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Originally Posted by lwcamp
This is starting to sound reasonable. It is worthwhile to note that nearly all of the people working at Hanford had no idea what they were making. The stuff that they thought they were producing was officially called "tube alloy", only later did people learn it was called plutonium and was used to turn Nagasaki into flaming radioactive rubble. So your army of mind controlled zombie slaves could be just the the thing, to act as pipe cutters and riveters and concrete pourers and crane operators and such.
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Brilliant.
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Originally Posted by lwcamp
Now the Hanford project had one genius (Enrico Fermi), but he was backed up by a whole bunch of other geniuses back in Los Alamos doing theory and experiments needed to get the nuclear data required to make the reactor work. After driving out or executing all the Jewish scientists and then invading their neighbors so that the other European scientists fled to the United States, Nazi Germany basically only had one physics genius left - Werner Heisenberg. And either Fermi was just a better genius than Heisenberg, or Heisenberg was actively working to sabotage the German nuclear program. Not to mention that Heisenberg was accounted for after the war. So getting the nuclear physics expertise may be difficult for these 3rd Reich holdovers.
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Well, in the world they came from, Hans Kammler knew about the other worlds since they were discovered, in 1943. And he was part of the planning for a new Reich in another world.
This plan was unknown to Hitler or others outside the SS (who did not believe in the occult and would have considered the esoteric aspects of the research involved ridiculous). As the tide of war turned against Germany, the upper echelon of the SS leadership started to become aware that victory for the Third Reich might be impossible, especially as their research did not turn up anything that would make enough of a difference on Earthly* battlefields in time to turn the tide.
As a result, they spent much of 1944 and early 1945 preparing the Last Redoubt, though in such strict secrecy that only in the last few months would they dare to openly loot factories and move entire armouries over. Before that, they stuck to things that were not urgently needed for the war effort. On the other hand, control over a whole lot of secret research meant that there was every opportunity to arrange for the best scientific equipment, and minds, to be transported over, even if the last steps were only taken when Germany's defeat seemed inevitable.
Hans Kammler may or may not have been able to move any actual geniuses to the Last Redoubt, but among the several hundred living settlers chosen would have been many of the engineers and scientists involved in all secret SS programs over 1944-1945. And Kammler would have been aware of the driving need for massive amounts of energy, to satisfy the dark Things that they had allied with, so he'd have prioritised the construction of power plants.
Mind you, while the history of the world these wacky Nazis came from seems to match ours until 1943, it is not necessary to confine ourselves merely to people who were unaccounted for after the war. Indeed, it seems utterly impossible that the Natactic Space Nazis could have done what they did and history remained the same. This is deliberate and a mystery for PCs to explore. For our purposes, just note that any true believing SS man could have fled to the Last Redoubt, regardless of what happened to him in our history. I'll rule that the senior SS leadership didn't trust Heisenberg, but that they secretly obtained copies of all the research he did, as well as recruiting whoever involved in the German atomic program who
was a genuine Nazi, ideally of the occult loopy kind, or at least could be brought into such a belief system.
Granted, the German atomic program was nowhere near the success of Los Alamos, but it doesn't have to be. Those atomic scientists that Kammler selected just have to be able to build a reactor at some point during the 40-50 years of the history** of these Antarctic Space Nazis. That's ten times the time that the Allies took and while Los Alamos was obviously a lot bigger concern than the research part of the Last Redoubt, the growth of the slave economy of the Antarctic Slave Nazis means that there would actually be quite a lot of surplus resources available after the first generation (during which, yes, a lot of unforeseen problems with settling a new world no doubt cropped up).
*Most of Earth being Very Low Mana, at best, which made even awesomely powerful otherwordly allies rather limited in military terms.
**Which, in itself, is merely an arbitrary number I threw out because it seemed a plausible time for the Antarctic Space Nazis to have solved any early problems and to be in possession of long-range exploration zeppelins, albeit possibly the earliest nuclear versions. If it would be more plausible for the earliest nuclear zeppelin to be launched later, or earlier, I can adjust that date.
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Originally Posted by lwcamp
Maybe the Nazis are actively conducting intelligence gathering and recruitment operations in our world? Perhaps they support Neo-Nazi movements, and recruit the best and the brightest? Maybe they send some of their most gifted ubermenschen to universities to major in nuclear engineering? Plus, there's enough information in the public domain to go a fair ways to building up a technological base for constructing reactors - all the nuclear cross sections are basically available to anyone with an internet connection.
Luke
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Actually, since leaving Earth, these wacky Nazis have had zero contact with any technological world. They can't go back and don't know what happened on Earth.