Plausible POD after 1900? Discuss.
Pre-1900 POD thread here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?p=3245102
Pre-1900 POD thread here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?p=3245102
Uhhhm, someone invents the aeroplane in Britain, sticks a boat to it and makes a million dollars, starts the boat-plane craze before the land-plane fad and soon enough the military is taking note and then you've got boats with RN insignias being loaded up in ports to fly around the world and the vast Empire. We will call him James. Good English name that guy, James.... Blond. Now, James Blond is intelligent, he knows that the key to people continuing to buy his boats so he can continue to upgrade his designs to live the high life is to sell more boats. So, in a daring stunt he flies round the world, visiting the various British dominions and allies and selling these boat-planes to these nations for their governments makes his even richer, and Britain's Allies all have boat planes, though they're not as good as Britain Boatplanes because they're always being upgraded (at a reasonable price) into better, faster and more shiny boatplanes!
By the time James Blond retires, he's practically the "INVENTOR OF THE SKY" to most, and the British government is lauding praise on him, knighting him and all that. He takes off from public life around 1912, so it's not too implausible that there would be materials to make boatplanes. With the British at their height (give or take a few colonies?) and their navy powerful in surface ships when they start developing combat doctrines involving Surface, Submersed, and Sky units they could be literally unstoppable.
But only if you take it for face value that boatplanes are boats and not planes.![]()
I doubt a 'clue-by-four' to the head would be enough...That's... going to be difficult. First off we need to decide what it means by 'rules the waves' - are we talking a navy that's more powerful than any other country's or simply one that's large and powerful on par with say the US Navy?
The three main problems I can see are money, doctrine, and political will. After WW2 the country had been trashed to such an extent that they just didn't have enough to keep funding the military at a level they had been. IIRC post WW2 a number of the up and coming leaders of the Royal Navy were still very much in favour of battleships over carriers even with the recent examples of the past conflict, plus they kept way too many ships in the reserve fleet eating up resources and manpower which should have just been scrapped. The third part is political will, why would they want to? Granted into the 50s the various British governments still tried to be a great power but after Suez that was pretty much finished, plus with no Empire the vital need for a massive navy is gone.
You're going to need a PoD that seriously changes or butterflies away WW2 and Britain's participation in it just for a start, then hit some of the senior RN types over the head with a clue-by-four to get them to drop the battleships and embrace carriers.