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Old 07-06-2012, 05:03 PM   #31
Polydamas
 
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

I find this is simple but time consuming. You just read things from your target society, and read things written about them by academics, until you have a sense of how things worked. My mental world has at least four filters of “how the human world works”: classical Greece, late medieval Latin Christendom, mid 20th century US, and 21st century Canada. An advantage of gaming is that it forces you to think about some practical details which even reenacting doesn't touch on.
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Old 07-06-2012, 06:51 PM   #32
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

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Originally Posted by David Johnston2 View Post
Al Capone and his ilk were the cause of the restriction on submachine guns in the United States in 1934, but Britain of course started on it much earlier. In 1870 it became illegal to carry a gun off of one's property without a license.
Hrm, Dr Watson never bothered with that (or was bothered about that).

Anyway, the relationship between crime and gun control is the US is that crime causes gun control. The first wave was in cities like New York with its' "Sullivan Act". This followed the "Gangs of New York" period and was designed to take guns out of the hands of the urban poor.

Then came the gangsters. Not just Capone but the spree bank robbers of the midwest like Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. This begat the Act of 1934. Before that almost everything was legal outside of specific municipaiities (order a BAR direct from the manufacturer and get it delivered by US Mail).

The next wave came in 1968 driven by the assassinations of that year and some stuff (like guns by mail) from the first Kennedy shooting.

Nothing twas done that would have effected James Earl Ray' rifle or simply made Oswald buy his in person but this and alter measures weren't really that well connected to the events whose publicity energized them.

Nothing new really. The 34 Act didn't help much with Clyde Barrow stealing autoweapons from police stations and National Guard armories.

A general rule for the US at least is probaly until something was explictly forbidden it was permitted.
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Old 07-06-2012, 07:33 PM   #33
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
What preconceptions and ideas should be 'unlearned' when designing a world (with TL, CRs, Statuses, Stigmas and other features) which hasn't experienced WW-/ColdWar-equivalents?

Gun Control has been mentioned. Passports are another one (passport/border checks were extremely mild/non-existent pre-WWI by modern standards).

What else?
A lot of the things Adolph Hitler did or supported, such as eugenics, and just general racism, would not be as extremely and absolutely vilified, if it hadn't been for him.
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Old 07-06-2012, 08:58 PM   #34
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

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Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
. . .People's views on guns here in the US were pretty benevolent back then. Without a substantial event to change those views, I would expect them to stay the same. . .
Remember two American presidents, both Garfield and McKinley, were killed by small handguns, only about 20 years apart. Despite this there was no giant roar for handgun elimination until the mid-20th century (say, 1930s) and it accelerated in the 1960s.

There had to be a large, vocal, and well-organized anti-gun movement to gain much headway.

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Originally Posted by Ronin Rabbit View Post
No cold war means no Vietnam, it also ends up meaning no war on drugs. . . .
The "war on drugs" actually was a product of the Progressive Era. Mid 1910s. Calls for bans on alcohol, drugs, and guns were all part of the same movement to make America safer, more productive, and more rationally organized.

One BIG change due to the Cold War was the microchip. It's cheap as he## now but the original research the led to its development, and, more important, the development of ways to make microchips en masse was extremely expensive -- the equivalent of hundreds of billions of 2012 dollars. No private sector corporation was going to do that without a huge guaranteed market -- which, of course, did not exist in the early 1960s.

Uncle Sugar (Sam, for those less cynical) was in the early 1960s looking at the Big Bad Bear (CCCP) and had reason to fear. The Bear had more people and resources. So if the US of A was going to stave off Russian offensives in the Third World by military force (Vietnam was only the most publicized effort) Uncle Sam had to have superior tech, including communications and sensor gear. Gee. Guess what the microchip is good for?

A friend of mine claimed that people like the late S. Jobs and current Wozniak could build their first computers cheap courtesy of Uncle Sam. (IIRC a 16K Apple cost about $2000 1977 dollars -- say 5-6000 US dollars now -- but that was dirt cheap for a working computer in 1977. Don't ask me how I know that.) The US military was buying lots of microcircuits for use in their aircraft, missiles, etc. but they had to have a very long MTBF (mean time between failures.) Chips from batches that didn't meet the MTBF requirements got shipped back to the manufacturers.

Well, no manufacturer is just going to throw away merchandise if they can make a buck on it some way. "Sure, Mssrs. Jobs & Wozniak, we can sell you these chips -- cheap. Where do you want them delivered?"

And a whole economic sector was born.

But the first checks for R&D, manufacture, and purchase were written by Uncle Sam.

The Progressives and other modernists of the late nineteenth century had been calling for Big Government long before it got here. The wars, especially WWI, did a HUGE amount to sell this idea -- and to make it seem irresistible. "If we don't have command economies with central planning, we're going to be drowned by the efficiencies of the evil Communists!" Well . . .

No wars, less of a sales pitch for Big Brother.

Note that in WW I the US government took over the railroads, about 25 percent of the economy. Almost every senior official of the New Deal had had experience in running things in 1917-18.

Don't underestimate this.

Last edited by fredtheobviouspseudonym; 07-06-2012 at 09:14 PM.
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Old 07-07-2012, 12:01 AM   #35
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

The Space Race, with the target of getting a man on the moon, was a direct result of the Cold War.

So even though the idea of space travel was becoming realistic from the end of WWII, without the impetus and available budget from the Cold War space travel might be extremely retarded.

Likewise, following from fredtheobviouspseudonym's exposition on microchips, jet travel, radar, cryptography and many other high technology products of wartime need, that we otherwise take for granted, might not exist or be underdeveloped.
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Old 07-07-2012, 12:07 AM   #36
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

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Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym View Post
There had to be a large, vocal, and well-organized anti-gun movement to gain much headway.
Not really. The primary mover behind gun control is generally increased urbanization, and before the 20th century the US was under 50%.
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Old 07-07-2012, 06:31 AM   #37
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

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A friend of mine claimed that people like the late S. Jobs and current Wozniak could build their first computers cheap courtesy of Uncle Sam. (IIRC a 16K Apple cost about $2000 1977 dollars -- say 5-6000 US dollars now -- but that was dirt cheap for a working computer in 1977. Don't ask me how I know that.) The US military was buying lots of microcircuits for use in their aircraft, missiles, etc. but they had to have a very long MTBF (mean time between failures.) Chips from batches that didn't meet the MTBF requirements got shipped back to the manufacturers.
I can readily believe this, as my Grandfather worked in the microchip industry in quality control, and to this day he gets annoyed by the maddening unreliability of consumer electronics. He knows from experience that they can make them where they just don't break, even under all kinds of brutal conditions.
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Old 07-07-2012, 07:50 AM   #38
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

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Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym View Post
Remember two American presidents, both Garfield and McKinley, were killed by small handguns, only about 20 years apart. Despite this there was no giant roar for handgun elimination until the mid-20th century (say, 1930s) and it accelerated in the 1960s.
Not the 30s. The Sullivan act dates to 1911. The Act of 34 had virtually nothing to do with handguns. It was all about autoweapons and saweed off longarms. I am not aware of any noise about banning handguns from that period.

With the Act of 68 you get bans on importing small handguns and pressure for gun control at least tries to acclerate from their but if you look at concealed carry states in the US (46?) it was probably never "a giant roar".
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Old 07-07-2012, 08:49 AM   #39
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

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A lot of the things Adolph Hitler did or supported, such as eugenics, and just general racism, would not be as extremely and absolutely vilified, if it hadn't been for him.
That is a good point. Even language has been affected. The Germans don't like using the word Fuhrer any more, and back in 1940 Canadian newspapers could write sentences like the following in their editorial sections: “Some authorities predict that this war will bring the final solution to Canada’s bilingual problem.” (The idea, roughly, was that all the Francophones would join the military, be forced to learn English, and give up French after the war).
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Old 07-07-2012, 11:25 AM   #40
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Default Re: Worldbuilding without the post-WW/WWII/Cold War glasses (TL, CR etc.)

Without the world wars, there's probably no concept of "total war" that involves attempting to destroy the enemy's industrial, transportation, and agricultural base as a means of impairing their abilty to continue making war. Without that basic idea, war becomes more about capturing such things rather than wiping them off the map.

Without total war, there's less targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. War stays slightly less horrific and WMD's are less common and more tactical. As such, there's less popular support for peace and disarmament movements (which probably more closely resemble the isolationist movements of the pre-WWI and II U.S.). And so, many fewer hippies.

Without total war, there might be less of a drive for unconditional complete surrender of the enemy nation, particularily for ideological motives. Once you've taken whatever territory you've set out to take (or repelled the invaders), you make peace with the enemy nation. Keeping the war going until you defeat them completely, and then remaking their internal politics probably happens less often. So less nation building and resources spent on nation building.

Probably without the World Wars and Cold War, there might be less of a bilateral world. Two nations may go to war without dragging in all of the other major players, and times of relative peace without a complete, bi-polar, us-against-them "pick a side" attitude may be possible and occur more often.
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