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Old 11-01-2014, 11:53 AM   #1
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default (IW) Details of Lucifer-5

To me at least, Lucifer-5 is one of the more appealing alternates in the IW but it also happens to have one of the briefer write-ups. I thought I would post some of my own thoughts and perhaps get some ideas form others to flesh things out.

The point of divergence (in hum an history at least) is 1908 (30 years before campaign date of 1938) when a meteor hits St Petersburg Russia, killing the Czar and his family and bringing large quantities of previously unknown superscience radioactive elements (Astronium and Petrinium) to earth. Afterwards these same elements were discovered in other meteor craters.

The capacity of Astronium to make powerful bombs is said to freeze the Great Power situation in place while Germany expands into Russia. I take this to mean no WWI or at most a short and relatively unimportant one.

So Germany would still have a Kaiser and there's probably a puppet Romanov on the Russian throne. Shickelgruber would be a house painter, Lenin's health would have failed him in some Bohemian basement in 1924 and one could hope that Trotsky and Stalin had offed each other.

Italy is described as Fascist so we probably get to keep Benny the Moose.

Japan is still apparently expansionist and much of the history of that part of the world might have proceeded in much the same manner at least until Japan came into conflict with one of the Western Astronium powers and presumably stopped then.

Those powers would appear to be Germany, England, France, Italy and the US. Plus Japan of course. All of those nations appear to have harnessed Astronium and Petrinium to build reactionless drive torch ships and staked out part of the Solar System which is far more habitable than the Real World's.

Petrinium doesn't explode but can be used to generate electric power for extremely low costs.

There is a mention of (apparently managable) stock market panics in 1929 and 30 but without a Great War and the disruptions that followed it I'm not sure there would be a Great Depression.

Cheap power is generally good for economies as a whole and there ought to be transcontinental rocket planes (also probably needed to drop those Astronium bombs) to further boost international commerce.

Mars is described as "canalled" and also Low Mana (Earth is a NMZ). Venus has "soda water oceans" and normal Mana. Britain dominates Mars and France exploits Venus.

Mars could be either the home of an extinct race or an alien race. Venus probably has primitives to use that Mana but that is just a guess.

An uninhabited Mars gives more room for colonization but one with a dying or at least sedentary alien race offers chances to sneak some ultra tech into the setting. Astronium isn't going to help you make space suits and the thought of thousands of construction workers in realistic TL6 space suits is painful.

There are other technological issues concerned with space flight such as life support and radiation protection. Lucifer-5's rocket jockeys seem to sport "cosmic ray tans" which is in genre but not congruent with even what was known about cosmic rays in the 30s.

I'd use inscrutable alien Martians with very high bio-tech to supply Terran spacers with symbiotic bacteria version of the Carcinophage and DNA Repair nano from bio-tech. The humans would probably call these "The Martian Inoculations" not really grasping how unlikely it is to cure cancer and radiation poisoning with "vaccines".

Venusians can be swamp-dwelling, voodoo practicing frog men or something like that. For a pulp-ier feel I'd sue Path/Book Magic rather than standard.

Venus is probably closer to human habitable than "soda water oceans" would imply.

I've got more but it will have to wait til later. I'm eager to hear if anyone else has some ideads for this Retrotech-ish pulp=-y setting.
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