• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

SLP 'Telephone' Maps and Graphics Game 4

A brilliant statesman and public speaker who never became president…could it have been because of his Dutch heritage?

DV5Y7A3.png


sent this to @Wolfram
So I looked at the "National Planning Board" (and presence of the "Ceremonial Official for the Constitution") and thought, 'you know, this doesn't sound like a hugely healthy democracy, no? In fact, it sounds like a pretty technocratic hydraulic-Keynesian regime that swings hard to the left sometime in the late '90s or early '00s.' Armed with that inference and a copy of QGIS, I picked a city - I think I picked it completely randomly - and made this:
AiJDUJO.gif

...and sent it to @Caprice.
 
So I looked at this fancy metro GIF and thought "hmm, Things happened in the American South in some sort of Special Period involving significant military presence". Only similar time I could think of was the Civil War, and I thought, what could inspire such a Reaction in this area so as to require military presence of this level?

Of all the things I could think to map, my political mapmaker brain went "maybe a few decades after a failed or nonexistent Civil Rights movement, Congress actually enforced that bit in the Fourteenth Amendment to dock states' representations for disenfranchising people". It didn't have to be a full secession thing, mind, just enough unrest that they need to bring in the military. Given the National Guard getting involved IOTL, well...

1652151437411.png

In the end, I sent this to @Von Callay. The actual numbers were based off multiplying the 1990 state populations by turnout in the 1960 election.
 
In the end, I sent this to @Von Callay. The actual numbers were based off multiplying the 1990 state populations by turnout in the 1960 election.
Ah, that's what it was! I saw what was happening, but I couldn't figure out what variable the results were being changed by.

So, well, I took this in entirely the wrong direction. Rather than 'legal disenfranchisement' causing congressional reapportionment, I reached for 'regional mass death from conflict.' Sprint and Spartan were US anti-ballistic missile interceptors, and there was at least one iteration of the variously evolving missile defense programs from the 1960s and 1970s where it was envisioned they would be deployed nationally to prove a limited level of missile defense: enough to break up an attack from a country like China with a small inventory of weapons, or to blunt a limited or accidental Soviet launch. I think what I imagined was nuclear conflict with a regional power like that, or something like a never-resolved Cuban crisis, with Soviet control of their weapons there being partially subverted, so that only a portion of weapons were used and only a particular region of the US being affected. Obviously I should have taken notes for myself.

6FwCWor.png


And so on to @kratostatic
 
And so on to @kratostatic

Who, not knowing the details of Sprint and Spartan systems (and my Google-fu failing me) decided that this map was showing actual nuclear missile launch silos. I tried to work out why and how they would have quite so many sites in Georgia of all places. I figured it would have to be either facing Europe or Cuba, and went "por qué no los dos". I just needed a scenario where America was hostile to Cuba and western Europe, and something that would demonstrate that this was the case; I didn't feel like doing a Communist bloc wank. So, inspired by a fortuitous museum visit with a display of WW1 propaganda letters from different powers to the people of the opposing countries why not a propoganda style letter from a group of powers with access to Cuba?

The letter in question



I sent this along to @Mumby .
 
Who, not knowing the details of Sprint and Spartan systems (and my Google-fu failing me) decided that this map was showing actual nuclear missile launch silos. I tried to work out why and how they would have quite so many sites in Georgia of all places. I figured it would have to be either facing Europe or Cuba, and went "por qué no los dos". I just needed a scenario where America was hostile to Cuba and western Europe, and something that would demonstrate that this was the case; I didn't feel like doing a Communist bloc wank. So, inspired by a fortuitous museum visit with a display of WW1 propaganda letters from different powers to the people of the opposing countries why not a propoganda style letter from a group of powers with access to Cuba?

The letter in question



I sent this along to @Mumby .


So what I had to go on was that the United States was under the control of MacArthur, was host to Japanese and British governments in exile and was facing down a Franco-Chinese-Cuban coalition that seemed vaguely democratic/republican if a little concerningly governed by Generals.

There didn't seem to be any indication that the coalition followed through on their threat and I read this letter as propaganda. So I decided to pick up the idea of a MacArthur led dictatorship and run with it, my logic being that the US develops nuclear weapons in time for this conflict to end in a begrudging stalemate. A few years, maybe a decade or so down the line and people start wearying of the General...

20211120_175721.jpg

Passed on to @Nanwe
 
Apologies for the delay!

So I received a propaganda poster from a McArthur-led American state, I had no clue whether fascist or not, but it did give me something of an authoritarian vibe. So I thought I could play with some sort of Cold War-style scenario with a twist. Kind of a Communist Western Europe (but unrelated to the Soviets) vs authoritarian capitalist US in a kind of soft AH scenario.

So I came up with a map of the Communal Union, showing its various republics and key economic areas before the rashness of McArthur led to an invasion, D-Day style.

giHdW7C.png

I then sent it over to @Stuyvesant
 
Well I got this infobox of a French guy going by the name of Alleman, which I assumed was something related to Allemagne, the French name of Germany. So I figured this Communal Union must be some kind of communist union of Western European nations which was broken up after a war against the United States. This is my take on the post-war European situation. I may have slightly overestimated the nation's borders.
AvmXLj3.png
 
Now I received this and noticed all its cities were OTL, except for 'Allemanville' and took this to be a nom de guerre of one of the Communal Union's leaders, and so made:
View attachment 53806
Which I eventually passed to @Excelsior

I really like this, I have to say. In my head, the name of the city was a reference to syndicalist leader and communard Jean Allemane, but this work so so well.
 
Possible to jump in as a late entrant?

Too late for this time around I think - I believe @Excelsior 's was the final image.

However, if people are interested we could go for a 5th round at some point soon? I'd be happy to start it myself so long as people are ok (particularly @Wolfram as you ran this one.
 
Too late for this time around I think - I believe @Excelsior 's was the final image.

However, if people are interested we could go for a 5th round at some point soon? I'd be happy to start it myself so long as people are ok (particularly @Wolfram as you ran this one.
I'd be happy with a fifth round happening, and I certainly don't have any ownership over the concept - go right ahead.
 
Back
Top