- Location
- España
I think that he was looking more to Sparta or the Caribean plantations, neither of them ended up lasting much.
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Let's Read The Domination of the Draka - Currently: Bottom Gun
- Thread starter Geckonator
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Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
Doing some very quick googling, it seems likely that Stirling may have based the Shrakenberg's demesne on the Smith C. Daniell plantation near Bruinsburg in Mississippi, decently representative of the biggest American plantations: in 1857 Smith C. Daniell owned Winsdor manor with 2,600 acres, worked by some 150 slaves, and an additional 18,189 acres in Louisiana worked by 164 slaves (it's basically a contiguous domain, with the Mississippi river itself cutting through the estate and forming a natural border between the two states). At approximately 21,000 acres and a little over 300 slaves, it's a close match for the Shrakenberg plantation.
The farmland put to use in antebellum plantations would typically be split as two thirds for cash crops and one third for food crops.
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- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The same people who write all the books, pure blood citizens.
- Location
- Canada
There is something I find a bit comical in having this evil aristocratic slavers society, but in it there would be those people who would be very middle class who get no respect from there job because it's reading material for slave even though it would require high level of particular skills to do. They are probably dealing with tons of micro-management to make sure the readers knows just enough, but also need to be communicate tons of information purely visually. A fuck-up in those manuals would probably have pretty massive repercussion.
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- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Would they be disrespected? The Draka have the whole "nation of elites" thing where all Citizens are automatic nobility that deserve respect and privilege which is going to give them a certain amount of intrinsic prestige. I'm sure the middle class types that do this sort of thing aren't going to be invited to high level meetings (lol) but they would have the same base level of supremacist privilege that anyone of their caste receives in that type of society.
Furthermore it's worth keeping in mind that creating reading materials for slaves is not a lowly position in this society (or arguably any slaver society), because sure the slaves themselves are extremely devalued but the same is not true of slavery itself. Slavers by definition are immensely invested in the institution of slavery and thus have an incentive to value the apparatus that keeps the system "strong". Which necessarily includes propaganda and thought control. From where I'm standing Drakan society has quite a few reasons to give this job at least some respect.
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King Washington
Semi-Depressed Lurker
- Location
- Indiana
Stirling explaining why a slaver society founded by the most reactionary fuck heads of Europe and North America would inexplicably become hyper technologically advanced quasi gender egalitarian (for Drakans) neo-pagans who are weirdly cool with (female) homosexuality:
Geckonator
Occult Materialist
Oh no, they're just atheists with a particular dislike for Christianity (citizens are allowed to be religious, but Christianity disqualifies you from basically any advancement and has the Security Directorate on your ass basically your entire life).
All the swearing by Freya and Thor and shit? Apparently just an affectation of an attempt to revive Norse paganism in the 19th century that nobody really bought into but just kind of humored with swears and so on.
Mechasaurian
Big Bossu
- Location
- Lost among fields of history
- Pronouns
- They/Them
There's a lot of logically questionable stuff going on here, but my mind keeps going back to the conceit of the Draka somehow remaining competitive with unmechanized agriculture.
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Marching Through Georgia - Chapter 4
Geckonator
Occult Materialist
Chapter 4
We finally get a different quote document at the beginning of this chapter! It's in fact, a quote of a quote; the book proper is Under the Yoke: Postwar Europe by Angelo Menzarotti at Cuba State University in 1977, but it's a citation of a Draka Security Directorate memo from Alexandria that somehow made its way over to America.
There's not much to it, although the names will be relevant later in the series. This is from a "Felice Vashon", a Security Decurion to a T. de Verre of "Stevenson & de Verre. labor Agents", which is to say slave traders. Mrs. Vashon seems to be forwarding a consignment of 123 Italian "unsound elements" of two categories to her friend: the wives and children of executed Fascist Party members, and nuns (a little darkly funny to me is that the numbers assigned to these two categories are only one digit off, which speaks to some weird priorities when the Draka are drawing up bureaucratic measures for occupation). There is a very light but gross implication that these people are seen as prime sex slave material rather than manual labor.
Vashon seems quite insistent that this is a big get for de Verre, having to go through "bureaucratic bunfights" with two potentially much more interesting goings on: a "hush-hush uranium refining thing out by the Quattara" run by Tech Section and "that greasy immigrant Lederman in Forces Morale Section" who evidently wants them for military sex slave "knocking-shops".
The former is interesting because it implies not only a Draka nuclear program, but one that is both ridiculously weak and leaking like a goddamn colander. A very junior officer here both vaguely knows about and can fight the labor acquisition of (albeit a very idiotic choice of labor) what should be a top-secret high-priority project. And not only this, but she's doing this in the name of some very petty corruption to enrich a friend's small local slavery business.
The latter is also interesting, if gross, because the mention of this Lederman being an immigrant opens a few possibilities. There's some offhanded details elsewhere that the Draka closed immigration/the chance to be considered part of their "master race" just after the Great War, which means either this guy has been a citizen for over twenty years and still seems really small-fry and looked down upon as other by other Draka... or that historical fact cited isn't fully true and they're still taking some opportunistic applicants, perhaps Nazis whose tastes run more exploitative than murderous judging by the name and job.
Vashon closes her letter documenting an act of petty corruption siphoning off slaves for the war effort to a personal friend by asking after said personal friend's wife and asking if they're up for couples' tennis with her and her husband Edgar, thus confirming that it is indeed personally-motivated petty corruption.
This is supposed to be chilling with the mention of sending in "bulls" with shock prods to stop the nuns from creeping her out with chanting, but it more comes off as confirmation that these people are indeed deeply and culturally stupid.
The chapter proper is fully in Dreiser's perspective as he arrives at Oakenwald after two weeks travel across a relatively perilous Atlantic: outside of the safe American basin in the Caribbean the U-Boats are apparently thick and effective enough that it's safer and swifter to get to Africa by going to Brazil first and then taking an airship across. Now he's in a steam sedan being driven to the plantation while guarded by a Security Directorate agent and her attack serf.
There's a few details in this trip I'll integrate later in mentions of Dreiser's overall perspective, but the one miscellaneous one that doesn't fit elsewhere is the first mention of Draka main battle tanks, seen on train flatcars parallel to the road and which the Security woman evidently doesn't want Dreiser getting too close a look at.
The Hond III is rather ridiculous contrivance that sounds suspiciously like Stirling wanting to kitbash in Draka M1A1 Abrams even though this setting is supposed to have at best '60s tech. It's described with emphasis on its sloped armor, 120mm gun, and in the appendices and elsewhere I've seen it mentioned that it uses a turbocompound engine which is basically a Draka compromise leap toward a gas turbine. I will leave that to the rivet counters here to point out how that is ridiculous in more detail than I ever could.
Above all, Dreiser's general alienation from the Draka is emphasized, as well as the extent to which he's evidently being watched more closely by some parts of the Domination than others.
View: https://youtu.be/4LpY3FKyYbA
Unfortunately he's going to be way too diplomatic with his hosts and not back that up anytime soon.
Of course, I suppose he's being smart in response to something: as he gets out at the destination he's slammed against the autosteamer (a sedan with a closed driver compartment and two rows of inward-facing passenger seats in the back, indicating that the Draka developed cars specifically around the idea they would be slave-driven, and which Dreiser compares to a "Stanley Raccoon" to imply a totally unrecognizable US auto industry) by the Security woman and warned that, even if the von Shrakenbergs consider it uncouth to attack a guest over his beliefs and violate aristocratic hospitality, if he says anything illegal to a serf he'll be killed.
Side notes: said security woman (who's described as having an "Eton crop" Dreiser compares to the flappers, in case you wanted more weird imagery of evil androgynous tomboy slavers) has some very weird turns of phrase that reiterate a few things about the Draka. She calls Dreiser "rebel pig", which I think is supposed to be them still being sore over the American Revolution, and then swears "by your slave-loving Christ" at him.
Dreiser, meanwhile, has a bit of tunnel-vision despite currently being in... well, probably the most evil regime in Human history. He's laser focused on the war against Germany, probably because of his personal history. Dreiser was apparently born in Illinois but raised in Iowa, in a very conservative farming family before wanderlust and disgust with midwestern conservatism in the Coolidge years led him to Europe in wanderlust. (He's mentioned to be 38, despite apparently aging like shit with glasses, a receding hairline, and a double chin. I believe this would put him in that awkward transition between the Lost Generation and the Greatest, too young to have served in the Great War but following the trends of those who did and tracking the rise of fascism.) He apparently spent a fair amount of time in Weimar Berlin and admired it, and then tracked the rise of the Nazis with spite (although he was apparently highly-placed and diplomatic enough to also get close to and write about things like Goering's parties in East Prussia, which I suppose could factor into the Draka considering him a useful diplomatic choice). Dreiser's journals from Berlin are high-selling enough and he has a high-paying job heading "American Broadcasting Service's" Central European bureau providing for his wife Ingrid and their daughter, but with the Germans secure in Europe having reached the Urals and Britain starving under a more successful submarine blockade, he feels the Draka are the only option to open up the front and draw American hopes towards stopping Germany instead of throwing everything at Japan.
And so he's decided to walk up to the devil(s) and ask them to name their price.
After an unspecified evening probably going straight to sleep, Dreiser is woken up from his sleep... on one of the Draka's weird extravagant waterbeds.
This is a minor detail but a kind of fascinating one for me. First, on a plausibility angle, people were experimenting with waterbeds in the 19th century already, but they were mainly seen as a medicinal relief for back pain or long term hospitalizations. I would almost wonder if this is meant to imply an insult to Dreiser, that the von Shrakenbergs see him as an inferior invalid, but then skimming Under the Yoke the other day I remember seeing a waterbed mentioned there too as a normal Draka furnishing. Secondarily, the modern, more comfortable waterbed was actually developed in the '60s (in an interesting convergence with sci-fi where the inventor accidentally came up with something described in detail a few years earlier by Robert Heinlein) and became a bit of a cultural craze through the '80s... but primarily marketed and culturally understood as a sleazy sex thing. Of all the Draka anachronisms and fetishy bits, this has to be one of the most mundane but perfectly evocative combos of the two.
After Dreiser wakes, he's dressed, feeling rather embarrassed about it, by various serf women in a kind of ridiculous sounding getup of "slippers of red Moorish leather and a grey silk caftan"; he only feels a little less embarrassed at breakfast/luncheon where the von Shrakenberg siblings seem to be wearing similarly silly orientalist robes while their father is in military dress. Dreiser also notes, for a strangely high word count, how it took him a minute to realize Johanna was a woman and has the same problem commonly with Draka women; it's described as not necessarily coming down to the military dress, the short haircuts, or the commonality of jewelry on both men or women, but something common and unearthly to how Draka move that obscures their build or features.
After formal greetings (name, rank, and occupation is apparently Draka custom), they move on to food.
Careful with the scones, you Draka bastards! Wouldn't want to see you lose those "lean bodies" Stirling keeps mentioning! The meat is also described as a very silly combo... "Scottish-Austrian-Indonesian cuisine, with a touch of Louisiana thrown in", which basically just comes down to Dreiser just finding it excessively spicy.
What follows is a lot of pontificating focused around Karl and exposition of the Draka social system. There's some mention of the current Draka government and the shift to seeing America as an ally being sudden: their current Archon, one Edwina Palme, apparently threatened to castrate and kill FDR in '38. Karl of course assures Dreiser that he would have preferred someone else in the seat, but the Party wouldn't accept the generals he saw as better leaders for war. The Draka system, Karl assures Dreiser, is "oligarchical collectivism" (goddamn Nineteen Eighty Four reference) where the Citizens dominate as a whole rather than one particular person or organization, which means they have more flexibility for criticism and changes in policy than the dictatorial military or party states elsewhere in the world.
This leads into the topic and theme of Draka bluntness, but it also ends up coming across as suicidal arrogance (I guess they really are descended from Dixie planters) and historically delusional grandiosity. Karl in particular goes on a tangent in terms of geopolitical generalities and classical references:
In short, Karl and the Draka planners see the current Eurasian War as involving two true World Powers--the Domination and the United States, which each have multi-continent-sized industrial bases (Karl also calls the South Americans "satellite governments" of the United States, and while I think the text intends this to be him "telling it like it is" to me it comes across as arrogant misconception; why would the US allow Gran Colombia and Brazil to be so large if they were truly puppets?)--and a bevy of competing Great Powers in the running, of which only Germany and Japan are left. Western Europe was too small and dependent on disconnected colonial empires and thus easily knocked off by German-Japanese action, and the Soviets are dismissed as "unskilled" (add "taking Wehrmacht generals' memoirs as real history" to Stirling's pile of crimes against history) and now finished after the Nazi invasion. That leaves Germany and Japan splitting Eurasia with the Draka's Great War conquests, and while they could team up against the USA due to being mutually hostile to Democracy on an ideological level, that leaves the Draka to eventually fight two consolidating empires with bigger populations than them in the next war. The Draka thus prefer to set aside ideology and knock off Germany and Japan, then "divide the spoils" (rich when compared to how thoroughly they overrun Eurasia in the future of the timeline with seemingly no real concessions to what America's doing) and digest the conquest for a generation before another war. The Draka have more people and resources, but America has more established industry and is generalized to be more "innovative" and faster-growing.
One small problem: this is a terrible geopolitical pitch. I have been actually watching WW2 US propaganda as background noise the past week, and the geopolitical perspective of American government in the '40s is basically perfectly formulated to hear this pitch and go "yeah, you next buddy."
Leaving aside the ideological angle that the Draka represent basically a third permutation of right-wing totalitarianism next to Germany and Japan that would be anathema to launder to a public in the middle of the New Deal, there is an intimate familiarity among US strategic planners that the Americas contain a vanishingly smaller fraction of the world's people and resources than the "World Island" of Africa-Eurasia. The Draka proposing to pour in, write the Soviets/Russians off entirely, and split what's left of Eurasia with America on an opportunistic basis would basically be seen in Washington as a deal written in warm piss. Why wouldn't Washington hear this and go "okay, you fight the Nazis on your own while we finish up with Japan, then while you're busy with all those mechanized divisions in Europe we'll take this nice two-ocean navy and drive burning stakes into Africa from both ends."
The only logical conclusion is that Stirling's message is that the Republican Party, even when pretending to uphold the New Deal, are all deliberately motivated fascist collaborators and defeatists who will do every thing possible to aid the enemies of freedom, and Dreiser is a credulous dupe. Also, moral objection to Stalin is evil fascist sabotage and we should have given even more industrial supplies to the Soviets from the start.
Dreiser accedes bitterly to all this but brings up that the public won't be moved by generals channeling sociopathy onto lines on a map (Paradox games haven't been invented yet to give millions of teenagers that level of insight), which Karl mocks as "Yankee moralism" ("tell it to the Mexicans", as well). So we get the first of several nasty, cynical invocations of the Holocaust in this series: Karl brings up the "rumors"--leaving aside that I think modern historiography is pretty clear that even if the rate was hard to guess it was damn well understood among the Allies there was a genocide being perpetuated--being reported by the Quaker Friends Service Committee, and promises comprehensive Draka intelligence on the scale of it as well as Generalplan Ost.
After dropping that bombshell, Karl leaves for work, leaving the siblings and Rahksan to mock Dreiser about sex. He was offered a girl for "entertainment", and upon refusing and insisting he's married they all look at him as if he's stupid. Eric's attempt at "tact" on the topic involves insisting the steward "never has trouble finding volunteers", and recounting how their grandfather had a troupe of serf ballet dancers who would entertain nude at private parties (Johanna throws in that their grandmother was a fan, when Dreiser asks how she felt about it).
Johanna leaves with Rahksan to go for a "swim", leaving Dreiser alone with Eric. Eric is keen to pick up on the thread of the Friends Service Comittee, which is clearly the organization that smuggled his daughter out, whom he then brings up to Dreiser: Anna, tattooed serf number C22D178. Dreiser recognizes the description and then very stupidly explains that she caused a stir in progressive society circles but the Friends kept her out of the media; she's been adopted by a well-off Philadelphia Quaker family.
DREISER YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER, THAT IS SO FUCKING OBVIOUSLY HER FATHER.
The narration describes him as pricking up on "newsman's instincts" at the topic, but come the fuck on! You don't know anything about the situation! What if Eric wants her back and just didn't have info on the exact organization that got her out and you just handed him something he can take to Draka intelligence? You even gave him a city and vanishingly small social class to look in! Fuck off!
On sheer luck, Eric has the best interest in mind here and tells Dreiser to never mention her to anyone; it'd be a very unsafe topic for either of them to pursue while in the Domination.
We then "cut" to a week later, as Eric makes good on some advice from Eric to get in shape before embedding in an airborne unit: he's freshly exhausted in the baths after an hour long workout, while the siblings train knife fighting with live blades (Eric wins and insists it's not because he's faster but because he can read her) before taking a nude swim. Eric takes that instance to reflect on Draka aesthetics and social customs, and how alien they are even after his time in Weimar Germany. There's a particular focus on Draka aesthetics, bringing up how in the extensive gymnasium-bath complex there is wall art "that a du Pont might have envied."
All throughout the chapter there's been more and more descriptions of Draka art and architecture: Archona's tiled buildings and intricate glasswork and floral motifs thereof; the landscape scenes in the dining room; the gardens and fountains throughout Oakenwald. It's hard to avoid an implication being laid on thick that the intent be there's something seducing about the Draka sense of beauty. Eric does casually insist to Dreiser that this is their best foot forward, that on top of treating their serfs well Oakenwald is aesthetically the place in the Domination best suited to "Yankee sensibilities", but as a book with impressions to make, it's certainly not doing its job fully committing to the misery of the serfs as something to keep morally in mind when they show all this to you.
But speaking of; while the siblings swim nude together, Dreiser is left still trying to rehydrate while nearby Rahksan sits knitting.
And with Dreiser's conversation/perceptions with her, we have to get to one of the most uncomfortable elements of the prose of this series and its treatment of the serfs.
The Draka have a weird dialect of English, generally. Earlier in the chapter, Dreiser notes that the Security Directorate woman's announcement of "we're here" sounds like:
You can imagine it sounding like Southern Belle crossed with Jerk Van Der Klerk. Just imagine a stew of "asshole racist arrogance" from all the historical dramas you can name and you can probably approximate what the Draka sound like in your head. Their dialogue is presented plainly and you can imagine the accent.
The serfs, however, get their accent phonetically spelled out in dialogue, and that makes it both difficult to read, and vastly uncomfortable with the resemblance to racist transliterations of African American Vernacular, especially when dealing with slavery.
Dreiser is deeply, and noticeably to others, uncomfortable around serfs. There's emphasis both with Rahksan and earlier in the car that he can't help but stare at the identification numbers tattooed onto their necks and to focus awkwardly on total alienation from them, on the fact that there's nothing he could really say to bridge the complete difference in life.
There could be something interesting here subtly commenting on ingrained liberal bigotries and discomfort confronting horrendous exploitation and racism. For example, there's a point where, in his head, he notes in response to Rahksan's sexual comment about Eric and Johanna both being present being quite tiring that she's:
After perfect comes a hard-r n-word. Which brings the slur counter up to two, unless you want to count that one for multiple points against the book.
But then Rahksan talks more, notes Dreiser's discomfort with her, and goes on... a very uncomfortable attempt to rationalize the perspective and happiness of a sexualized house slave, as written by a white dude in the '80s. There's a lot of rationalizing around her background, that it wasn't the von Shrakenbergs who killed her family and in Afghanistan she would have been treated as equivalent to livestock anyways, forced to wear a Chador and be married off (oh boy, American clichés about Afghan women 15 years early to the party). And she's fully bought in to the Draka idea of pleasure, dismissing any of Dreiser's objections to the sex as Christian prudishness.
All of this is uncomfortable, but the accent tips it over:
@Eukie put it best when I was showing this to her on Discord: this feels like a hate crime just trying to pronounce it in your head.
After Dreiser ends up kind of put on the spot and vaguely shamed by Rahksan, the siblings finish their swim and emerge. Eric's courteous enough to get dressed for Dreiser's discomfort with nudity, while Johanna just stays naked and has Rahksan dry her (incidentally, a line earlier implies that Dreiser seems to think Rahksan is only sleeping with Eric which... motherfucker, you were in Berlin in the '20s, you know what homosexuality is). In the small talk it comes up that Dreiser has used this training/rest time before deployment to make some notes on Draka home life (to only be released after the war, he notes privately), which turns into a chapter-closing meander on Draka economics and the close combat and gender, of all things.
The Draka system was termed "feudal socialism" by Thomas Carlyle. There's no private ownership of land; holdings and plantations are merely grants by the state, although there's no real information on how this practically differs from ownership. Large industries, then, are held as "Combines" with corporate shares owned in variable percentages by the state and various citizen guilds, including the Landholder's League which is essentially the bureaucratic coordination cooperative of all the plantations.
Pictured: the jingoistic patriotism re-entering my body whenever the goddamn snakes say anything about America.
Anyways, brother and sister snake here also claim that the Landholder's League are also the ones who commonly lobby for improved serf conditions: 91% of the population is serfs and they can't have relevant trade with the world, so the one way to raise consumption of agricultural goods is to beef up (figuratively and literally) serf rations.
Most citizens, meanwhile, are just inherently wealthy from the system and distributed profits from their guild membership: more than 90% hold some serfs, although "three-quarters hold ten or less. Half five or less." Eric describes the only truly poor citizens as alcoholics and... well, the r-slur (slur counter: 3). And they're put into institutions and implied to be soft-euthanized with "life-shortening vices."
After Johanna leaves, we get one last tangent explaining Draka "pankration" fighting styles: despite the name, it's actually a form of karate (goddamn '80s martial arts craze...). A Draka overseer apparently encountered a group of Okinawan serfs (A: Did the Indian Ocean slave trade ever fucking touch the Ryukyus? B: Slur Counter 4, because he uses the c-slur for Asians) who fought back and won when he went to whip them, and the overseer responded by promptly buying out their contracts and setting up a school to teach it to Draka.
Dreiser has a mildly sexist comment about how odd it is that Johanna can stand up to him so well; Eric responds that after the Great War Draka women got very insistent about combat service, and that kind of talk might get him challenged to a duel, or just flatly attacked and left with broken bones. He'll understand Draka women better when he's out in combat.
We finally get a different quote document at the beginning of this chapter! It's in fact, a quote of a quote; the book proper is Under the Yoke: Postwar Europe by Angelo Menzarotti at Cuba State University in 1977, but it's a citation of a Draka Security Directorate memo from Alexandria that somehow made its way over to America.
There's not much to it, although the names will be relevant later in the series. This is from a "Felice Vashon", a Security Decurion to a T. de Verre of "Stevenson & de Verre. labor Agents", which is to say slave traders. Mrs. Vashon seems to be forwarding a consignment of 123 Italian "unsound elements" of two categories to her friend: the wives and children of executed Fascist Party members, and nuns (a little darkly funny to me is that the numbers assigned to these two categories are only one digit off, which speaks to some weird priorities when the Draka are drawing up bureaucratic measures for occupation). There is a very light but gross implication that these people are seen as prime sex slave material rather than manual labor.
Vashon seems quite insistent that this is a big get for de Verre, having to go through "bureaucratic bunfights" with two potentially much more interesting goings on: a "hush-hush uranium refining thing out by the Quattara" run by Tech Section and "that greasy immigrant Lederman in Forces Morale Section" who evidently wants them for military sex slave "knocking-shops".
The former is interesting because it implies not only a Draka nuclear program, but one that is both ridiculously weak and leaking like a goddamn colander. A very junior officer here both vaguely knows about and can fight the labor acquisition of (albeit a very idiotic choice of labor) what should be a top-secret high-priority project. And not only this, but she's doing this in the name of some very petty corruption to enrich a friend's small local slavery business.
The latter is also interesting, if gross, because the mention of this Lederman being an immigrant opens a few possibilities. There's some offhanded details elsewhere that the Draka closed immigration/the chance to be considered part of their "master race" just after the Great War, which means either this guy has been a citizen for over twenty years and still seems really small-fry and looked down upon as other by other Draka... or that historical fact cited isn't fully true and they're still taking some opportunistic applicants, perhaps Nazis whose tastes run more exploitative than murderous judging by the name and job.
Vashon closes her letter documenting an act of petty corruption siphoning off slaves for the war effort to a personal friend by asking after said personal friend's wife and asking if they're up for couples' tennis with her and her husband Edgar, thus confirming that it is indeed personally-motivated petty corruption.
This is supposed to be chilling with the mention of sending in "bulls" with shock prods to stop the nuns from creeping her out with chanting, but it more comes off as confirmation that these people are indeed deeply and culturally stupid.
The chapter proper is fully in Dreiser's perspective as he arrives at Oakenwald after two weeks travel across a relatively perilous Atlantic: outside of the safe American basin in the Caribbean the U-Boats are apparently thick and effective enough that it's safer and swifter to get to Africa by going to Brazil first and then taking an airship across. Now he's in a steam sedan being driven to the plantation while guarded by a Security Directorate agent and her attack serf.
There's a few details in this trip I'll integrate later in mentions of Dreiser's overall perspective, but the one miscellaneous one that doesn't fit elsewhere is the first mention of Draka main battle tanks, seen on train flatcars parallel to the road and which the Security woman evidently doesn't want Dreiser getting too close a look at.
The Hond III is rather ridiculous contrivance that sounds suspiciously like Stirling wanting to kitbash in Draka M1A1 Abrams even though this setting is supposed to have at best '60s tech. It's described with emphasis on its sloped armor, 120mm gun, and in the appendices and elsewhere I've seen it mentioned that it uses a turbocompound engine which is basically a Draka compromise leap toward a gas turbine. I will leave that to the rivet counters here to point out how that is ridiculous in more detail than I ever could.
Above all, Dreiser's general alienation from the Draka is emphasized, as well as the extent to which he's evidently being watched more closely by some parts of the Domination than others.
View: https://youtu.be/4LpY3FKyYbA
Unfortunately he's going to be way too diplomatic with his hosts and not back that up anytime soon.
Of course, I suppose he's being smart in response to something: as he gets out at the destination he's slammed against the autosteamer (a sedan with a closed driver compartment and two rows of inward-facing passenger seats in the back, indicating that the Draka developed cars specifically around the idea they would be slave-driven, and which Dreiser compares to a "Stanley Raccoon" to imply a totally unrecognizable US auto industry) by the Security woman and warned that, even if the von Shrakenbergs consider it uncouth to attack a guest over his beliefs and violate aristocratic hospitality, if he says anything illegal to a serf he'll be killed.
Side notes: said security woman (who's described as having an "Eton crop" Dreiser compares to the flappers, in case you wanted more weird imagery of evil androgynous tomboy slavers) has some very weird turns of phrase that reiterate a few things about the Draka. She calls Dreiser "rebel pig", which I think is supposed to be them still being sore over the American Revolution, and then swears "by your slave-loving Christ" at him.
Dreiser, meanwhile, has a bit of tunnel-vision despite currently being in... well, probably the most evil regime in Human history. He's laser focused on the war against Germany, probably because of his personal history. Dreiser was apparently born in Illinois but raised in Iowa, in a very conservative farming family before wanderlust and disgust with midwestern conservatism in the Coolidge years led him to Europe in wanderlust. (He's mentioned to be 38, despite apparently aging like shit with glasses, a receding hairline, and a double chin. I believe this would put him in that awkward transition between the Lost Generation and the Greatest, too young to have served in the Great War but following the trends of those who did and tracking the rise of fascism.) He apparently spent a fair amount of time in Weimar Berlin and admired it, and then tracked the rise of the Nazis with spite (although he was apparently highly-placed and diplomatic enough to also get close to and write about things like Goering's parties in East Prussia, which I suppose could factor into the Draka considering him a useful diplomatic choice). Dreiser's journals from Berlin are high-selling enough and he has a high-paying job heading "American Broadcasting Service's" Central European bureau providing for his wife Ingrid and their daughter, but with the Germans secure in Europe having reached the Urals and Britain starving under a more successful submarine blockade, he feels the Draka are the only option to open up the front and draw American hopes towards stopping Germany instead of throwing everything at Japan.
And so he's decided to walk up to the devil(s) and ask them to name their price.
After an unspecified evening probably going straight to sleep, Dreiser is woken up from his sleep... on one of the Draka's weird extravagant waterbeds.
This is a minor detail but a kind of fascinating one for me. First, on a plausibility angle, people were experimenting with waterbeds in the 19th century already, but they were mainly seen as a medicinal relief for back pain or long term hospitalizations. I would almost wonder if this is meant to imply an insult to Dreiser, that the von Shrakenbergs see him as an inferior invalid, but then skimming Under the Yoke the other day I remember seeing a waterbed mentioned there too as a normal Draka furnishing. Secondarily, the modern, more comfortable waterbed was actually developed in the '60s (in an interesting convergence with sci-fi where the inventor accidentally came up with something described in detail a few years earlier by Robert Heinlein) and became a bit of a cultural craze through the '80s... but primarily marketed and culturally understood as a sleazy sex thing. Of all the Draka anachronisms and fetishy bits, this has to be one of the most mundane but perfectly evocative combos of the two.
After Dreiser wakes, he's dressed, feeling rather embarrassed about it, by various serf women in a kind of ridiculous sounding getup of "slippers of red Moorish leather and a grey silk caftan"; he only feels a little less embarrassed at breakfast/luncheon where the von Shrakenberg siblings seem to be wearing similarly silly orientalist robes while their father is in military dress. Dreiser also notes, for a strangely high word count, how it took him a minute to realize Johanna was a woman and has the same problem commonly with Draka women; it's described as not necessarily coming down to the military dress, the short haircuts, or the commonality of jewelry on both men or women, but something common and unearthly to how Draka move that obscures their build or features.
After formal greetings (name, rank, and occupation is apparently Draka custom), they move on to food.
Careful with the scones, you Draka bastards! Wouldn't want to see you lose those "lean bodies" Stirling keeps mentioning! The meat is also described as a very silly combo... "Scottish-Austrian-Indonesian cuisine, with a touch of Louisiana thrown in", which basically just comes down to Dreiser just finding it excessively spicy.
What follows is a lot of pontificating focused around Karl and exposition of the Draka social system. There's some mention of the current Draka government and the shift to seeing America as an ally being sudden: their current Archon, one Edwina Palme, apparently threatened to castrate and kill FDR in '38. Karl of course assures Dreiser that he would have preferred someone else in the seat, but the Party wouldn't accept the generals he saw as better leaders for war. The Draka system, Karl assures Dreiser, is "oligarchical collectivism" (goddamn Nineteen Eighty Four reference) where the Citizens dominate as a whole rather than one particular person or organization, which means they have more flexibility for criticism and changes in policy than the dictatorial military or party states elsewhere in the world.
This leads into the topic and theme of Draka bluntness, but it also ends up coming across as suicidal arrogance (I guess they really are descended from Dixie planters) and historically delusional grandiosity. Karl in particular goes on a tangent in terms of geopolitical generalities and classical references:
In short, Karl and the Draka planners see the current Eurasian War as involving two true World Powers--the Domination and the United States, which each have multi-continent-sized industrial bases (Karl also calls the South Americans "satellite governments" of the United States, and while I think the text intends this to be him "telling it like it is" to me it comes across as arrogant misconception; why would the US allow Gran Colombia and Brazil to be so large if they were truly puppets?)--and a bevy of competing Great Powers in the running, of which only Germany and Japan are left. Western Europe was too small and dependent on disconnected colonial empires and thus easily knocked off by German-Japanese action, and the Soviets are dismissed as "unskilled" (add "taking Wehrmacht generals' memoirs as real history" to Stirling's pile of crimes against history) and now finished after the Nazi invasion. That leaves Germany and Japan splitting Eurasia with the Draka's Great War conquests, and while they could team up against the USA due to being mutually hostile to Democracy on an ideological level, that leaves the Draka to eventually fight two consolidating empires with bigger populations than them in the next war. The Draka thus prefer to set aside ideology and knock off Germany and Japan, then "divide the spoils" (rich when compared to how thoroughly they overrun Eurasia in the future of the timeline with seemingly no real concessions to what America's doing) and digest the conquest for a generation before another war. The Draka have more people and resources, but America has more established industry and is generalized to be more "innovative" and faster-growing.
One small problem: this is a terrible geopolitical pitch. I have been actually watching WW2 US propaganda as background noise the past week, and the geopolitical perspective of American government in the '40s is basically perfectly formulated to hear this pitch and go "yeah, you next buddy."
Leaving aside the ideological angle that the Draka represent basically a third permutation of right-wing totalitarianism next to Germany and Japan that would be anathema to launder to a public in the middle of the New Deal, there is an intimate familiarity among US strategic planners that the Americas contain a vanishingly smaller fraction of the world's people and resources than the "World Island" of Africa-Eurasia. The Draka proposing to pour in, write the Soviets/Russians off entirely, and split what's left of Eurasia with America on an opportunistic basis would basically be seen in Washington as a deal written in warm piss. Why wouldn't Washington hear this and go "okay, you fight the Nazis on your own while we finish up with Japan, then while you're busy with all those mechanized divisions in Europe we'll take this nice two-ocean navy and drive burning stakes into Africa from both ends."
The only logical conclusion is that Stirling's message is that the Republican Party, even when pretending to uphold the New Deal, are all deliberately motivated fascist collaborators and defeatists who will do every thing possible to aid the enemies of freedom, and Dreiser is a credulous dupe. Also, moral objection to Stalin is evil fascist sabotage and we should have given even more industrial supplies to the Soviets from the start.
Dreiser accedes bitterly to all this but brings up that the public won't be moved by generals channeling sociopathy onto lines on a map (Paradox games haven't been invented yet to give millions of teenagers that level of insight), which Karl mocks as "Yankee moralism" ("tell it to the Mexicans", as well). So we get the first of several nasty, cynical invocations of the Holocaust in this series: Karl brings up the "rumors"--leaving aside that I think modern historiography is pretty clear that even if the rate was hard to guess it was damn well understood among the Allies there was a genocide being perpetuated--being reported by the Quaker Friends Service Committee, and promises comprehensive Draka intelligence on the scale of it as well as Generalplan Ost.
After dropping that bombshell, Karl leaves for work, leaving the siblings and Rahksan to mock Dreiser about sex. He was offered a girl for "entertainment", and upon refusing and insisting he's married they all look at him as if he's stupid. Eric's attempt at "tact" on the topic involves insisting the steward "never has trouble finding volunteers", and recounting how their grandfather had a troupe of serf ballet dancers who would entertain nude at private parties (Johanna throws in that their grandmother was a fan, when Dreiser asks how she felt about it).
Johanna leaves with Rahksan to go for a "swim", leaving Dreiser alone with Eric. Eric is keen to pick up on the thread of the Friends Service Comittee, which is clearly the organization that smuggled his daughter out, whom he then brings up to Dreiser: Anna, tattooed serf number C22D178. Dreiser recognizes the description and then very stupidly explains that she caused a stir in progressive society circles but the Friends kept her out of the media; she's been adopted by a well-off Philadelphia Quaker family.
DREISER YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER, THAT IS SO FUCKING OBVIOUSLY HER FATHER.
The narration describes him as pricking up on "newsman's instincts" at the topic, but come the fuck on! You don't know anything about the situation! What if Eric wants her back and just didn't have info on the exact organization that got her out and you just handed him something he can take to Draka intelligence? You even gave him a city and vanishingly small social class to look in! Fuck off!
On sheer luck, Eric has the best interest in mind here and tells Dreiser to never mention her to anyone; it'd be a very unsafe topic for either of them to pursue while in the Domination.
We then "cut" to a week later, as Eric makes good on some advice from Eric to get in shape before embedding in an airborne unit: he's freshly exhausted in the baths after an hour long workout, while the siblings train knife fighting with live blades (Eric wins and insists it's not because he's faster but because he can read her) before taking a nude swim. Eric takes that instance to reflect on Draka aesthetics and social customs, and how alien they are even after his time in Weimar Germany. There's a particular focus on Draka aesthetics, bringing up how in the extensive gymnasium-bath complex there is wall art "that a du Pont might have envied."
All throughout the chapter there's been more and more descriptions of Draka art and architecture: Archona's tiled buildings and intricate glasswork and floral motifs thereof; the landscape scenes in the dining room; the gardens and fountains throughout Oakenwald. It's hard to avoid an implication being laid on thick that the intent be there's something seducing about the Draka sense of beauty. Eric does casually insist to Dreiser that this is their best foot forward, that on top of treating their serfs well Oakenwald is aesthetically the place in the Domination best suited to "Yankee sensibilities", but as a book with impressions to make, it's certainly not doing its job fully committing to the misery of the serfs as something to keep morally in mind when they show all this to you.
But speaking of; while the siblings swim nude together, Dreiser is left still trying to rehydrate while nearby Rahksan sits knitting.
And with Dreiser's conversation/perceptions with her, we have to get to one of the most uncomfortable elements of the prose of this series and its treatment of the serfs.
The Draka have a weird dialect of English, generally. Earlier in the chapter, Dreiser notes that the Security Directorate woman's announcement of "we're here" sounds like:
You can imagine it sounding like Southern Belle crossed with Jerk Van Der Klerk. Just imagine a stew of "asshole racist arrogance" from all the historical dramas you can name and you can probably approximate what the Draka sound like in your head. Their dialogue is presented plainly and you can imagine the accent.
The serfs, however, get their accent phonetically spelled out in dialogue, and that makes it both difficult to read, and vastly uncomfortable with the resemblance to racist transliterations of African American Vernacular, especially when dealing with slavery.
Dreiser is deeply, and noticeably to others, uncomfortable around serfs. There's emphasis both with Rahksan and earlier in the car that he can't help but stare at the identification numbers tattooed onto their necks and to focus awkwardly on total alienation from them, on the fact that there's nothing he could really say to bridge the complete difference in life.
There could be something interesting here subtly commenting on ingrained liberal bigotries and discomfort confronting horrendous exploitation and racism. For example, there's a point where, in his head, he notes in response to Rahksan's sexual comment about Eric and Johanna both being present being quite tiring that she's:
After perfect comes a hard-r n-word. Which brings the slur counter up to two, unless you want to count that one for multiple points against the book.
But then Rahksan talks more, notes Dreiser's discomfort with her, and goes on... a very uncomfortable attempt to rationalize the perspective and happiness of a sexualized house slave, as written by a white dude in the '80s. There's a lot of rationalizing around her background, that it wasn't the von Shrakenbergs who killed her family and in Afghanistan she would have been treated as equivalent to livestock anyways, forced to wear a Chador and be married off (oh boy, American clichés about Afghan women 15 years early to the party). And she's fully bought in to the Draka idea of pleasure, dismissing any of Dreiser's objections to the sex as Christian prudishness.
All of this is uncomfortable, but the accent tips it over:
@Eukie put it best when I was showing this to her on Discord: this feels like a hate crime just trying to pronounce it in your head.
After Dreiser ends up kind of put on the spot and vaguely shamed by Rahksan, the siblings finish their swim and emerge. Eric's courteous enough to get dressed for Dreiser's discomfort with nudity, while Johanna just stays naked and has Rahksan dry her (incidentally, a line earlier implies that Dreiser seems to think Rahksan is only sleeping with Eric which... motherfucker, you were in Berlin in the '20s, you know what homosexuality is). In the small talk it comes up that Dreiser has used this training/rest time before deployment to make some notes on Draka home life (to only be released after the war, he notes privately), which turns into a chapter-closing meander on Draka economics and the close combat and gender, of all things.
The Draka system was termed "feudal socialism" by Thomas Carlyle. There's no private ownership of land; holdings and plantations are merely grants by the state, although there's no real information on how this practically differs from ownership. Large industries, then, are held as "Combines" with corporate shares owned in variable percentages by the state and various citizen guilds, including the Landholder's League which is essentially the bureaucratic coordination cooperative of all the plantations.
Pictured: the jingoistic patriotism re-entering my body whenever the goddamn snakes say anything about America.
Anyways, brother and sister snake here also claim that the Landholder's League are also the ones who commonly lobby for improved serf conditions: 91% of the population is serfs and they can't have relevant trade with the world, so the one way to raise consumption of agricultural goods is to beef up (figuratively and literally) serf rations.
Most citizens, meanwhile, are just inherently wealthy from the system and distributed profits from their guild membership: more than 90% hold some serfs, although "three-quarters hold ten or less. Half five or less." Eric describes the only truly poor citizens as alcoholics and... well, the r-slur (slur counter: 3). And they're put into institutions and implied to be soft-euthanized with "life-shortening vices."
After Johanna leaves, we get one last tangent explaining Draka "pankration" fighting styles: despite the name, it's actually a form of karate (goddamn '80s martial arts craze...). A Draka overseer apparently encountered a group of Okinawan serfs (A: Did the Indian Ocean slave trade ever fucking touch the Ryukyus? B: Slur Counter 4, because he uses the c-slur for Asians) who fought back and won when he went to whip them, and the overseer responded by promptly buying out their contracts and setting up a school to teach it to Draka.
Dreiser has a mildly sexist comment about how odd it is that Johanna can stand up to him so well; Eric responds that after the Great War Draka women got very insistent about combat service, and that kind of talk might get him challenged to a duel, or just flatly attacked and left with broken bones. He'll understand Draka women better when he's out in combat.
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- Location
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This shouldn't be misconstrued as a defense of the overall passage but can this really be called a cliche if it's literally true? The Taliban did not invent Afghanistan's patriarchy, the condition of women was pretty damn bad for a much longer time.
Geckonator
Occult Materialist
I'd say it's a cliché in the sense of that fact getting deployed to justify a foreign occupation as being either better or no worse for women. It's sort of hard to compare because the Draka are written as, again, the worst regime imaginable instead of ideological projects making a pitch for nation-building like the occupations of Afghanistan in real life, but there's an echo of how exceptional and limited narratives of women now having "choice" gets deployed.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
burn alt-history to the ground and salt the fields
- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
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- She/Her
You know I've never actually read the Draka series, though of course I've heard the horror stories over the years, so this is the most exposure to it I've had.
It's not great!
The genre deserves better than to be primarily associated in people's heads with Nazi victories, Confederate victories, or the Draka, which is sort of a Nazi-Confederate victory.
It's not great!
The genre deserves better than to be primarily associated in people's heads with Nazi victories, Confederate victories, or the Draka, which is sort of a Nazi-Confederate victory.
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
When @Geckonator showed me some excerpts from this chapter one thing that stood out to me was how dirty Stirling does Dreiser: he's simultaneously described as a New Deal democrat and journalist covering Weimar Germany and Hitler's rise to power, who rants and rages about the need to drag America kicking and screaming into the 20th Century and make things better for its black and latin population—and when coming face to face with the cruelest empire imaginable he's just kind of accepting it in at best quiet resignation. This guy's a progressive American journalist in the 1940s, he should be so fucking angry about the injustice of the Draka.
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- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
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- She/Her
Okay, thoughts as I catch up:
My favorite is Separated at Birth.
Stirling is one of the seminal AH writers, for better or for worse, but the genre is slowly moving on.
So there's this thing Stirling does where every novel he writes is a sendup of a different genre. The Lords of Creation duology was planetary romance, Conquistador was a Western, Peshawar Lancers was a pulp novel, Emberverse was him doing a Conan.
And then Under the Yoke is inexplicably a Nazisploitation film, ala She-Wolf of the SS.
Good ol' "S&M Stirling" as we called him.
That would be a good idea.
The Ferguson Rifle is basically an alternate history cliche of its own at this point.
Parallelism, a classic AH trope, which can be done well or poorly. Personally I don't mind it.
Let's be honest, the mass conscription force has been pretty effective in historical conflicts. That's what we used to win WW2!
Which is silly. Africa is a much more difficult and less enticing destination for immigrants than America, and I doubt any inventor or industrialist there would do better than they did in America, since the Draka should be by all accounts a pretty dysfunctional society.
The Draka being sexually liberated just doesn't make sense to me, nor does their relative gender equality. I guess it's a Sparta thing, but - no, the Spartans did not allow women to train in war, they were expected to be physically fit so that they could be healthy childbearers. In a society with constant concerns about your tiny ruling class, the job of women should be to pump out as many children as possible. In a society obsessed with racial purity, reproduction will be tightly controlled.
Hacky nonsense.
I'm sorry, how did I miss that the Draka are also neopagans? Damn you, Stirling.
This stuff is extremely gross by the way, it's wayyyy worse than I thought it would be. It mostly seems to suggest that lesbianism is something that women are into, like, as a fetish and not an actual sexuality? Hate it, hate it, burning these books.
Right, this is a good point. The Citizens are too comfortable.
I guess you could craft something where the Citizens serve as shock troops and special forces, like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, with the Janissaries engaging the enemy and baiting them so that the Citizens could perform breakthroughs...something like that.
Well, Stirling was literally banned from AH.com for Islamophobia.
Ow. Dumb. Fucking dumb. My brain.
My favorite is Separated at Birth.
Stirling is one of the seminal AH writers, for better or for worse, but the genre is slowly moving on.
So there's this thing Stirling does where every novel he writes is a sendup of a different genre. The Lords of Creation duology was planetary romance, Conquistador was a Western, Peshawar Lancers was a pulp novel, Emberverse was him doing a Conan.
And then Under the Yoke is inexplicably a Nazisploitation film, ala She-Wolf of the SS.
Good ol' "S&M Stirling" as we called him.
That would be a good idea.
The Ferguson Rifle is basically an alternate history cliche of its own at this point.
Parallelism, a classic AH trope, which can be done well or poorly. Personally I don't mind it.
Let's be honest, the mass conscription force has been pretty effective in historical conflicts. That's what we used to win WW2!
Which is silly. Africa is a much more difficult and less enticing destination for immigrants than America, and I doubt any inventor or industrialist there would do better than they did in America, since the Draka should be by all accounts a pretty dysfunctional society.
The Draka being sexually liberated just doesn't make sense to me, nor does their relative gender equality. I guess it's a Sparta thing, but - no, the Spartans did not allow women to train in war, they were expected to be physically fit so that they could be healthy childbearers. In a society with constant concerns about your tiny ruling class, the job of women should be to pump out as many children as possible. In a society obsessed with racial purity, reproduction will be tightly controlled.
Hacky nonsense.
I'm sorry, how did I miss that the Draka are also neopagans? Damn you, Stirling.
This stuff is extremely gross by the way, it's wayyyy worse than I thought it would be. It mostly seems to suggest that lesbianism is something that women are into, like, as a fetish and not an actual sexuality? Hate it, hate it, burning these books.
Right, this is a good point. The Citizens are too comfortable.
I guess you could craft something where the Citizens serve as shock troops and special forces, like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, with the Janissaries engaging the enemy and baiting them so that the Citizens could perform breakthroughs...something like that.
Well, Stirling was literally banned from AH.com for Islamophobia.
Ow. Dumb. Fucking dumb. My brain.
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TFW everybody knows the intimate details of your country's nuclear program because your citizen population is more concerned with organizing swinger parties than national security.
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King Washington
Semi-Depressed Lurker
- Location
- Indiana
I think it's kind of hilarious that the Draka and SaB's Drakia would probably fucking hate each other on ideological and religious grounds.
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yeah, it's standard-issue necropolitical adoption of progressive causes for the purpose of generating imperialist casus belli. See also: British Imperial rhetoric about widow-burning in India or liberal Zionist claims that progressive queers shouldn't be pro-Palestine because Arabs are all homophobes.
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
I have a name, you know!
Sloped armour and 120 mm gun is certainly doable in WWII: the IS-2 with its 122 mm gun and sloped armour arrived in 1943. The turbo-compound engine was also around as prototypes, with commercial (or "commercial") variants like the Napier Nomad and Dobrynin VD-4K appearing in 1949. A turbo-compound engine uses the exhaust gasses from the engine to drive a small turbine on the driveshaft, increasing power. Because, like all turbines, the turbo-compound engine's turbine is driven the pressure difference between two environments, a turbo-compound engine is most efficient when the difference in pressure between the engine manifold and the environment is high and expels the exhaust gasses very forcefully. For an aircraft engine, this isn't much of a problem, because the environment is typically low pressure, high altitude air.
Tanks usually operate near sea level, so to keep it efficient would require a very high manifold pressure. This can be done by tapping some power from the engine to drive a blower that pushes extra air into the engine, but the engine will only be maximally efficient when the blower is operating at 100%—which is difficult, because most blower designs are driven directly by the engine, so if the engine isn't at a optimum throttle, the blower won't be either. This is less of a problem in long-haul diesel trucks (and supercharged aircraft) where you can design for peak blower at the standard long-haul road speed, but an engine will throttle up and down a lot more if it's in a tank darting between natural cover in the French bocage or Russian steppe. Without a consistent engine running speed, it's hard to design a blower that keeps a constant overpressure at the manifold, so the turbo-compound turbine will rarely be providing much extra power.
Maybe you could make a variable system that gives you the extra power exactly when you need it, but I get the feeling you'd end up making a very heavy engine for very marginal gains in fuel efficiency or power—that are offset by needing a bigger, heavier tank to carry a bigger, heavier engine.
(Ref.)
- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Personally I'm not a rivet-counter - I think it can be a detriment when people get too bogged down in criticizing the details of this or that piece of technology. I don't think an AH story needs to get into the weeds of guns and tanks to work as a story, although at the same time a certain amount of balance between fidelity and, call it vibes needs to be struck. You can't give me all these details about how advanced the tanks the Draka are using are and expect me to believe they're still using airships and steam cars out of some pulpy soft sci-fi story.
But Stirling is definitely a rivet-counter, and I think when you make the firm details of your technology a central part of the story like this, it needs to hold up. As I said, I'm not knowledgeable about all this stuff but even a laywoman like me can see the wires.
But Stirling is definitely a rivet-counter, and I think when you make the firm details of your technology a central part of the story like this, it needs to hold up. As I said, I'm not knowledgeable about all this stuff but even a laywoman like me can see the wires.
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The good news for a tank turbo-compounded engine is that the major tradeoff for plane use is that the hot, high pressure and thus fast air that would go into the system has functionally no use on a land vehicle, whereas on a plane you can shape the manifolds to generate a non-zero amount of thrust which becomes more valuable at higher speeds (thrust and power not being the same thing in terms of propulsive utility is a lot of why jets really gain ground as speeds get higher, and is also why turboprops are common on smaller planes that spend more of their time climbing and thus flying slowly, which I think is also the turbo-compounded engine's sweet spot.)
The bad news is everything you described about throttle response. Turbo lag is a very complicated subject, and 1940s turbine technology really is not up to providing a response to quick throttle changes. Aviation and land, especially armored warfare needs for an engine are very different. Aviation wants steady power and its idea of hard use is stuffing ridiculous air pressure into the engine so it can have way more air per air as it runs steadily at its upper limit of horsepower generation. Meanwhile a tank needs low end torque, and a turbocompounding setup adds functionally nothing to it, maybe even worsening performance due to backpressure even though it's a draw-down turbine. Turbocompounding turns the exhaust gases from high rpm engine running into additional crankshaft power, which is to say it provides power when a tank least needs it. Also, I really wonder about the reliability of this setup, because even in aero engine use, there's a good bit of fun with it being a fluid coupled linking to prevent the turbine and piston engine's vibration from shaking each other apart, and this system is going to be spending a lot more time at speed ranges that the historical engines went through once on startup and doing so with different levels of contribution from each.
All in all, I think that if you absolutely must explore alternate propulsion systems for tank engines, Ferdinand Porsche, whose inefficient use of resources really warrants a Hero of the Soviet Union for his unsung industrial sabotage committed through the novel technique of "trying his best, bless his heart", had better ideas and I'd find it much more interesting to see something like a turboelectric drive tank that gets around turbine issues by running the thing on high all the time and varying power delivery through electric motors. The US even played with it on the Medium Tank T23 (which makes sense, the US was actually the bigger fans of turboelectric transmissions outside Porsche just being a weirdo).
There's also the other problem, which is the 120mm gun. I'm very curious to see if that thing is somehow firing APFSDS or if it has two loaders in the crew, because pretty much universally no full caliber projectile gets loaded into a 120mm gun by a single person at a quick rate. Modern tanks work because the shells aren't the same kind of APCBC or similar that you'd see in WWII, which is why most tanks outside oddball heavies with a side hustle of breaking fortifications generally used lighter guns back then.
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Geckonator
Occult Materialist
I believe it's 5-person crew, from a mention in the preview chapters of future books where a certain character recalls it; commander, driver, gunner, loader, and radio operator.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's kind of odd to frame this is as an "alternate history" problem. I don't know about you but I've read lots of alt-history that didn't have anything like this. And I'm not talking about stuff on alt-history.com or SV, Turtledove is very much mainstream and while he's not without his flaws he has never done anything so egregious.
The issue here isn't necessarily alt-history, it's Stirling's fucking weird racism.
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Wow, I must destroy the Drakan Dominion, immediately