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Old 08-09-2018, 07:57 AM   #611
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Default Re: Five Earths, All in a Row

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Originally Posted by tshiggins View Post
As difficult as WWII is for the people of Dp-Earth, the fact is that it'll wind up quite truncated, with far lower loss of life, than Ip-Earth's WWII. It'll also come to an end.

That means, in a lot of ways, the aftermath of that war will prove far, far more difficult and harrowing for the people of Dp-Earth. After all, every single person on that world will have to contend with an advanced world that can, in almost every case, point out any and all flaws in their world-views.

The Germans might not even get the worst of it, really. Stalin and Tojo are both in for really bad times, because they have to face the facts that the parallel history of another world almost certainly discredits everything they believe; everything they are.

In the United Kingdom, Parliament and Downing Street may have begun to face some ugly truths about the future of the British Empire, as well, and both Apartheid South Africa and the states of the Old South in the U.S.A. may come entirely unhinged. The Dixiecrats and other Segregationists know they face a bleak future of withering scorn, and the Obama administration has (quietly) already begun to take steps to hamstring them.
There is also future events they will learn of and the 2014 view on them.

Joseph McCarthy can kiss his chances of even getting near the US Senate good bye.
General public knowledge of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and that on Ip-Earth is lasted until 1972 is definitely not going to go well.
Learning about MkUltra and similar programs may result in the CIA never coming into being or having a closer oversight.

Then there is the issue of radio signals coming from Ip-Earth (nearly everybody has converted to digital TV broadcast by 2012 so at least that isn't an issue...yet)

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Over on Sp-Earth, it'll be almost as bad. The Southern Planters will almost certainly face a future of failure, ruin, and incandescent fury focused completely on them.

By comparison, almost everybody else on that world has time -- time to adapt, to figure out what to do. For slave-owning Brazil, that time will be pretty short, too, but not nearly as short as it is for the Sp-USA's Old South.

For the British Empire, which is approaching its zenith, the appearance of Ip-Earth -- while certainly troubling -- offers a rare opportunity to learn. If they pay attention to the historians of England on Ip-Earth, they might just save much more of the Empire than they otherwise would.
Sp-Earth can also learn from Dp-Earth as that is when the British Empire effectively ended.
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Old 08-09-2018, 06:03 PM   #612
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Default Re: Five Earths, All in a Row

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As difficult as WWII is for the people of Dp-Earth, the fact is that it'll wind up quite truncated, with far lower loss of life, than Ip-Earth's WWII. It'll also come to an end.

<SNIP>
Thank you. Helpful followup, and quite true.

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General public knowledge of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and that on Ip-Earth is lasted until 1972 is definitely not going to go well.
Also important to note that the information gained from it is already available, so they've stopped, but the pressure from groups on both Earth-1 and (fewer and smaller) on Earth-2 to prosecute the people involved remains.

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Then there is the issue of radio signals coming from Ip-Earth (nearly everybody has converted to digital TV broadcast by 2012 so at least that isn't an issue...yet)
Well, people are capable of building converters of their own. Thus, the signals that the common listener or viewer (more TVs on that Earth than in the same period in our history) can see is the stuff that people on Earth-1 send then on purpose, much like Earth-3. The number of converters available, commercially or otherwise, on Earth-2 is rather smaller, and they do need at least a low-grade radio-telescope to get signals that aren't boosted for them.

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Sp-Earth can also learn from Dp-Earth as that is when the British Empire effectively ended.
Oh, yes. Of course, Churchill is trying to save as much as he can of it, but there are limits to what he can achieve (and he knows this), so helping Stp-Britain might make him feel a little less bad about it.
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Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted.
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Old 08-10-2018, 07:23 AM   #613
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If anyone is interested I have consolidated much of the general information on this to the GURPSwiki with Five Earths, All in a Row as the main reference page.

I just started gathering the timeline and it will take a while as there were revisions and I am having some issues with figuring out which is the latest version. There also appear to be continuity issues with the timeline.

Because it could easily turn into a wall of text I have broken up the timeline into manageable chucks of a month each.

Last edited by maximara; 08-10-2018 at 02:14 PM.
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Old 08-10-2018, 05:49 PM   #614
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Default Re: Five Earths, All in a Row

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If anyone is interested I have consolidated much of the general information on this to the GURPSwiki with Five Earths, All in a Row as the main reference page.

I just started gathering the timeline and it will take a while as there were revisions and I am having some issues with figuring out which is the latest version. There also appear to be continuity issues with the timeline.

Because it could easily turn into a wall of text I have broken up the timeline into manageable chucks of a month each.
Thank you.

EDIT: Something relevant to the setting, though not to the current discussion: In the PBY Catalina thread, there's a link to a long photoblog showing how a Catalina 'Landseaire' laid out as a luxury air-yacht looked, and how it was advertised in Life Magazine, in 1950. Post-war Dsp-American space yachts are likely to have a similar look, at least internally, and be advertised in a similar way (because sex sells, and sexism on the other Earths isn't going to vanish just because people on Earth-1 are more progressive). A rocket similar to Consolidated's PBY is already in development on Earth-2, though I haven't decided what to call it, and much like the Catalina, is likely to be a good 'home away from home' or 'traveling base' for bands of wandering adventurers.
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Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted.

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Old 08-11-2018, 08:26 AM   #615
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Default Re: Five Earths, All in a Row

I have gotten (as far as I know) all the major information on (or links to) the Five Earths, All in a Row material as well as "flavor text" on the GURPSwiki.
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Old 08-12-2018, 10:09 AM   #616
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I have gotten (as far as I know) all the major information on (or links to) the Five Earths, All in a Row material as well as "flavor text" on the GURPSwiki.
*looks at it* Yeah, I think you probably have. There might be some not yet entered, but if so, they'll get added eventually.

Just the timeline entries is a fair bit of work, so thank you again.
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Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted.

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Old 08-16-2018, 05:25 AM   #617
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Also important to note that the information gained from it is already available, so they've stopped, but the pressure from groups on both Earth-1 and (fewer and smaller) on Earth-2 to prosecute the people involved remains.
I'm not sure they just stopped the Tuskegee syphilis experiment as they kept it going long after the funding disappeared. Heck they knew by 1947 that penicillin was so good at fighting the disease that it became the standard treatment. More over every major medical textbooks of the time recommended that all syphilis be treated.

If that that wasn't enough the results of the experiment were public knowledge as the first clinical data came out in 1934 and the first first major report came out in 1936. And the reports kept coming.

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Well, people are capable of building converters of their own. Thus, the signals that the common listener or viewer (more TVs on that Earth than in the same period in our history) can see is the stuff that people on Earth-1 send then on purpose, much like Earth-3. The number of converters available, commercially or otherwise, on Earth-2 is rather smaller, and they do need at least a low-grade radio-telescope to get signals that aren't boosted for them.
The ease of that depends a lot on how far the superscience has progressed.

First it doubtful that the vacuum tube technology (I am assuming even at TL(6+1)^ the transistor is a few years away) would be able to allow converters to be built with stuff from the local RadioShack (founded 1921).

Second there is the little issue of the amount of stuff that has gone into the war effort. Supplies to John Q. Public are going to be rare and that is assuming they are even available to those with the very limited A cards (3 to 4 US gallons of gasoline per week.) It is is going to take time to shift production back to peace time.

Finally TV really didn't became a mass media thing until after the war in OTL and so I expect that things are to be much the same on Dp-Earth.

Last edited by maximara; 08-16-2018 at 07:06 AM.
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Old 08-17-2018, 07:29 PM   #618
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I'm not sure they just stopped the Tuskegee syphilis experiment as they kept it going long after the funding disappeared. Heck they knew by 1947 that penicillin was so good at fighting the disease that it became the standard treatment. More over every major medical textbooks of the time recommended that all syphilis be treated.

If that that wasn't enough the results of the experiment were public knowledge as the first clinical data came out in 1934 and the first first major report came out in 1936. And the reports kept coming.
I think I'd forgotten about that, but the experiment is politically difficult in a way that it wasn't in OTL, so maybe Roosevelt asked them politely to stop making his job harder?

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The ease of that depends a lot on how far the superscience has progressed.

First it doubtful that the vacuum tube technology (I am assuming even at TL(6+1)^ the transistor is a few years away) would be able to allow converters to be built with stuff from the local RadioShack (founded 1921).
They don't so much have transistors, as multiplex vacuum tubes (entire circuits in a single tube, much more compact and a bit less expensive than normal tubes of TL6, once they were fully developed), and are trying for vacuum microelectronics (that is going to take quite a while, though it goes faster due to some of the tools to build the tools being available from Earth-1). By the time Dieselpunk Earth becomes Atompunk Earth (TL(6+2)^ and higher), they'll be making them in significant quantities.

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Second there is the little issue of the amount of stuff that has gone into the war effort. Supplies to John Q. Public are going to be rare and that is assuming they are even available to those with the very limited A cards (3 to 4 US gallons of gasoline per week.) It is is going to take time to shift production back to peace time.
That is significant, yes. That doesn't mean none are available, but parts are not terribly easy to obtain, especially if you are sourcing them legally.

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Finally TV really didn't became a mass media thing until after the war in OTL and so I expect that things are to be much the same on Dp-Earth.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by mass media. The BBC had television transmissions going out in the 1930s in our history, but stopped for a while when the war started in 1939, so as to prevent the signal being used for bombers to home in on. They were a bit ahead in Earth-2's 1930s, though again, the transmitter was shut down when the war started, and only started up again as the Battle of Britain came to a close (OTL, they started it up again in 1946).

(When I started work on this setting, I was actually pretty surprised how common TV sets and shows already were in our 1930s and '40s; Wikipedia has a helpful List of years in television, though I'm not sure if the page was there already in 2012. Some of the articles were, though.)

In the US, New York has a fair number of TV sets, and so do other major US cities; transmission was only briefly stopped due to the war, though new consumer televisions and radio sets are in very limited production due to the aforementioned need for war materiel (in OTL, they were stopped for consumer use completely from April 1, 1942, to October 5, 1945, but a fair number of sets and spare parts were already in circulation by then).

Countries that are not so involved in the war do also have some TV sets, though - they're pretty common in Dsp-Switzerland, for example, even in some middle-class households, and a number of bars and other businesses in many countries (both those in the war, and those out of it) had already gotten the idea that a TV is a good way to bring in customers.

So, TV sets are uncommon and expensive, but not so much of either as you seem to be suggesting.
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Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted.
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Old 08-18-2018, 07:56 AM   #619
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I think I'd forgotten about that, but the experiment is politically difficult in They don't so much have transistors, as multiplex vacuum tubes (entire circuits in a single tube, much more compact and a bit less expensive than normal tubes of TL6, once they were fully developed), and are trying for vacuum microelectronics (that is going to take quite a while, though it goes faster due to some of the tools to build the tools being available from Earth-1). By the time Dieselpunk Earth becomes Atompunk Earth (TL(6+2)^ and higher), they'll be making them in significant quantities.
Once Dp-Earth finds out about the transistor and how to make it will they even try to continue down the vacuum tube route?

Size, weight, power consumption, and durability are the transistor's main advantages over the vacuum tube.

Atompunk is a weird concept as it can be argued that it ran parallel to Dieselpunk with the "atomic power" gizmos of Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers and really hit its stride by the 1950s but by then it had shifted its tech gears. The TL(6+x)^ gizmos were effectively gone with TL7^ or TL(7+x)^ gizmos replacing them; GURPS Atomic Horror IMHO gives a good slice of Atompunk.
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Old 08-20-2018, 04:49 AM   #620
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Once Dp-Earth finds out about the transistor and how to make it will they even try to continue down the vacuum tube route?

Size, weight, power consumption, and durability are the transistor's main advantages over the vacuum tube.
They're kind of trying to skip that stage, going straight from the aforementioned multiplex tubes to experimenting with vacuum microelectronics.

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Atompunk is a weird concept as it can be argued that it ran parallel to Dieselpunk with the "atomic power" gizmos of Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers and really hit its stride by the 1950s but by then it had shifted its tech gears. The TL(6+x)^ gizmos were effectively gone with TL7^ or TL(7+x)^ gizmos replacing them; GURPS Atomic Horror IMHO gives a good slice of Atompunk.
Kind of, yeah, but the point is that the Atompunk stuff often was either clearly more advanced, or had a more advance feel to it, than the Dieselpunk stuff, so I'm using them as distinct eras (though the Atompunk era of Earth-2 is going to be somewhat different from the Atompunk era of a hypothetical parallel where Dieselpunk Earth never encountered the other four).
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