Recent content by Craig

Were this ASB and not Alternate History Discussion: After 1900 a convenient Iceberg may have shown up for the U-Boat to strike. Maybe next time.

Would Japan have attacked the Aleutians if they were Russian?

Perhaps the question is 'Can a USSR that hadn't been run by an industrializing psychopath over the previous 20 years have won the Great Patriotic War?'

Worse case scenario may be the US trying and failing to keep Alaska out of Bolshevik hands between 1917 - 1922. That might lead to a Soviet Alaska which now has great reason to hate and fear the US.

How would the government pay for universal health? The 16th Amendment authorizing an income tax wasn't ratified until February 3, 1913. Couple all of that with WWI starting up in a few years, the taxes on the nation will appear to go up massively.

A live world-wide broadcast of a manned Soviet launch may kick this TL to ASB. :)

1954 is only a year after the nominal end of the Korean War. The US would have hit those parts of China which most threatened remaining US forces in South Korea. Also, probably, major population centers along the coast. Otherwise, China is not a threat to the US, Korea or Japan. In the...

Harry Turtledove's The Hot War series also ignores the existence of the B-36. I guess acknowledging it would make the story too much of a an Americawank.

FYI: The last update was January 23, on page 47. OTOH, he may feel complimented that his TL has generated so much interest that it's still hotly discussed two months and twenty-three pages later.

Perhaps the 1955 example by the war mongers of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick convinced the US Government to not brush off a hostile Sweden and decided to invade before Sweden managed to build or steal a Quadium Bomb. Could anybody blame them?

Small quibble. I suspect that first satellite launch vehicle would be more like the smaller, multi-stage rockets used by Explorer 1 than the modified R-7 rocket used for Sputnik.

Judging by The Forgotten Man, by Amity Schlaes, there's an excellent chance that the depression would not have become Great and that recovery would have well on its way by November 1932,

THIS. A key difference between Venus and Mars is that any manned ship going to Mars should be able to land on Deimos and/or Phobos.

We REALLY need to start using the Gap between the inner and outer Van Allen Belts (around 7500-8100 miles). Putting large manned stations in LEO requires too much station keeping and too much general crap sharing the orbits.

Wasn't Freedom a Reagan Administration program? By that time, unexpectedly strong solar activity had expanded the upper atmosphere giving Skylab more drag than had been anticipated, causing its premature de-orbit.