Recent content by Coiler

I loooooooooooove simulations, especially counterfactual/alternate ones[1]. While I could go on and on and on about the perils of wargaming/simulations, overall I think someone who tries to use empirical tools in a serious way is usually preferable to someone who doesn't. (This is another issue...

Online AH, unlike Star Trek inspiring engineers/space scientists, Top Gun getting people to join the US Navy, or 101 Dalamatians leading people on mostly ill-conceived attempts to raise those dogs, is very insular. To use one of my metaphors, it doesn't have a handle for normal people to grab.

Military planning 101 has lots of emphasis on "courses of action" (the formal field manualese term). IE it's important and essentially to analyze the potential courses of action for both you and the enemy, and guess what's the "most likely" and "most dangerous".

Toying with the notion which I don't know is plausible, but can be a good point of difference: Having an independent Scotland's head of government still be called a "First Minister" and not a "Prime Minister" Thoughts?

Axis victory collaborator air force.... (or a Ju-88 in postwar French service)

The second All Union novel, A Period of Cheating, is now out!.

Yeah, it's not like it's the headquarters of the nuclear command or anything, oh wait

I actually followed this theory (having heard of it earlier) for my most important AH flags in All Union and went a step farther by having them actually be intentionally bland/mediocre to deter their use as nationalist rallying symbols. (The lowlight is the Independent Republic of Romania, a...

Reviving this with something I just found/came up with: Ways (including giant vaccuum flasks) to make liquid oxygen for rockets either more storable or faster-filling, which were considered OTL. For launch vehicles it wasn't nearly as crucial, but for ICBMs it's essential. A variant of the...

My stepfather once had a Farsi cover album of Frank Sinatra songs.

For me it was the xenomorph-koalas. Yeah, the entire "story" is nothing but a description of an entire people that are inherently monstrous and cruel and sadistic in the extreme even when it makes absolutely no sense and even though a single actually human culture would have sent the edgelords...

I also think (and may write another post either here or on my own blog) that this can apply to variations on character names. Like a common fantasy trope of taking a real name and slightly altering it actually actually fits with linguistic variations on real names...

Meanwhile a Canadian team has not won a Stanley cup since mid-1993. Afterwards Canadians won champions in the American leagues of baseball (Blue Jays, fall 1993), and basketball (Raptors, 2019)

The Dream A biography of Nigerian international footballer Hakeem Olajuwon, one of the greatest goalkeepers to play the sport.

My answers are: "I can't possibly know" and "it's irrelevant to counterfactual/alternate history fiction,"