Brainstorming Exercise

Scenario Seeds--Miscellaneous

If you're tired of refighting Worlds War II, these might be down your alley.

By: Dale R. Cozort



 

Alternate History Islands From A to Z.

Brainstorming ideas that range throughout history and across the planet.

Scenario Seeds=World War II 

Lots of mini-scenarios related to World War II.


Scenario Seeds- Other

Brainstorming ideas that may become scenarios in a couple of issues.


Best of the Comment Section


POD is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas.  A lot of the comments don't make sense unless you've following the dialogue.  Here are some of my general-interest ones.  


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  1. Earlier television?  Television was technically possible before World War II, and a few thousands sets were actually sold in the US (10,000 from old and possibly fallible memory).  What if the development and/or commercialization of television happened a little more quickly, so that televisions were already being produced in fairly large quantities before the stock market crash of 1929 and being bought by wealthy families and maybe up-scale businesses?   How would that affect the aftermath of the stock crash?  How would the industry develop during the depression years?  How would the existence of television affect the politics of the 1930’s?  Would it have enough impact to make Roosevelt less effective due to his polio?  What impact would it have on European politics?  The rise of Hitler?  British politics leading up to and after Munich?  What kinds of military impacts would it have on World War II?  What kinds of weapons would be more feasible sooner given more advanced television technology?   How would television affect the propaganda of the war?  How would the various countries try to use it?  What political impact would it have on the politics and perceptions of the war?

    What if the widespread adoption of television had been delayed five or ten years?  That could be due to patent disputes or difficulties with the FCC or difficulty setting standards.  What would the political implications be?  A Nixon presidency in 1960?  What European political figures would be helped or hurt?
  2. Earlier or later women’s suffrage?  What if women had gotten the vote earlier or later than they did?  What impact did women voting have on political systems?  What sorts of things wouldn’t have happened or would have happened later without women voting?  What sorts of things would have happened earlier or wouldn’t have happened with women voting earlier.  I’m not thinking mainly about specific elections here, though some extremely significant ones might be interesting to look at.
  3. What if France had atomic weapons by 1954?  The French actually had nukes by 1960 and didn’t use them in Algeria where they were still fighting Algerian nationalists in 1962.  Would they have used nukes in IndoChina?
  4. Spain exiles Protestants to Australia?  Here’s an unlikely (and off-the-wall) thought: the Spanish Armada conquers England and looks around for a place to deport stubborn Protestants from England and Holland.  At about that time they discover Australia and use it as a penal colony.  As I said, unlikely.  There were too many more convenient places to park the captives.  What would it take to make deportation to Australia happen?
  5. What if the Russians had somehow managed to win the Russo-Japanese War?  Given the decay in the Russian military and Russian over-confidence, a Russian victory would be rather difficult to pull off.  On the other hand, Japan was economically fragile so Russia could ‘win’ by not losing too badly long enough for the Japanese to run out of money.  What would the consequences of that be?

    I’m guessing that Russia would not do the reforms necessary to rebuild military power.  They would not get the massive French investment that helped them industrialize, so they would industrialize more slowly, which would mean fewer workers for the socialist parties to recruit from. With Russian power not unmasked as a sham, Russia would play a much larger role diplomatically in the period between 1905 and 1914, but would in reality be much weaker.  Japan, on the other hand, would not accept their defeat as final.  They would gear up for round two.  England would probably help with that because they would still fear the Russians.  The fact that Russia still seemed formidable would probably help defuse tensions between Britain and Germany.  Historically, after the Russo-Japanese war Russia was considered somewhat of a military vacuum rather than a potential adversary by both the Germans and the British, and that undoubtedly played some role in allowing the Brits and Germans to develop more of a rivalry in the years leading up to World War I.
  6. What if Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of the Tarzan series, the John Carter of Mars series, and numerous others) had discovered alternate history as a venue for his adventure stories?  What kind of alternate history would he have designed as a setting?  Would he have just created more potboilers like the later Tarzan or John Carter books or would he have done something more interesting?  Would these stories have had any impact beyond the adventure fiction community?
  7. What if some of the pulp fiction authors had gone the alternate history route?  Doc Savage?  The Saint?  The Shadow?  That’s probably not too likely because part of the attraction of alternate history is that it provides an exotic yet somewhat familiar place to put adventure stories and in the 1930s you could still credibly put that kind of story in some out of the way part of Africa, Asia, or South America, or on one of the planets of the solar system—usually Mars or Venus.
  8. Inhabitable Mars or Venus? If Venus and/or Mars were inhabitable, but not inhabited by technological civilizations in ‘nearby’ time-line, when would that time-line start diverging from ours, and how would it diverge?
  9. China without warlords?  What if China managed to avoid falling into warlordism after the fall of the Manchu dynasty, or was able to reunify under a strong central government in the mid-1920s?
  10. Space alternatives: Could the Space Shuttle been less of a disaster?  A lot of people have toyed with alternatives where NASA continued developing the Saturn series rather than going with the Space Shuttle.  Let’s take that another way.  Even if NASA went with the shuttle, there were options in the design of the shuttle that could have gone a different way and might have made it at least a little less of a fiasco.  For example, I remember that the choice of shuttle engines raised a lot of eyebrows, and the problems the shuttle program had with the engines undoubtedly delayed development and probably sucked away funds from other parts of the program.  Also, my understanding is that there were supposed to be a series of improvements on subsequent shuttles that upped the weight to orbit and made the shuttles more maintainable. 

    While the decision to drop Saturn in favor of the shuttle was probably wrong, and while the shuttle design was inherently flawed in a lot of ways, there were also a series of smaller wrong decisions that may have pushed the shuttle program from being a bad decision to being a disastrous one.  Was there ever any way to take the basic shuttle design and have it turn into something at least sort of reasonable?

    As I think about the space program, I also wonder if the choice of hardware really mattered all that much.  The problem might be NASA as an organization as opposed to any particular design that they worked on.  The NASA of the moon landings was for the most part a goal-oriented technologically savvy organization.  With that much money and that many high-paying jobs at stake though, I doubt that it would have remained that type of an organization even without the shuttle decision.  NASA had huge pork-barrel potential, and any administration would have to work very hard to keep it from becoming a risk-averse bureaucrat culture that generated tons of paper studies and very little hardware.

    It’s not like NASA hasn’t had opportunities to design its way beyond the shuttle. It has spent billions on design studies for various configurations of cargo rockets and shuttle replacements.  Most of the designs have never gotten to flyable hardware of any kind.  Let’s see.  There was the National Aerospace Plane, Venturestar, and an advanced expendable (can’t remember the name of the program). To the best of my knowledge, NASA (as opposed to the military) hasn’t designed anything capable of reaching orbit since the space shuttle.  That says something about the organization, or possibly about the political environment the organization finds itself in. If NASA as an organization is the problem, I’m not sure that Saturn versus shuttle makes all that much difference.  The Saturn may have had more potential, but in hands of an organization like today’s NASA would it really accomplish all that much more?  I’m not sure.

 

 
Comments are very welcome. 

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Copyright 2006 By Dale R. Cozort

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