Steampunk Mars/ Cold War crossover

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by marvin

I was think of doing a GURPS Dying Mars/Space 1889 crossover with something like Red Storm Rising.

So the gist is that...

Ancient Artifact somehow transfers every other inner planet, Vulcan, Venus, Mars from a steam punk setting to a more modern year during the late Cold War. For simplicity's sake lets say 1973 (last year of Vietnam and a year after the last Apollo mission).

So my questions are...

How long would it take Earth to notice the difference? I'd imagine that would occur rather quickly.

How quickly could we send a manned mission to each of these planets?

An amateur with even a small telescope could probably detect the difference the first time he looked. Even just the atmosphere would change how things looked. Real canals would be noticed as well as cities and so on. One day would be quite possible for Mars. If your Steampunk Venus is still cloud covered it'd be the last one to have its' change confirmed.

Spend as much money as you like but it'd be at least a decade before manned missions could go anywhere and they'd be small at first. Possibly for a significant period of time as well. Realistic space flight is just hard.

I'd give it 2 years for an unmanned flyby also. The Viking landings could probably happen as scheduled in 1976, maybe with altered instrument packages..