[Infinite Worlds] Idea for an Alternate Earth

[Ed the Coastie]

(Caveat: Please bear in mind that I am by no means an expert in military history. The comments below are simply my own interpretation.)

Originally Posted by rogersd

George Marshall and the Chiefs of Staff told Truman that casualties from Operation Downfall would be close to a million Allied personel before the Japanese home islands were reduced.

By even the most favorable of estimates, Operation Downfall would have been bloody. Most of the sources that I have seen tend to agree with the estimate of 100,000 casualties; if I remember correctly, the "close to a million" figure was a worst-case scenario that assumed a total resistance among the Japanese civilian populace in which the Americans were forced to fight house-to-house for literally every village and intersection.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

A draft can only force so many americans to fight, before a civil war / coup errupts.

True, but I'm not aware that either a civil war or a coup was even being discussed by a credibly significant percentage of the American people. By this point in the war, the American forces had definately gained both the upper hand and the momentum in the Pacific; the general feeling at home would more likely have been the "Let's do what's necessary to finish this thing and get it over with" that seems to have characterized that particular generation rather rather than the "ain't gonna practice war no more / give peace a chance" attitude popularized by an extremely rebellious and overly vocal minority of the following one.

Originally Posted by Ruinous

Would the longer, drawn out war of conquest by USSR generate more tech advances (at-least for the commies, plundering germany, france and britain).
The soviets would likely get all the german scientist that were snapped up by britain and america in our timeline.

Not really, since the War in Europe was pretty much over by that point and the Americans would not have been willing to surrender what they had already gained. It was hard enough to reign in Patton so that the Soviets could take Berlin...I doubt that anyone could have convinced him to surrender American gains of territory, technology, or personnel to the Soviets.

[Derago]

Rathjer than keep beating this scenario with the reality stick, let's talk about some adventure hooks that could come up. What if the Soviets create their own Reich-5-like time-travellers and begin to wage cross-time war on their sworn enemy with many homeline and/or centrum interests in the crossfire?

[Ed the Coastie]

Originally Posted by Derago

Rathjer than keep beating this scenario with the reality stick, let's talk about some adventure hooks that could come up. What if the Soviets create their own Reich-5-like time-travellers and begin to wage cross-time war on their sworn enemy with many homeline and/or centrum interests in the crossfire?

Well...if memory serves, aren't the Soviets supposed to have had some sort of paranormal research program? It wouldn't be difficult to adapt this into a psionic -based cross-time commando corps.

I'll have to think a bit on the whole adventure hook thing...the only thing that comes immediatly to mind is the old "Freedom's Rangers" time-travel series by Keith William Andrews, in which the Americans and the Soviets are fighting a war through time travel.

[David Johnston]

Originally Posted by Derago

Rathjer than keep beating this scenario with the reality stick, let's talk about some adventure hooks that could come up. What if the Soviets create their own Reich-5-like time-travellers and begin to wage cross-time war on their sworn enemy with many homeline and/or centrum interests in the crossfire?

They'd kind of render Centrum redundant. Centrum is, after all, something of a best case socialist dictatorship. Of course a worse case socialist dictatorship might be more fun. Of course the Soviet Union in this world could have already been taken over by Centrum, who are now working to cause the collapse of the United States even as they reform the administration of the Russians.

[vitruvian]

I was thinking about how history would have been different if the Earth's crust didn't contain substantial amounts of Uranium, making the construction of an atomic bomb difficult or impossible.

The only way for the Earth's crust to contain less uranium would be for there to be less uranium in the Earth in general. This would result in less heat at the core, and more than likely a slowing or stopping of continental drift well before the present era. This leaves the continents in different positions and may lead to a dying planet before humans have a chance to evolve.

Even a process that just resulted in pitchblende deposits in lower concentrations or less accessible locations would mean enough geological change that there will likely not *be* a United States, Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany.

[Kyle Aaron]

If you have the "science" which allows travel to alternate worlds without blinking too much, I daresay you can have a similar science which allows much smaller proportions of uranium in the crust, without worrying about continental drift and the like. It's a smaller use of handwavium, I'd say.

But of course there can be other changes which give the same effect without removing uranium. You can, for example, say that Newton's notation for the calculus won out over Leibniz's, which makes the entire progress of physics slower. It's rather the same as how in the West we used Roman numerals, while in the Middle East they used Arabic (in fact Indian) numerals; so their mathematics was far in advance of ours, until we started using Arabic numerals ourselves, about the 13th century. If you've got a clumsy system of noting things down, it slows down progress in mathematics, physics and chemistry.

People would still discover these things, it'd just be much slower. By 2007 we wouldn't have things like quantum uncertainty and the weak force, or calculations of yield of fission, etc. We'd also miss out on microchips, but would have managed transistors by now.