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Old 08-22-2020, 08:27 PM   #4981
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Originally Posted by ronwit View Post
What about John Drake (Danger Man)
As there is no backstory on John Drake to get that from, I'll say he's the same age as his actor. That makes him twenty-nine in 1957.
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Old 08-23-2020, 04:52 PM   #4982
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Try this one...

A brilliant inventor, Manfred Reinach, who in Homeline history died in the Holocust, got to come to America in 1932. He got to work with Robert H. Goddard and became his close confidant. When Wernher von Braun gets to America he finds Reinach and manages to rebuild his friendship.

Since, Reinach is a brilliant metalurgist and has both great conections with the millitary and the right to look through all of Goddard's papers, the team of von Braun and Reinach manage to get the first satellite into orbit in 1950.

The local year in this Q6 low manna world is 1959. The US built maned satelite is just gotten to the point that people can stay there. Work on the life support systems, growing food in space, medical issues of micro-gravity, are all being studied. The USA is commited to reaching the moon in the next decade and building a moonbase.

Russia, hasn't really tried to compete in the space race, they focus on retrenchment and demands that the American Milliterist Imperialist Warmongers leave space. The Russians, feeling that America is too dangerous to challenge directly focuses on promoting revolution in the decolonizing world. America, secure in her oceanic moats and dominating the orbital high ground, has stayed out of the third world and continued the New Deal commitment to anti-colonialism and, without a Korean War (Stalin feared US rockets with nukes), Truman's third term was devoted to FDR's Second Bill of Rights.

This means France and Britain are competing with Russia in the third world. While America focuses on ending racial and class inequality and starts to move out into the solar system Europe fights a cold war across their former empires.

Basically, another version of the classic spy thriller. Like my other recent spy thriller I've changed a basic fact. America's focus on world events and desperation to prove to the world they can compete with the USSR is removed. America is minimally engaged with the world so Frace and Britain provide the spy power. In many ways this setting makes Bond films, were Britain's spy masters make it a still dominant power, semirealistic.
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Last edited by Astromancer; 08-23-2020 at 05:04 PM.
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Old 08-23-2020, 07:44 PM   #4983
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1968, and his fame and profile weren't really comparable to de Gaulle.
Yeah, I transposed the digits.

Attempted 1957 U.K. right-wing coup would probably want Churchill as leader/figurehead. In this timeline, he might have resigned from politics beforehand (maybe to teach at Westminster College, like on Lenin-1).

I think/hope he would denounce it.

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There was an Avengers episode with Mrs. Keal called the "Mauritius Penny" were Europe's fascists tried to team up to fight democracy. Stead and Keal with as hard on them as Stead and Peal were going to be.
Avengers plots do read a bit like potential I-Cop adventures, if Infinity being less sexy & sexist.
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Old 08-24-2020, 05:02 AM   #4984
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Since, Reinach is a brilliant metalurgist and has both great conections with the millitary and the right to look through all of Goddard's papers, the team of von Braun and Reinach manage to get the first satellite into orbit in 1950.
The major problem here is paying for it. Creating a rocketry industry is really expensive. In the real world, that was paid for by the military, but they worked rather too slowly for this outcome. The US got serious about space in reaction to Sputnik. Who pays for this rapid development?
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Old 08-24-2020, 05:43 AM   #4985
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Yes, 1950 for the first satellite is really too early, as there would not have been the impulse without the Cold War. Without the Cold War, the USSR would have steamrolled over Europe (and probably Japan and Korea) after the end of World War II, as Stalin would not have wanted to have given France, Germany, Japan, or the UK time to recover.

In addition, without the research into ICBMs, there would not have been any money for the Space Race. Sputnik 1 went up on a R-7 launch vehicle (an ICBM), and the threat posed by Sputnik 1 to the USA was physical, not psychological. If the USSR could place a satellite into a stable orbit, it meant that it could hit the USA with a nuclear weapon without needing to send them by bombers vulnerable to fighter interceptors or anti-aircraft guns. It meant that all of the protections that the USA had built after WWII were worthless and that the only way for the USA to avoid annihilation would be to build its own ICBM. The Space Race was just a propoganda tool to spin the positives of the development of the ICBMs (and to build national pride and unity in the face of the divisions caused by racism), though the derived and improved technologies largely created TL8.
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Old 08-24-2020, 10:20 AM   #4986
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The major problem here is paying for it. Creating a rocketry industry is really expensive. In the real world, that was paid for by the military, but they worked rather too slowly for this outcome. The US got serious about space in reaction to Sputnik. Who pays for this rapid development?
This is a perpetual problem for the more realistic sort of "space" plots. Realistic spaceflight is mostly an expensive boondoggle. Even the low earth orbit stuff that kind of pays off is iffy considering you could get most of the benefits from a cheaper network of undersea cables and weather radars.

Without the military uses (and even the ICBMs probably aren't *that* big a win over, say, jet powered stealthed bomber drones) and the international bragging rights, it's hard to find reasons anyone cares about space enough to spend even a fraction of what it would cost to go there.
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Old 08-24-2020, 12:14 PM   #4987
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Yes, at $10,000 per kilogram, it is just too expensive. Now, at $300 per kilogram, the economics are much different, but you need to get to that point (and we have not after over half a century).
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Old 08-24-2020, 12:32 PM   #4988
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In 1908, a meteor that on Homeline hit near hit near the Tunguska River instead arrives north of Berlin. Despite what some media on this timeline shows, it did not hit the city itself, and did relatively-little damage to it. What it did do is scare people, and make people pay more attention to astronomy.

In 1910, Kaiser Wilhelm II announced that by 1930, the German flag would fly on the Moon, and by 1940, Germany would have a permanent colony up there (he had wanted to say that Germany would put a man on the moon by 1920, but his scientists and engineers talked him down). This was fairly widely mocked, but various European and other intelligence services did pay attention to German rocketry experiments, especially as they got big enough to carry substantial bombs (which some considered to be the whole reason for said experiments). This lead to other nations putting money into their own experiments, which lead to Dr. Goddard being employed by the US Army in 1914 to develop rockets for the Artillery. It also effectively butterflied away WWI - which the pressures that cause it on many other Earths were still there, the powder keg just kept failing to spark, and much if the money that would have gone into the war went instead to rocket development.

In 1918, a German three-stage rocket managed to put a radio transmitter into Low-Earth Orbit - it actually hit the atmosphere and burned up before the batteries would have run out, but it managed two-and-a-third orbits. Suddenly, the Space Race was something more than military spending, and the need to get to the Moon first was a matter of national pride. Of course, technological development can be sped up by stealing research from other nations. The Great Game has entered a new phase, and the Roaring Twenties have a slightly different flavor.

EDIT: While radios were not common in OTL 1918, they did exist, and the rocket craze could push them a little faster as a side effect. What the Germans managed would thus become known pretty quickly.
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Old 08-24-2020, 12:44 PM   #4989
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EDIT: While radios were not common in OTL 1918, they did exist, and the rocket craze could push them a little faster as a side effect. What the Germans managed would thus become known pretty quickly.
The first rockets could have heliostats as signaling devices, reflecting sunlight in a pattern. It wouldn't be able to receive, but anyone with a telescope could see the blinking and read the morse code. Could be an early version of global broadcast. Radio would still have motivation to follow quickly though.
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Old 08-24-2020, 03:37 PM   #4990
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I do not think that 1910 Germany had the scientific understanding to even imagine the requirements of sending a satellite into orbit. They also had neither the technological expertise nor the economy to do the required research and development in just eight years. The USA was only able to do it because the Nazis had already done the basic research in rocketry, we had over thirty years of aeronautics research from NACA (starting in 1915), we were already early TL7, and our economy in the early 1950s was something like 6x as large as the German Empire's in 1910 (it was already twice as large as the German Empire's in 1910). In addition, staging is a TL7 technology.

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