilities, and rapidly drawn interest from non-medical fields- including the US military who could easily grasp the potential applications of power-armor. Unfortunately issues with the power-demand of early exoskeletons made them impractical, as did the fact that while they made soldiers stronger they also slowed down their reaction times, and the first exoskeleton to be standard issue in the US Army was a passive un-powered model that transferred two-thirds of the weight of a soldier’s pack to the ground and entered service in 1960. The first electronic computers had appeared in the 1910s in Europe, the first computer networks emerged in the 1930s in commercial use, and the Great Wars saw considerable advancement in computer networking technologies such as packet switching for increasingly large military computer networks designed to facilitate communication between radar stations, military and civil authorities, and public health facilities. The first computer network to span the North American continent was the AWS Network of the American Weather Service that connected the AWS’ sixteen regional forecast offices and first came online in 1948. The first mini-computers were invented in 1940, and while the first microprocessor was created in 1952 it was these machines that formed the basis of the Pan-American Computer Network that integrated the major military, government, and academic computer networks of the United States in 1955. The publicly-funded nature of this system initially prevented commercial use, but private computer networks were growing rapidly and the foundations of the Common Network (Comnet) had been laid.
(National packet-sharing networks similar to the PACN emerged outside of the USA not long after- the CELT system in Ireland and the Automatic Information Network in Germany being the two most prominent, major private/non-state networks included the Digital Message System (DMS) and United Telegraph Computer Network (UTCN) in the United States, ODIN in Scandinavia and Germany, and Spiderweb in China. Computer networks existed in the Societist bloc- most notably the FATE computer network in Britain- but these were independent centralized networks instead of “networks of networks” with decentralized control like the PACN. They were also much smaller and less advanced.)
The VIOLET passive exoskeleton might not sound very impressive, but reducing the weight of a soldier's pack by two-thirds is a major advantage. Like many technologies it was also a fore-runner for other things to come.
So, the United States of America wasn’t technologically behind the Empire of Drakia, but widespread public fear that it was gave President McKnight the lever he needed to rouse the sleeping giant yet again. Signatories to the Second Paris Protocol (1959) included the United States, the minor Grand Alliance members, plus Australia and New Zealand, and brought the International Association for Reciprocal Assistance (IARA) into being. India and the Jakarta Pact did not sign, but talks between New Delhi, New York, Berlin, and Paris to create a global anti-Societist alliance began in earnest.
Before the diplomats could even meet in Paris to hash out the Second Protocol and the IARA however, a mere forty-eight hours after Ulysses Kobold had promised to conquer the Moon, McKnight made a televised address of his own.
“America will never sit idly by and allow space itself to be corrupted by Societism!” the President swore. “For the sake of all mankind we will- we must- halt Drakia’s illegal lunar imperialism before it comes to fruition! We must get to the Moon first!”
Ground broke on America’s first space gun only six weeks later.
A space gun? Not the wisest idea I've ever heard, but the US isn't run by insane fascists and so should be able to pick a smarter method quickly.
Awesome new chapter, also:
I can totally understand them...
If your starting point is huge guns...well, that's where you start.
Not necessarily where you end, mind, but also not necessarily not. I stand by the view that the reason we didn't see more space guns OTL is that rockets got there firstest with the mostest, not necessarily that they're the bestest.
Isn’t the reason no one uses space guns to send stuff into orbit is due to the fact the gun tends to damage what’s being sent into orbit?
This seems oddly appropriate
Cue the ruthless megacorporate exploitation of space!
Cue the ruthless megacorporate exploitation of space!
Rockets are absolutely better than guns because of sheer amount of wasted weight needed for shock hardening. But you're right about them being the obvious starting point.
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