Alternate History General Discussion

[frittering]

Not to say this is plausible because I don't believe it is, but I've thought for a while that 'Champ Clark becomes President in 1912, the alt!Zimmermann Telegram is trying to convince the US to invade Canada' could make for entertaining pulp.

cause that went so well the first two times

 

[Matt]

cause that went so well the first two times

Third Time’s the Charm! was that timeline’s Champ Clark’s campaign slogan. Pretty damn catchy, too.

 

[Mark]

This might just be me not having slept for a while, but reading on history, I can’t help but feel that almost every leader I’ve read about is a giant asshole one way or another.

Yes but surely that is no surprise.

Which leaders were not?

I have seen this said about businessmen,for example

From first Goole I found bbc https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20171102-do-psychopaths-really-make-better-leaders

Studies have indicated that, depending where you look, up to one in five of those filling company boardrooms and senior management positions are hiding psychopathic tendencies, using certain personality traits to charm and manipulate their way through the workplace.

 

[Bolt451]

Any books or online TLs about Edward VIII staying on the throne? any outcomes really. It just interests me.

EDIT: I just found one, it begins "Oswald Mosely and the BUF win a general election in 1935" well fuck that then

 

[Charles EP M.]

Any books or online TLs about Edward VIII staying on the throne? any outcomes really. It just interests me.

EDIT: I just found one, it begins "Oswald Mosely and the BUF win a general election in 1935" well fuck that then

Generally AFAIK you only see King Edward stick around in timelines where the fash win

 

[RyanF]

Generally AFAIK you only see King Edward stick around in timelines where the fash win

I'm mulling over David hanging in there but this not affecting the outcome of World War II as a submission in the monarchies Challenge but won't go into much more detail than that.

 

[Japhy]

Any books or online TLs about Edward VIII staying on the throne? any outcomes really. It just interests me.

EDIT: I just found one, it begins "Oswald Mosely and the BUF win a general election in 1935" well fuck that then

I wrote a Vignette once about it and then I totally buggered a project Bob and I were going to do by being the classmate who doesn't do the homework.

 

[Doctor Sulemain]

Any books or online TLs about Edward VIII staying on the throne? any outcomes really. It just interests me.

EDIT: I just found one, it begins "Oswald Mosely and the BUF win a general election in 1935" well fuck that then

I believe it's part of Reds! but he gets sidelined/kicked off the throne like in OTL just later on.

 

[Coiler]

Since I'm on a Forgotten Weapons kick, I'm wondering: What if both the AR and AK platforms were superseded in mass production by something else?

IOTL it didn't happen because the performance needed to be much higher to justify the huge logistical effort and it wasn't. But what if more modest standards were used and one of the two classics went the way of the FAL?

 

[Hendryk]

Since I'm on a Forgotten Weapons kick, I'm wondering: What if both the AR and AK platforms were superseded in mass production by something else?

Ian McCollum has incidentally published a book on Chinese pistols of the Warlord Era, and one of his videos is about the Liu automatic rifle, a promising weapon that never got to prove its worth in OTL and which I made an appendix about in WIAF.

 

[Hendryk]

A pre-WWII semiautomatic doesn't seem likely to displace proven postwar automatic/semiautomatic designs, particularly when its selling point is that you can circumvent the Rube Goldberg gas trap mechanism and just use it as a bolt action. Gas traps were a stupid and barely workable design that we knew by WWII were impractical, there's no way in hell that one is going to displace the AR/AK platform.

Oh it doesn't, its greater success is relative to OTL where it fell into complete oblivion.

 

[Delta Force]

Since I'm on a Forgotten Weapons kick, I'm wondering: What if both the AR and AK platforms were superseded in mass production by something else?

IOTL it didn't happen because the performance needed to be much higher to justify the huge logistical effort and it wasn't. But what if more modest standards were used and one of the two classics went the way of the FAL?

Maybe the Soviet Union could produce an improved AK system with the Balanced Automatics Recoil System, leaving the classic AK as a monkey model.

 

[JesterBL]

Yes but surely that is no surprise.

Which leaders were not?

I have seen this said about businessmen,for example

From first Goole I found bbc https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20171102-do-psychopaths-really-make-better-leaders

Some of this is really just that psychopathy has a more or less useless clinical definition.

 

[Ricardolindo]

Here is a great resouce with the map of the ethnic and religious groups in the Russian Empire at the time of the 1897 census: https://datatowel.in.ua/pop-composition/languages-census-1897.
Unfortunately, not all ethnicities have their names translated.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Arturo Serrano reviews the Jewish AH anthology Other Covenants

(Includes SLP's own @M_Kresal ! EDIT: someone with a similar name)

 

[Coiler]

(Includes SLP's own @M_Kresal !)

(checks other contributors...)
Must be an honor to share an anthology with Harry Turtledove! I know it would be for me.

 

[M_Kresal]

Arturo Serrano reviews the Jewish AH anthology Other Covenants

(Includes SLP's own @M_Kresal !)

Not for the first (nor I suspect last) time, there’s been a case of mistaken identity!

 

[Talwar]

Only going to get worse when Matthew Kressol starts writing.

 

[Jared]

Only going to get worse when Matthew Kressol starts writing.

Well, I needed a pen name for my space opera stuff…

 

[Charles EP M.]

Not for the first (nor I suspect last) time, there’s been a case of mistaken identity!

Whoops!