Antarctic Space Nazis Across the Multiverse

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The level of development of the culture(s) in Japan. If the idea is correct, Japanese development would be much below that of China, Korea, and other neighbouring regions.

Ah, I see.

Well, complicating that is that in actual, real history, Japan was a lot less developed than China during the late Jōmon period and early Yayoi period than the Chinese Shang and early Zhou dynasties, let alone if we get into Spring and Autumn and the Warring States.

The Japanese adopted Chinese writing and a lot of technology and material culture from the mainland, with some evidence that many ideas and technologies were transmitted through Korea, which would then also have been at a higher development level than the early Japanese. And, anyway, the prehistoric Japanese, by definition, pretty much, hadn't by that time adopted most of what they would eventually adopt from Chinese cultures.

Sailing technology wasn't all that good around -2,000 to -1,000 BCE and by the time you've got the technology to sail easily between the mainland and Japan, you've got a situation where there was an advanced mainland interacting with 'primitive' island people. We see the same thing in Europe, with the British isles, for example.

So, discovering less technological development in prehistoric Japan than in early historic China and Korean states more closely connected to this mainland culture, for example, wouldn't tell the ASNs whether this was a real history or one moulded by anti-Axis prejudice.

Originally Posted by johndallman

No, the Nazi never thought the Japanese had "Aryan" ancestry; "honorary Aryans" simply meant that they'd arrived at a similar style of politics by a different route.

Yeah, that seems to fit what I've read on the subject.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Oh, no. Indo-Aryans were never considered to be ancestors of the Nazi's "Aryans". Nazi Aryans were supposed to have originated in Northern Europe, and spread from there, degenerating as they went. Their languages had spread to other ethnic groups. Nazi theories were completely unrelated to modern ones.

I agree that it was not mainstream to consider Iranian or Indic peoples proper Aryans (at best degenerative descendants of Nordic people who traveled there), but let's keep in mind that there was no single accepted Nazi orthodoxy on prehistory. I've found Nazi archaeologists who placed the Aryan Urheimat in locations ranging from Atlantis and/or Antarctica, in the Himalayas, in the cradle of the Goths around the Black Sea and the Crimea, Central Europe and even stranger locations. There were theories about a 'Nordic Rome' or the Ancient Greeks being pure Aryans.

I admit that I've only read deconstructions of the theories of the men like Houston Steward Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau, not their original turgid racialist screeds, but it seems that they were often fond of Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages and mythologies, but how much that extended toward the modern peoples, I am unsure. Well, Gobineau loved Persians and Persia, but did that find its way into the thinking of his intellectual heirs in Nazi Germany?

The 'Corded-Nordics' theory exemplified by Carleton S. Coon oddball racialist theories, but found in a purer Germanic formulation, more acceptable to Nazis (though never accepted as an official Nazi doctrine), in the work of Gustaf Kossinna, was popular in Nazi Germany, but it was never the only theory around and the Anhnenerbe crowd around Himmler was a fertile source of really out there theories. And a lot of the 'Aryan' theories that shaped Nazi thought idealized Sanskrit and ancient Hindu mythology, including the racialist writings that most influenced Hitler.

Technically, Adolf Hitler, for example, did not believe that the Aryan race originated in Germany or even necessarily in Scandinavia, only that the Nordic peoples were particularly pure examples of Aryans and that the German people had unique ethnic and cultural qualities which were not necessarily merely due to biological descent. Indeed, Hitler seems to have come to accept that the majority of Germans were not Nordic, but that the things that made Germans great were due to the influence of Germanic, Nordic and Aryan blood and spirit.

Many Nazis would accept that there could be genuine mystery about the actual origin of the Aryan people while simultaneously believing that the people who became Germans and their favored Nordic cousins represented a perfection of the Aryan ideal, not necessarily the original source of such people. It was perfectly compatible with being a hard-core Nazi to believe that the first Aryans came from Atlantis, Greece, Italy, the Caucasus, Persia, Himalayas, the Pontic steppes or somewhere else and that they merely didn't reach their perfect flowering as a race until they found Germany and developed into Germans.

Something worth keeping in mind is that Himmler kept a copy of the Bhagavad Gita with him at all times (in a translation by Dr. Franz Hartmann) and that he was apparently uplifted and inspired by the example of the ancient Aryan warriors he read about there. It seems Himmler saw himself as Arjuna.

SS-Hauptsturmführer Jakob Wilhelm Hauer would have been an Antarctic Space Nazi. Sure, it's not like he represented any kind of mainstream thought within Nazism, not even occult Nazism, but at least his presence means that the ASNs have someone who knows Sanskrit pretty well.

[johndallman]

You start by needing lots of bricks, especially firebricks for the ovens and kilns you need for burning all that coal. Some initial supplies, along with tools and cement for mortar, will need to be carried through.

Firebricks are made of several kinds of clay, depending on the usage: the usual kind has a preponderance of aluminium oxides over silicon oxides, but you need high-silicon clay for steel-making furnaces, and magnesium/chromium oxide clays for non-ferrous metallurgy.

More normal kinds of bricks are made of high-silicon clay but don't need to be fired so hot.

Moulding bricks is an interesting problem: the big machines that are used for mass production in the modern world won't be practical for the ASN at first, and they may well have to use slave labour for several years.

Cement is going to be Portland Cement, which is made by heating the right mixture of limestone and clay to high temperatures in a cement kiln, and then grinding the resulting lumpy material to a fine powder. The kiln can be coal-fired, which reduces the demand for coke.

The fineness of the grinding is important for the soundness of mortar and concrete made from the cement. A cement mill is a big steel cylinder, rotating at a few tens of rpm, with a lot of hard steel balls inside it. Modern ones are electrically powered, but for the ASN, a steam engine might be a better bet. As well as turning, you need fans to control air flow, because that's how you get the fine powder out, and you really don't want to breathe the powder. Cloth masks will be necessary for workers who are meant to live more than a few days.

A small cement mill can be taken through in pieces, along with the fans, controls, and small parts for larger ones. They're going to need several of these.

Something they need early on, and might forget, will be sanitation and water supplies. They'll have chlorine for disinfecting water, but they will need sewage farms, water-filtration systems, and loads of ceramic piping for local sewer systems.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

You start by needing lots of bricks, especially firebricks for the ovens and kilns you need for burning all that coal. Some initial supplies, along with tools and cement for mortar, will need to be carried through.

Firebricks are made of several kinds of clay, depending on the usage: the usual kind has a preponderance of aluminium oxides over silicon oxides, but you need high-silicon clay for steel-making furnaces, and magnesium/chromium oxide clays for non-ferrous metallurgy.

More normal kinds of bricks are made of high-silicon clay but don't need to be fired so hot.

Moulding bricks is an interesting problem: the big machines that are used for mass production in the modern world won't be practical for the ASN at first, and they may well have to use slave labour for several years.

Cement is going to be Portland Cement, which is made by heating the right mixture of limestone and clay to high temperatures in a cement kiln, and then grinding the resulting lumpy material to a fine powder. The kiln can be coal-fired, which reduces the demand for coke.

That all sounds good.

Originally Posted by johndallman

The fineness of the grinding is important for the soundness of mortar and concrete made from the cement. A cement mill is a big steel cylinder, rotating at a few tens of rpm, with a lot of hard steel balls inside it. Modern ones are electrically powered, but for the ASN, a steam engine might be a better bet.

When in doubt, go with Steampunk Nazis.

Originally Posted by johndallman

As well as turning, you need fans to control air flow, because that's how you get the fine powder out, and you really don't want to breathe the powder. Cloth masks will be necessary for workers who are meant to live more than a few days.

Well, only for those workers performing duties that require an ability to learn new skills or the exercise of some individual initiative. The others... won't be living when they start, anyway.

Originally Posted by johndallman

A small cement mill can be taken through in pieces, along with the fans, controls, and small parts for larger ones. They're going to need several of these.

What kind of weight budget are we looking at there?

Originally Posted by johndallman

Something they need early on, and might forget, will be sanitation and water supplies. They'll have chlorine for disinfecting water, but they will need sewage farms, water-filtration systems, and loads of ceramic piping for local sewer systems.

Well, a significant part of the SS leadership that forms the majority of early ASN leaders will have extensive experience in building camps full of workers, in their thousands. And while some of them were not intended to avoid killing the workers, others were expected to turn a profit over years of economic activity. And, in all cases, the guard force was expected to avoid disease caused by the lack of waste disposal. For that matter, there will be people there who built underground bases with hundreds and even thousands of valuable German technical workers.

That being said, the massive population growth of the ASNs and their former slaves, current native-born citizens, will stretch any industry to the limits when it comes to building and upgrading sewers and the like. I'm betting that there are large areas of Jötunheim that smell even worse than Jötunheim normally does and that even in Germania Hyperborea, overflowing sewers and waterborne diseases are a common problem and a major political issue.

The hyper-focus on military technologies has always relegated civil engineering works to second place unless they have important military ramifications and sewer planning is decidedly not sexy. The ASN leadership no doubt demanded it be done and assigned it to experts who knew what they needed, but I'm sure that as the population grew by leaps and bounds, the support was always less than it should have been.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The easiest solution for that is that many of the binary (or higher multiple) stars that take a telescope to resolve on Earth are not visibly multiple, and spectroscopic binaries are entirely absent. At which point anyone with real knowledge of astronomy can be quite sure this isn't Earth, and never will be.

Again, this isn't Earth. Somebody will have made a note that at some point in the future, a proper sky survey ought to be made, and a statistical study of the distribution of non-naked-eye stars will likely reveal non-random patterns.

You're absolutely right. Anyone with even a decent hobby skill level (say 8-10) in Astronomy/TL7 will understand exactly why Germania Hyperborea is not Earth and never has or will be. And it only takes someone from the V-2 program who is interested in space, in addition to being a rocket engineer, to demonstrate this conclusively, using scientific equipment which would have been taken along as it would be useful for surveying and long-range scouting from airships.

Unfortunately, most of the influential leaders and prestigious elites among the ASNs do not have Astronomy/TL7 at even Dabbler levels, being rather more likely to have Fortune-Teller or Occultist and at most observational Astrology that is effectively TL5 or lower. And even those who are not deluded occult Nazis may not necessarily be all that familiar with TL7 Astronomy.

Even highly educated people do not necessarily study cutting-edge astronomy in depth, not if they are agronomists, civil engineers, economists, jurists, mechanical engineers or belong to other fields that do not really intersect much with the study of the stars and heavens. There will be plenty of the older generation, even intelligent, pragmatic, capable industrial leaders and military officers, who were raised with mostly TL5 ideas about outer space and who have never really studied the field as they amassed their expertise in fields related to doing things in German industry and/or fighting two World Wars.

So, sure, there is a group of people among the ASNs who know for a fact that Germania Hyperborea is not Earth and never has been or will be. There are, however, much higher numbers of völkisch, fascist and Nazi ideologues educated in entirely different fields who publish popular literature and speak at mass rallies to popularize the idea that Germania Hyperborea is the Earth of their ancient Aryan past and the ASNs have been given a chance to do things right this time around.

Originally Posted by johndallman

An obvious effect is that shadowed areas will always be in shadow. If flora had evolved with this situation, there would be specialisations for it: plants would not need to turn towards the sun as it moves, trees would be different shapes, roots would specialise in sunlit or shaded areas, and so on. However, I strongly suspect that these specialisations are absent, revealing that the world was recently created and populated with Earth-derived life. Another scientific note for the future: Observe changes in the natural shape of fast-breeding bushes over decades.

You know what, let's throw in a couple of more 'suns' down there, really shake things up.

Have a period of 'night' when they're all absent or at least not radiating that much light through the mists, but also periods when just one or two of them are 'on'.

And note that there are things in Jötunheim that imply hundreds of millions of geological history and abundant native life, like the massive coal fields and the more recent tar pits. Of course, whether that life much resembled Earth fossil life is a different question.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

You're absolutely right. Anyone with even a decent hobby skill level (say 8-10) in Astronomy/TL7...

Actually, that only takes Astronomy (Observational)/TL6.

And it only takes someone from the V-2 program who is interested in space, in addition to being a rocket engineer, to demonstrate this conclusively, using scientific equipment which would have been taken along as it would be useful for surveying and long-range scouting from airships.

Actually, the spectroscopic equipment might well not have been. I suspect that once the absence of telescopic binaries was discovered, the hobby astronomers went rather quiet.

So, sure, there is a group of people among the ASNs who know for a fact that Germania Hyperborea is not Earth and never has been or will be. There are, however, much higher numbers of völkisch, fascist and Nazi ideologues educated in entirely different fields who publish popular literature and speak at mass rallies to popularize the idea that Germania Hyperborea is the Earth of their ancient Aryan past and the ASNs have been given a chance to do things right this time around.

This is where the astronomers have to reconcile conflicts between scientific and ideological knowledge, which was a common thing before the twentieth century. So they'll just emphasise the "second chance" part, and nod along with the identity part.

You know what, let's throw in a couple of more 'suns' down there, really shake things up.

Have a period of 'night' when they're all absent or at least not radiating that much light through the mists, but also periods when just one or two of them are 'on'.

If sunlight isn't from a constant point in the sky, the adaptations are much less obvious, but the fact that this isn't Earth is far more obvious. Unless you claim it's the really far past according to some of Weisthor's more interesting early claims.

And note that there are things in Jötunheim that imply hundreds of millions of geological history and abundant native life, like the massive coal fields and the more recent tar pits. Of course, whether that life much resembled Earth fossil life is a different question.

The geologists will be interested in the fossil prints in the coal.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Actually, that only takes Astronomy (Observational)/TL6.

Actually, the spectroscopic equipment might well not have been. I suspect that once the absence of telescopic binaries was discovered, the hobby astronomers went rather quiet.

Ah, indeed. Very good.

Originally Posted by johndallman

This is where the astronomers have to reconcile conflicts between scientific and ideological knowledge, which was a common thing before the twentieth century. So they'll just emphasise the "second chance" part, and nod along with the identity part.

In any case, I can't imagine many fields where exciting science or engineering is going on in the first couple of ASN generations where it really matters all that much whether this is an earlier Earth, an Alternate Earth or some imaginary world which just happens to mimic Earthly conditions on the world well enough for science to work down there. And I can't imagine any fields where the exact nature of astrophysics in their version of space become relevant until they've advanced their technology and infrastructure somewhat further.

So it seems to me that scientists could privately believe what they want and ardent Nazi engineers could believe in the myth, but that this wouldn't cause any problems as long as they were simply building up the industrial base of the world until they reach similar economic levels as they had in 1940s Germany.

Originally Posted by johndallman

If sunlight isn't from a constant point in the sky, the adaptations are much less obvious, but the fact that this isn't Earth is far more obvious. Unless you claim it's the really far past according to some of Weisthor's more interesting early claims.

Jötunheim has three suns, not Germania Hyperborea, and pretty much no one but the most dedicated Irminists accepts Jötunheim as a past era of our Earth. I mean, it's not like people are lining up to correct Weisthor, the greatest magician in the world, about it, but privately, most of the ASNs who live there consider Jötunheim' elsewhere', not merely another time, no matter how ancient.

Originally Posted by johndallman

The geologists will be interested in the fossil prints in the coal.

They will indeed and they're seeing... wonderful things. Yes, wonderful things.

Occasionally, they'll come across something that matches known Earth fossils pretty well, but the vast majority of the fossils are unknown to 1940s archaeology and a good 5-10% of them show some features that seem likely to be impossible for normal Earth-based life.

As far as anyone can tell, Jötunheim has always been highly magical, with the local mana fluctuating between No Mana Zones to Normal Mana Zones, with occasional Places of Power that have even higher Mana than that, sometimes aspected and sometimes higher across the board. And the fauna has adapted to this, with multiple species seeming to have evolved in higher mana areas and died out in mass extinctions when the local mana changed.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Well, only for those workers performing duties that require an ability to learn new skills or the exercise of some individual initiative. The others... won't be living when they start, anyway.

Do they need to speak? They will need air to do that, and having their lungs eaten away by alkali dust will be a problem.

What kind of weight budget are we looking at there?

About 20 short tons for the small one, broken down into 400lb or smaller loads. This assume you can build the structure to mount it in with local materials.

20 short tons each for controls, bearings, and other small parts for much larger cement mills.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Do they need to speak? They will need air to do that, and having their lungs eaten away by alkali dust will be a problem.

Eh, the original Kadavergehorsamer in the campaign where they first appeared were not scintillating conversationalists, but the more advanced versions of the Spawn of the Cold Ones have managed just fine with sepulchral voices that have no interaction with mundane lungs (Disturbing Voice), so if it's really important, no lungs need not be a barrier to speech.

That being said, anyone who really needs to speak is probably working in a more highly skilled field than the typical un-living slave and would get cloth masks.

Originally Posted by johndallman

About 20 short tons for the small one, broken down into 400lb or smaller loads. This assume you can build the structure to mount it in with local materials.

20 short tons each for controls, bearings, and other small parts for much larger cement mills.

Excellent, not as much as I feared.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

In any case, I can't imagine many fields where exciting science or engineering is going on in the first couple of ASN generations where it really matters all that much whether this is an earlier Earth, an Alternate Earth or some imaginary world which just happens to mimic Earthly conditions on the world well enough for science to work down there.

The first place where it could show is isotopes, once they start on nuclear technology. Since the basic concept of isotopes is firmly TL6, first theorised in 1913, it's imaginable that these worlds lack them. However, the ASN probably haven't got that far yet.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The first place where it could show is isotopes, once they start on nuclear technology. Since the basic concept of isotopes is firmly TL6, first theorised in 1913, it's imaginable that these worlds lack them. However, the ASN probably haven't got that far yet.

Well, Hans Kammler's position in late-war Germany put him in a position to know a) That the German nuclear research was primarily viewed as of utility as a new form of power plant that would generate massive amounts of energy, b) Who appeared on the Osenberg list and who among them was involved in the Uranverein and therefore not available for any of the Wunderwaffen projects he was overseeing, and c) Where the research took place and where the scientists and the equipment was moved, as it was his SS men who were dispatched to do so.

And as one of the ablest, most competent men among the ASN at administering massive projects in secrecy, he probably knew more than anyone not personally casting the spells about the efforts of the ASNs from 1943-1945. If anything odd needed arranging, Kammler was the one who coordinated between the various fiefdoms of senior SS men, industrialists, military, security or the latter-war amalgamations of many of these. Kammler was never told about the Faustian bargain with the Lords of the Last Waste, but he certainly grasped the essence of it even before the ASNs officially settled.

Kammler would have considered the development of this new energy souce imperative and if he could not find some trustworthy physicists who'd be open to recruitment, he would not have been above having his SS men bring unwilling physicists when they were sent to move them as the Allies got closer. And while Kammler lived, he'd have done his best to provide official support for research into nuclear reactors (he wouldn't consider bombs worth tehe effort in their strategic position).

Of course, there is every chance that those physicists Kammler was able to convince or kidnap would not have been enough and as wartime Germany barely had the resources to carry out the research in a way that would results on any fast time frame, it might theoretically be that even in Year 51, there is little useful to show for the research.

But there would have been physicists carrying out some experiments that continued the work done by Heisenberg and others invokved in the German project, and they'd have had copies of all work accessible by the SS when they moved the works from Berlin in 1944 and whatever else they could copy or steal.

Short story, there is no discernible difference between uranium or any other radioactive material from Earth or Germania Hyperborea. They've also tested material they got from Jötunheim and it's apparently radioactive as well, though perhaps somehow subtly different.