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Inspiration and little seeds of ideas

As part of the research for my upcoming Podcast I found something that could be a fun idea for a timeline but doesn't really work for anything I have:

After popular feeling back in the UK saw Benedict Arnold forced out of his command with the British Army the turncoat attempted for many years without success to get himself a commission with the East India Company which from what I'm reading, he was pretty close to getting a few times.

My understanding of Indian History at that point is pretty much just limited to the Sikhs and I don't really get any broader bearings until the lead up to the invasion of Afghanistan and the Sepoy Mutiny so if this could be useful for anyone else, hit me up and I'll provide the pertinent transcripts of letters.
 
Thande said:
Someone would have to build a means by which one can get from one to the other without going to go via London first.
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Any reason why in this dystopian world (presumably without oil or electricity) that they are not walking or using bicycles directly between the two points?

Incidentally, I am now imagining battles being fought in the streets of Milton Keynes.
 
As my post in the list threads highlights, I've spent a(n early) morning trawling through the old London Mayoral election data to find who got what in second preference. What interests me is not the second preference itself, but what if the London Mayoral elections were FPTP, rather than AV as IoTL. I'm just not sure where that goes.
 
Md139115 said:
Any reason why in this dystopian world (presumably without oil or electricity) that they are not walking or using bicycles directly between the two points?

Incidentally, I am now imagining battles being fought in the streets of Milton Keynes.
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Oh no, in a British Dystopia, there are a lot more cars.
 
RyanF said:
So, I've got two ideas that are fairly far along and at the stage of plot outline, story structure, and characters and even prologues all done, I like both equally but would probably work better on one then the other than in tandem. I thought this might be the place to throw myself at the mercy of the potential readership as a tie breaker and ask which of the two ideas people like better.

  • Fit For Heroes - A worse end to the Great War leaves Britain in 1919 in a much worse place than it was OTL, in spite of actually still "winning". Soldiers strike in the Home Counties, masterless men roam the Midlands, Dominion troops revolt in Wales, the red flag rises above Belfast and Glasgow, police forces go on strike, civil war brews in Ireland, and warships are dispatched to the Mersey... and that's just lifted from OTL. Now, with Kings and Kaisers and politicians dead from the Spanish flu, returning soldiers and those left on the home front have to struggle with a country not fit for heroes, but one that is rapidly changing.
  • White Heat - A much stronger majority for Labour in the late 1960s makes the white heat of technological revolution a reality. By 2014 Britain is a very different country - Sinclair vies for a slice of the video game market with Nintendo, people queue round the corner at the crack of dawn to buy the latest Acorn devices, drones dispatch from the travelling post office every morning, hovercraft roam freely across the land and sea, and Britain is in the middle of its worst brain drain for generations. What secrets that a dying man hid in the Royal Mail at Maplin Sands Airport could warrant murder? And why have several people with the same name up and down the country received an identical flash drive?

The prologues for both were published on AH.com in the Writer's Forum awhile back, but if anyone would like a read at them here can post them.
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Since most responses seemed to prefer White Heat have restarted it in First Drafts.

Fit for Heroes to be picked up some time in the future, hopefully in a few months.
 
We all know that the POD is sort of like a rock thrown into a pond, and everything ripples out from there.

But suppose that someone carefully threw six rocks at once so that they landed in a sort of hexagonal pattern, at the center, the ripples would either be amplified to a sum equal to all them combined, or they would all cancel out.

Let us then imagine a world where, after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, six different nations, Britain, France, Belgium, the USSR, Poland, and Czech partisans, all decide that Hitler needs to be put down. They all assemble teams and decide to target him at the same place and time, and all the teams accidentally, spectacularly, manage to kill each other without ever harming a hair on Der Furhrer’s head. Just how good of a black comedy AH novel could be made out of this?
 
One idea I had was of the Indian Bourbons asking the British East India Company, in the wake of the Second Anglo-Maratha War, to make them rulers of Bhopal. Subsequently, the Kingdom of Bhopal is constituted, led by the “House of Bourbon-Bhopal”, and a number of Frenchmen go to this kingdom out of curiosity and give it stuff like national symbols and some semblance of Bourbon culture. In the city of Bhopal, the Bourbons sponsor Rococo architecture, and by the modern day, Bhopal is oddly French-tinted.

Another idea I had was for Duleep Singh, the last Sikh Maharaja, to lead a Sikh rebellion during the Indian Mutiny. IOTL, he was taken to Britain to be forcibly Christianized and Anglified, and one reason the Sikhs didn’t rebel was because they assumed that the British Empire would kill Duleep Singh. Avoiding this kidnapping, he could potentially be a Sikh leader like Nana Sahib was for the Marathas, and the result is a number of inland regions in India breaking away from the British Empire.
 
Japhy said:
That was probably the dumbest thread in the history of the internet if only because they wouldn't shut up about how funny they all thought it was.
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I only recall the idiot who started it talking about how hilarious it was, and crying and whining when I locked it so he couldn't bump it every day.
 
Md139115 said:
We all know that the POD is sort of like a rock thrown into a pond, and everything ripples out from there.

But suppose that someone carefully threw six rocks at once so that they landed in a sort of hexagonal pattern, at the center, the ripples would either be amplified to a sum equal to all them combined, or they would all cancel out.

Let us then imagine a world where, after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, six different nations, Britain, France, Belgium, the USSR, Poland, and Czech partisans, all decide that Hitler needs to be put down. They all assemble teams and decide to target him at the same place and time, and all the teams accidentally, spectacularly, manage to kill each other without ever harming a hair on Der Furhrer’s head. Just how good of a black comedy AH novel could be made out of this?
Click to expand...

Wasn't there a Pink Panther movie where this happened?
 
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