New Reality Seeds

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

The catch is they've botched the travel and somehow they're landing in Homeline's past.

I'd go with an echo to prevent shenanigans, but an interesting seed nonetheless.

[PTTG]

Actually a Japanese Imperialist group is an interesting Guns of the South sort of deal.

Your crosstime idealists are going to amp up Japan in a couple of ways. For one, maybe they find a way to break the Chinese ceasefire. Hell, maybe they convince Japan to avoid inciting too much backlash with a softer occupation; there may even be international legitimacy (to an extent) if those two steps are combined. Japan isn't invading China; they're performing peacekeeping operations until the Chinese civil war can be resolved.

Then there's (space) battier interventions, such as giving Yoshio Nishina a 21st-century physics textbook in '29, but he'd also need to be convinced to work with the nationalists instead of publishing his work more broadly. Kamikaze nukes are broadly thematic, if somewhat unrealistic in a campaign where Japan is winning the war.

Go with the other horrors of the Empire, and you can give Japan success in their biowarfare projects. Give them a disease that attacks lactose-tolerant people, or whatever (maybe antibodies from lactose-intolerant mothers keeps children OK). It still probably makes more sense to make crop blights, since the USA and the USSR rely on wheat far more than Japan did.

Or we could go all out and say advanced, self-assembling robots drop onto Japan in 1943. The mechanical warriors (and their human pilots) turn the war around again.

[adm]

Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold

The D-Day landings were only as successful as they were thanks to a wide variety of things going right. ...

A total failure of the US landings at Normandy, but Commonwealth forces are successful is a hard sell, the Commonwealth bridgehead would be small enough to be more easily contained. While Omaha Beach nearly turned into a disaster, Utah Beach's disorganization is often overblown and was typical of many other landings, Torch, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima, had similar early landing disorganization, someone there would have got them organized and moving. There were plans to divert from one US beach to the other if one was too strong, abandoning Omaha Beach was almost done in OTL.

If the Normandy landings had gone as badly as posited, then expect Dragoon in Southern France to hit much sooner than it did in OTL. They had wanted Overlord and Dragoon to be simultaneous, but did not have the landing capacity for both at once in Europe and the Mediterranean. If Normandy was going badly, a lot of lift capacity would be diverted from the Pacific and Burma campaigns to speed Dragoon up.

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Or we could go all out and say advanced, self-assembling robots drop onto Japan in 1943. The mechanical warriors (and their human pilots) turn the war around again.

And the robots are desigbned to only work for large-bosomed high-school girls and brooding young bishonen with scruffy hair?

[AlexanderHowl]

Taino-1

In Taino-1, a reality quake from a much more advanced matriarchal timeline deposited a totally automated nanofactory in the highlands of Cuba around 1000 AD. After a couple of decades of trial and error, the women of the Taino people learned to communicate with the governing intelligence of the nanofactory and developed a relationship where they gave 'sacrifices' (raw materials) in exchange for material goods (the governing intelligence of the nanofactory ignored any attempts by men to communicate with it). After a century, the women of the Taino discovered that it could produce battlesuits and could teach them how to use them effectively.

The Taino women used the battlesuits to crush the Carib invaders of their islands in 1200 AD and created a unified Taino Federation that controlled the islands of the Taino Sea (the Caribbean Sea in Homeline). They developed a hybrid TL5 (TL11) technology, as the nanofactory could make anything up to TL11 that possessed a mass of one metric ton or less. The Taino Federation formed the Wave Knights, a group of battlesuit wearing women, to protect the Taino Federation from invaders as they learned from the governing intelligence of the nanofactory how to improve their society.

The local date in the timeline is 1605 AD, but the Spanish conquistadors were crushed easily by the Wave Knights during the 1500s, and the Taino Federation is a TL5 (TL11) society whose technology appears magical to the European powers. With six centuries of trial and error, the Taino have managed to help the nanofactory to reproduce so that there are one hundred nanofactories spread across the Taino Federation. The Taino worship the nanofactories as messengers of their deities, but they do not allow anyone outside of the female clergy to communicate with the nanofactories.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Taino-1

In Taino-1, a reality quake from a much more advanced matriarchal timeline deposited a totally automated nanofactory in the highlands of Cuba around 1000 AD. After a couple of decades of trial and error, the women of the Taino people learned to communicate with the governing intelligence of the nanofactory and developed a relationship where they gave 'sacrifices' (raw materials) in exchange for material goods (the governing intelligence of the nanofactory ignored any attempts by men to communicate with it). After a century, the women of the Taino discovered that it could produce battlesuits and could teach them how to use them effectively.

The Taino women used the battlesuits to crush the Carib invaders of their islands in 1200 AD and created a unified Taino Federation that controlled the islands of the Taino Sea (the Caribbean Sea in Homeline). They developed a hybrid TL5 (TL11) technology, as the nanofactory could make anything up to TL11 that possessed a mass of one metric ton or less. The Taino Federation formed the Wave Knights, a group of battlesuit wearing women, to protect the Taino Federation from invaders as they learned from the governing intelligence of the nanofactory how to improve their society.

The local date in the timeline is 1605 AD, but the Spanish conquistadors were crushed easily by the Wave Knights during the 1500s, and the Taino Federation is a TL5 (TL11) society whose technology appears magical to the European powers. With six centuries of trial and error, the Taino have managed to help the nanofactory to reproduce so that there are one hundred nanofactories spread across the Taino Federation. The Taino worship the nanofactories as messengers of their deities, but they do not allow anyone outside of the female clergy to communicate with the nanofactories.

Interesting. Probably a bit nerve-wracking for Infinity. I think if I were running this, I'd make the nano-factory a bit stupid in the machine way; it won't suggest courses of action to its operators, it will only do what it's told. Thus, the Taino have high tech tools and still a mostly low-tech mindset. Inquisitive priestesses have made discoveries and learned to ask questions that get productive answers (beyond "build me a battlesuit") but there's a lot of trial and error.

I'd also have the Columbian Exchange pandemics still going off on schedule. Probably alleviated somewhat once the priestesses figured out how to make medical devices off the nanofac, but I like the idea of an almost-post-apoc high tech society facing off against the far more numerous, but lower-tech invaders. (Kind of elves vs orcs).

... I think I'd also throw in a few rogue priestesses in the past who managed to scarper with a nanofac or two and now lurk in the forbidden lands on the fringes of the Taino Confederacy, using their nanofacs to create monsters and otherwise be scary. Just because. You could even have one or two head off to Europe to find out more about these pale barbarians; be a fun little addition to a very strange Renaissance campaign. (Makes me think a bit of Miracle of Science.)

[AlexanderHowl]

Penny-1

In Penny-1, the US government decided to charge a telecommunications tax of $0.01 per email ($0.001 per internet posting) to internet service providers in 1993 (it was quickly followed by similar taxes in Europe and Japan in 1994 and the rest of the world by 1995). Internet service providers passed the cost of the telecommunications tax to their customers and, without relatively free email and internet postings, the internet primarily remained the province of academia and social media never developed beyond the old style BBS. While there are internet companies that provide specialized services, the added cost of communication means that the majority of people only use them when they cannot find local suppliers.

It is now the year 2018 in Penny-1 and, while the pace of digital computer technology stagnated comparison to similar timelines, overall technological progress was accelerated as the money that would have been invested in computing technology was channeled into more productive investments. The most extreme example of technological advancement occurred due to breakthroughs in biotechnology in the late 1990s, meaning that the timeline possesses TL9(TL10 biotechnology). Over the past decade, TL10 biological computers have replaced the old TL8 digital computers and have triggered a computer revolution.

While Penny-1 is a Q6 timeline, Homeline and Centrum have had a lot of trouble infiltrating it because of its advance biotechnology. While genetic engineering of humans is still avoided in the timeline, genetically engineered security animals are quite common, and they are very hard to fool with the technology of Homeline and Centrum. After the USA of the timeline captured a conveyor, Infinity was send a strike force against the secret underground facility where it was held and, even though it succeeded in destroying the conveyor, it lost fifty agents during the attack. Since then, the governments of the timeline have been on alert for 'alien' invaders who use human clones to do their dirty work.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Penny-1

In Penny-1, the US government decided to charge a telecommunications tax of $0.01 per email ($0.001 per internet posting) to internet service providers in 1993 (it was quickly followed by similar taxes in Europe and Japan in 1994 and the rest of the world by 1995). Internet service providers passed the cost of the telecommunications tax to their customers and, without relatively free email and internet postings, the internet primarily remained the province of academia and social media never developed beyond the old style BBS. While there are internet companies that provide specialized services, the added cost of communication means that the majority of people only use them when they cannot find local suppliers.

It is now the year 2018 in Penny-1 and, while the pace of digital computer technology stagnated comparison to similar timelines, overall technological progress was accelerated as the money that would have been invested in computing technology was channeled into more productive investments. The most extreme example of technological advancement occurred due to breakthroughs in biotechnology in the late 1990s, meaning that the timeline possesses TL9(TL10 biotechnology). Over the past decade, TL10 biological computers have replaced the old TL8 digital computers and have triggered a computer revolution.

While Penny-1 is a Q6 timeline, Homeline and Centrum have had a lot of trouble infiltrating it because of its advance biotechnology. While genetic engineering of humans is still avoided in the timeline, genetically engineered security animals are quite common, and they are very hard to fool with the technology of Homeline and Centrum. After the USA of the timeline captured a conveyor, Infinity was send a strike force against the secret underground facility where it was held and, even though it succeeded in destroying the conveyor, it lost fifty agents during the attack. Since then, the governments of the timeline have been on alert for 'alien' invaders who use human clones to do their dirty work.

<sigh> There is no particular reason why advanced biotechnology would make a parallel hard to infiltrate in itself because infiltrating a parallel doesn't involve a lot of dressing up in cat suits and navigating laser mazes. It's more like "buying a fake driver's license and then renting store space". The difficult ones to infiltrate are the paranoid ones that do ID and background checks at every turn. Nor would Infinity deploy a company-strength military unit to attack a local government installation. The Secret is intended to avoid wars, not start them and military assaults are the exact opposite of covert. Infinity is sneaky. Nor would a parallel that they hadn't even successfully infiltrated be one where they knew enough about what was going to even know the location of secret government research installations

[Flyndaran]

Infiltration's hardest part would be just learning the local language.
Once that's done, simply wandering around as a homeless not-all-there guy would probably work in nearly every human inhabited parallel. Any off behavior or lack of I.D. can easily be explained that way. Sadly, it would almost certainly involve dangerous interactions with locals, but good intel none the less.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

<sigh> There is no particular reason why advanced biotechnology would make a parallel hard to infiltrate in itself because infiltrating a parallel doesn't involve a lot of dressing up in cat suits and navigating laser mazes. It's more like "buying a fake driver's license and then renting store space". The difficult ones to infiltrate are the paranoid ones that do ID and background checks at every turn. Nor would Infinity deploy a company-strength military unit to attack a local government installation. The Secret is intended to avoid wars, not start them and military assaults are the exact opposite of covert. Infinity is sneaky. Nor would a parallel that they hadn't even successfully infiltrated be one where they knew enough about what was going to even know the location of secret government research installations

TL10 biotechnology allows nations to design viruses to infect people without specific qualities (such as tailored vaccines) and to allow vaccinated populations to be carriers of the virus. If the virus makes an infected human release specific scents that genetically engineered security animals are designed to detect but which humans cannot smell, it is fairly easy to detect immigrants (illegal or legal) trying to enter secure locations (it is also really easy to detect illegal immigrants). The governments do not even need to inform their populations of the virus, they just have to release the virus within the population and check the documents of everyone who smells funny to the genetically engineered security animals.