Recent content by MachiavelliJr

Biggish Polynesian voyaging canoe as a mail packet is about the only conceivable use case I can think of and even then you're going to need some fairly serious innovation to get it stiff enough to be wide enough to be stable enough under sail to get up on the foils without wiggling itself apart.

As the thread's been revived I feel like I can reply to this. Small hydrosails, dinghy size, could indeed come along at any time, and "somewhere in Polynesia" is a good guess for where because they built light and pretty strong, but it's a harbour toy that will break if you look at it funny...

Charlie Stross' Merchant Princes sequels (an example of pop AH which is both very clever and very stupid) used 'corpuscular bomb', abbreviated 'corpse' which I thought worked quite well. I can't offhand remember any reference to nuclear power.

God I thought that was longer ago. Pandemic time I guess.

I mean there is a positive which is he appears not to be getting published any more. I guess the idea that an offering exclusively aimed at the very-far-right won't sell many books has finally penetrated Toni Weisskopf's head after 15 years. The negative is, well, Nazi is still a Nazi.

I just decided to find out what he's up to now. I regret that choice.

I know it's fashionable now to point out the serious limits to "Denazification" and refer to all the Germans who managed to retain their high places in society post-1945. But the scale of public education about the evils of Nazism and the popular determination for a clean break are, by any...

I don't know what he can really do to restore the links between the army and 'civil society' - by the late C2nd the army is largely recruited from, and stays on, the periphery, it moves around less, promotes a higher proportion of officers from within, and it's not surprising that those officers...

You'd end up with some other rule to stop the game just being a free-for-all fight under a high ball into the box, because that's just fundamentally a really dull game. Maybe a "no shots from within N yards" rule and a wider pitch to force the game to open up?

Yeah I tend to agree that the Thames Valley backlash would have been TTL's MK Dons, and killed off the idea of mergers/franchises for years to come. Oxford City Council tried to bribe Maxwell to back down with a promise of a new stadium at Seacourt or Botley (apparently "on a site owned by the...

Yeah basically this. Clinton will have vastly better national policies , stronger central coordination (she'll have access to the teams who managed the swine flu and Ebola scares, at least), somewhat better preparedness, and almost certainly get worse outcomes because no Republican governor is...

The warming-pan theory is bollocks though, and everyone knew it was at the time, it was just the only way to avoid the prospect of James and Mary of Modena raising the Prince of Wales in a Catholic household. If someone else will be raising the kid, Parliament's choice is either they can rule...

I think James II dropping dead very shortly after "James III" was born might do it - Mary of Modena gets her marching orders from Parliament, Anne is notional Regent for her baby brother, real power is with, hmm, someone else for quite a long time, and James III turns out to take after his uncle...

This would also be by miles the biggest wrong-winner election in history and would certainly kick off discussions about the Electoral College.

Fair enough - your OP said Baldwin became PM in March '31 so I figured there had been an earlier change. I think in the absence of anyone remotely resembling "good guys" in Europe, US isolationism can only be strengthened, at least unless the British agree to a Japanese free hand in the DEI...