Recent content by Crunch Buttsteak

For some background, in 1981, 82, and 83 oil tycoon Jack Grimm funded multiple expeditions to find the wreck of the RMS Titanic. While the expeditions did not bear fruit at the time, due to technical problems and poor weather, with what we now know about the wreck site, we know that his search...

The Apollo program used an alphabetical sequence of mission profiles ending with the “J missions” of Apollo 15, 16, and 17, which featured longer stays on the surface and more complex surface operations than the previous H missions (12, 13*, & 14). So in a situation where the Apollo program...

When Titanic was leaving Southampton, her displacement was enough to pull the New York and Oceanic free from their moorings and New York almost collided with the Titanic had it not been for the quick intervention of a tugboat to prevent a collision. What would have happened if Titanic and New...

Pretty much what it says, during preflight testing of SM-109 oxygen tank 2 ruptures in either the Operations and Checkout Building, VAB, or on the pad. How long does this delay the flight of Apollo 13, what knock on effects does this have on the rest of the Apollo program?

You could always have the meltdown Chernobyl would have had happen to a different RBMK reactor like Ignalina or Leningrad. The design flaws meant that an RBMK reactor going into a low power state could explode like OTL Chernobyl did, it was only a matter of time.

What would it take for NASA to launch a mission to Skylab to reboost it into a higher (but still accessible by the shuttle) orbit sometime between the end of Skylab 4 and when it’s orbit decayed and it reentered the earth’s atmosphere in 1979? Would the reboost mission have to be manned? Does...

Any chance of David Gerrold’s Blood and Fire script for TNG making it off the ground ITTL?

Back in 1938 there had been a massive push after the flooding of the LA River to encase the river in concrete in order to prevent future floods. This never came to fruition but it did produce some fascinating concept drawings of a fully concrete river, as opposed to the concrete floodwalls we...

Pretty much what it says, what would have happened if Avengers Endgame didn’t get delayed and managed to be released in 2019, before the COVID pandemic? How would that have affected the film industry?

The V-1 had a CEP of 31 km in the early war and 11 km by the end. The guidance system was extremely crude and couldn’t account for targets that move. all this really adds is a bunch of loud, sporadic, and inaccurate buzz-bombs that might or might not hit something. plus the allied landing...

Exactly what it says on the tin. Can you work out a scenario where the city of Königsberg is in undisputedly within Russian territory by the end of the 20th century?

Looking back, the attempt to pass Taft-Hartley Act is considered the ur-example of anti-union overreach, by passing a bill that would have severely undercut the hard-won power of unions in an attempt to restore the pre-depression status quo. How would history have turned out if that Congress...

Fun fact, on the disc for Pikmin is a Windows executable that runs a debug version of the game. Though in that case the executable is running in OpenGL mode and not DirectX.

Exactly what it says on the tin, how would history have played out if Friedrich Ebert’s collaborationist plot to have the far right freikorps kill Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 had succeeded? Would the SPD have had a greater success electorally if they had successfully killed the KPD’s rising star...

Who’s Stalin? *furiously searches* Dzejughashvili?! Were you just trying to find the most obscure figure from the old Bolsheviks to go with? The Red Navy would still be a huge part, if only to prevent the Baltic or Bosporus from being blockaded by reactionary states.