Chapter 24
Scientific progress in the Separate-verse had proceeded at a breakneck pace since the early 19th century. This was not the result of chance or lucky discoveries, but the consequence of sustained deliberate investment by national governments into technological research. Nations that fell behind in the technological race, or who tolerated too much in the way of technical conservatism, found themselves at a serious disadvantage when it came to economic and military competition. The result was a desperate global chase for the next bomb, the next fighting machine, the next poison gas. Such an approach had its advantages, but those advantages were not universal and it was actively detrimental to certain branches of science.
For instance, resources and funding were concentrated on projects that offered the potential for notable improvements to existing technologies, or new technologies that were imaginable on the basis of what was currently known to be possible. When it came to pure scientific enquiry without a clear utility, or scientific avenues that didn’t have a history of yielding valuable results, governments were at best disinterested and at worst actively hostile towards research that distracted from “practical” work. On top of that avenues of research that had military implication were prioritized over those that did not, resulting in wildly varying rates of progress in different fields.
The Separate-verse had far better mechanical engineers than OTL had at the same point in time. It had sunk considerable resources into the chemical and material sciences and was thus far ahead in those areas as well. Medical capabilities had progressed rapidly (America led the world in prosthetics and treatments for physical handicaps), as had general biology to a lesser degree. But physics of the theoretical sort languished, and fields like astronomy remained largely the province of self-funding amateurs.
I was somehow unaware that while the Wright Brothers got all of the credit for the first heavier than air flight in 1903, a German inventor named Hermann Ganswindt probably beat them by two years with the largely forgotten flight of the helicopter he invented. I also didn't know that an unmanned helicopter flew successfully as early as 1878. We should have had helicopters in this TL for a while now. Oops.
This meant very good engines and manufacturing machines. It meant that assault rifles were standard with all major militaries and landcruisers were on par with the tanks of the OTL 1950s. Chemical weapons at this point were as advanced as OTL 21st century agents. Aviation faced a small hiccup in that drachenflieger technology doesn’t translate as well to jets as OTL fixed-wing aircraft do, but the first turbojet aircraft to enter service still did so in the 1920s. The first manned flight in a helicopter dated back to the 1880s however, and unarmed military helicopters had been used in in the World War for search and rescue (minor retcon, yeah, yeah, yeah).
Analogue Computers emerged from programmable manufacturing machines, and the first electronic ones entered use in the 1910s. Rocketry received some attention- there were rocket-propelled grenades and some work with rocket engines in aviation- but experimentation into rocket artillery had been abandoned back in the 19th century. Intense research into long-range howitzers and gun artillery began under Napoleon who had successfully created guns with the range to fire on England from France as early as the Canadian War of the 1830s, and artillery technology advanced rapidly enough that a demand for long-range rockets never materialized. By the end of the 1930s multiple armies were fielding
self-propelled howitzers on par with OTL 1960s and 70s technology (although since the OTL US Army still uses a
self-propelled gun it first introduced in 1963 in 2020, the Separate-verse was arguably already on par with 21st century tech in this area) and some truly staggering heavy artillery with no precise OTL equivalents.
Pride drove competing programs in multiple nations to see who could build an artillery piece with the longest possible range, a competition that was “won” in 1937 by Drakia (not because their technology was better- it wasn’t- but because Stoker liked expensive prestige projects that other countries wouldn’t spend money on- see the Hadrian Plan) with “
God’s Own Sling ” a twenty-two-hundred-ton multi-charge accelerating gun that was fixed in place and thus nearly useless for military purposes, but had a range of over 400 miles and allowed Drakia to claim the title of first to outer space when it successfully fired a hundred-pound projectile to an altitude of 120 miles and into sub-orbital space (said projectile then fell back down into the Sahara desert).
God's Own Sling, the first Drakian space gun, under construction. Bet you weren't expecting that, were yah?
It’s difficult compare the Separate-verse’s advancement in biological warfare to a period in OTL given how little biological weapons were used in modern conflicts, but it had progressed at least as far as the Cold War. Drakia in particular led the world in biological weapons (one of the only areas in which it could claim genuine innovations, and not merely capitalizing on other countries’ discoveries early) due in part to the Bureau for Technical Progress’ willingness to make use of large numbers of human subjects, a legacy that went back to Doctor Henricus Calvet in the 19th century. By 1938 the Office for Epidemiological Study (the BTP’s biowarfare department) had successfully weaponized
Smallpox,
Bubonic Plague,
Anthrax,
Botulinum,
Tularemia,
Yellow Fever, and
Q-Fever among others. The first major organized use of biological weapons by Drakia (they had made minor and unorganized use of biological weapons during the Crucible and the World War) occurred during the Judeo-Arab Revolt and involved deploying aerosolized
Ricin bombs against rebel forces and the use or attempted use of Tularemia and Q-Fever against rebel-held cities. The results were mixed; the aerosolized Ricin worked fine, but was no more effective than standard chemical weapons. The introduction of Tularemia to Haifa failed to cause an outbreak because of issues with deployment and a rapid public health response by the city’s authorities. They were much more successful with causing outbreaks of Q-Fever in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Homs in Syria, but Q-Fever’s long incubation period meant that it took too long for its most serious symptoms to manifest, about half of those infected didn’t even show symptoms, and there were issues with the disease spreading to second-line Drakian forces and loyal noncombatants in rebel held areas who hadn’t been properly vaccinated. Q-Fever may have played a role in weakening the rebels at least, but in general the results of Drakia’s early biowarfare efforts were disappointing. They tried again during the Great Slavic Conspiracy, deploying biological weapons against Serbian and Bulgarian rebels in Rhomania with the co-operation of the Rhomanian government. This allowed Drakia to better refine its deployment techniques, and it had greater success there. A more virulent Q-Fever variant called Q19 (10% lethality in its non-chronic form and less than 5% of infected persons failing to show symptoms) was deployed to “pacify” government-held areas after vaccination programs had been conducted for loyal Rhomanian civilians and military personnel, sickening unvaccinated Slavic communities. The “Execution of Sofia” proved the climax of the Draco-Rhomanian biowarfare campaign with 100 pounds (rather more than necessary) of the
Wynter strain of Anthrax aerosolized over the Bulgarian city. The majority of Sofia’s 300,000 inhabitants were killed, and the city became a contaminated zone that would be unlivable for decades.
The Noble Race weren’t the only ones with biological warfare programs however, even if theirs was the most developed. There were substantial German, French, Japanese, and American programs, and smaller ones in Brazil, La Plata, Australia, Italy, and Scandinavia which should not be dismissed. No one wanted to be left behind in the biological arms race, and if nothing else everyone wanted to make sure that they had the capabilities to
protect themselves should they end up on the receiving end of someone else’s plague or toxin.
A victim of anthrax inhalation dying in the former Bulgarian city of Sofia.
Did you know it only takes a few pounds of aerosolized anthrax to reach LD50 (half of everyone is dead) for an area the size of a city? It has a 90% fatality rate if inhaled and not treated. You can also make it in your shed with commonly available materials and areas contaminated by anthrax remain so for up to 70 years unless incredibly expensive decontamination procedures are performed. By infecting people or monkeys you can create more virulent strains, the sort of thing that Drakia would have no problem doing. In theory it could be as devastating as nuclear weapons if deployed by state actors with the proper training and equipment (you can make it in a shed, you can't aerosolize it in shed, or make it in large amounts).
Incidentally I'm now on an FBI watchlist if I wasn't already.
But we were talking about how some fields of research hadn’t kept up with the rapid pace that affected others.
There were niche areas of biology that suffered- if it seemed unlikely to have practical value then it was de-emphasized- even as other areas flourished. We already mentioned how astronomy languished, so did paleontology, and any areas of geology not directly connected to mining. Did the world really need to invest in higher mathematics? Probably, but it didn’t. There was some research into physics, but once again many branches of that science suffered from lack of attention. Radio and television were invented at roughly the same time they were in OTL, they merely saw quicker improvement and faster widespread adoption. The discovery of ionizing radiation came ten years late however, and it languished with little attention for another half decade before anyone began trying to do anything with it. The first working X-Ray didn’t appear until 1919, and atomic theory remained stuck at the
plum-pudding model by the end of the 1930s. Other than making clock-dials glow in the dark uranium had few uses, although Drakia accidentally discovered the mutagenic properties of radiation in the mid-20s during unsuccessful experiments to see if they could use radioactive dust as a weapon (they could, but it was less effective than pre-existing chemical weapons) and subsequently operated a series of
atomic gardens to produce new varieties of mutagenic plants.
So it was, that as the Great Pacific War began and Great Patriotic War entered its prologue, High Energy Physics was a minor, neglected field of study. The new technologies featured in those wars would thus be absent nuclear power.
A Drakian atomic garden with plants arranged in circular rows around a central radiation source. The radiation causes random mutations in the plants, most of which are harmful or useless, but a small percentage result in valuable improvements and new varieties of crops. It's not publicized much because human beings are stupid and easily scared, but radiation and chemicals are widely used in OTL to produce new crops through mutation and there are over thirty-two hundred varieties of mutagenic plants currently being cultivated- most for food. Ever eat a red grapefruit? They created it in an atomic garden in Texas in the 1970s. I drink red grapefruit juice every morning because hail Trinity.
Better living through atomic power.