VTOLs and Airships

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article by @Coiler here

 

[Hendryk]

Yet while the presence of airships has become a cliche in alternate history circles, VTOLs have not been. Alternate history is full of Victorian zeppelins, not Vietnamese tilt-wings and jet-copters.

Lighter-than-air transport being more prominent in AH has been a trope for so long, a lot of us do it in a self-ironic way. Personally, i've been handed an opportunity to play around with rotorcraft in WIAF and I intend to use it at some point: two of OTL's main Soviet helicopter designers, Nikolai Kamov and Mikhail Mil, were both from Irkutsk, which means they get to become Yakutian citizens by default.

Yup, the Red Army loses its most iconic combat helicopter

 

[Charles EP M.]

The brand appearance is right and it probably says stuff about what we consider The past. If I go "Harrier Jump Jets were a thing that sounded cool when I was a kid so in this AH there's jump jets everywhere", that's a very different look and one (as Colier says) that'd be seen as more futuristic sci-fi than a blimp - even though the Harrier jump jet was invented over fifty years ago!

 

[Thande]

It's a bit of a depressing thought that I could see hovercraft becoming an allo-transport-punk staple used by younger writers, as they seem to be disappearing from their former status of being THE FUTURE too.

Autogyroes are a bit of a grey area I feel.

Tony Jones' AH work is good at using lesser-known transport what-ifs, such as Cliveless World (as seen in his SLP book "The Plague Policeman") in which most aircraft are asymmetrical one-wing designs.

 

[Hendryk]

It's a bit of a depressing thought that I could see hovercraft becoming an allo-transport-punk staple used by younger writers, as they seem to be disappearing from their former status of being THE FUTURE too.

Oh, yeah, that's in WIAF too. @Bruno's The Road to Yakutia and @Talwar's Rock of Ages, both included in Volume 1, feature early types of a Yakutian vehicle developed to deal with the difficult Siberian terrain, which are recognizable as hovercraft, except they are called ground gliders.

 

[Coiler]

One thing that came to me after I wrote the original post is that another reason is that airships obviously look a lot different, while VTOLs that don't look "futuristic" (as in the case of the Harrier) appear very similar to conventional aircraft at first glance.