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Alt History ideas, rec and general discussion thread

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Zam said:
OK, so idle question, but like if there was a nuclear war, are we guaranteed all life on earth would end if the major nuclear powers mostly just targeted each other? Or could places like New Zealand be ignored until it was too late to shoot at them?
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Even in a worst-case scenario that kills billions of people, all our nuclear weapons combined could not end life on Earth or even human civilization - billions of humans would survive to continue, although it's impossible to say what society would look like.
 
ScottishMongol said:
Even in a worst-case scenario that kills billions of people, all our nuclear weapons combined could not end life on Earth or even human civilization - billions of humans would survive to continue, although it's impossible to say what society would look like.
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Well that's encouraging to hear, thank you, :D

Encouraging both as a general concept and for potential stories I mean.
 
ScottishMongol said:
Even in a worst-case scenario that kills billions of people, all our nuclear weapons combined could not end life on Earth or even human civilization - billions of humans would survive to continue, although it's impossible to say what society would look like.
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Is that true? I think the runaway climate effect might end up causing a biological extinction period we'd be hard pressed to survive.

The biosphere would recover but we could easily be one of the many species that wouldn't make it.
 
Nyvis said:
Is that true? I think the runaway climate effect might end up causing a biological extinction period we'd be hard pressed to survive.

The biosphere would recover but we could easily be one of the many species that wouldn't make it.
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The science is still out on that, ultimately it's impossible to predict.
 
On a completely different note: I am thinking back to the Greek Revolution of 1821 ( يونان عصيانى, Yunan İsyanı,) and how the Ottomans seriously bungled the response to what could have been Yet Another Regional Revolt. WI Mahmud II and his administration kept a far calmer head about things... not so much about lowering the boom on the rebels in the Morea (especially those involved in wholesale confessional massacre), but in the areas beyond klepht/armatole reach.

In particular, insofar as the Greek community in Constantinople is concerned he should have taken all pain and effort to protect Orthodox subjects in areas the Sultan controlled from retaliatory violence, refrained from doing more than jailing the loudest Filiki Eteria propagandists for sedition, reserved outright execution for confirmed gun-runners,... and (here is the big thing) do not under any circumstance lay a finger on the Patriarch or his clerical loyalists (and loyalists they were, condemning the revolt from the pulpit).

Boom, even if the Philhellenes imbued with Romantic Classicism continue to throw money at the revolt the domestic and international willingness to back a Rightful Monarch in that post-Napoleonic age is boosted greatly.
 
So, here's question.

In the past I have dabbled in -First Nations people fight off the British colonists in "Australia"- as an idea before. As records indicate it was actually pretty close early on to being so costly that the British (Who weren't enthused in the first place) to sod the whole thing. After gold was discovered this wasn't an option but that took 40 years or so.

But let's say that happens.

What becomes of the convicts?

As I understand it the idea of trying to 'reform' convicts was sort of new to the British and not super popular and with nowhere easy to shove them what might the consequences be for the convicts, the British Empire and social development in general?
 
Nyvis said:
Is that true? I think the runaway climate effect might end up causing a biological extinction period we'd be hard pressed to survive.

The biosphere would recover but we could easily be one of the many species that wouldn't make it.
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From what I've read on the matter, nuclear winter isn't really a concern. Nuclear explosions don't create that much fallout, especially on a planetary scale, and what fallout they do create doesn't persist in the atmosphere. Compare that to volcanic eruptions, which semi-regularly blast entire mountains apart, often hurling vast clouds of ash into the stratosphere– which usually just causes a temporary cooling in the climate, if that.
 
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Horologer said:
From what I've read on the matter, nuclear winter isn't really a concern. Nuclear explosions don't create that much fallout, especially on a planetary scale, and what fallout they do create doesn't persist in the atmosphere. Compare that to volcanic eruptions, which semi-regularly blast entire mountains apart, often hurling vast clouds of ash into the stratosphere– which usually just causes a temporary cooling in the climate, if that.
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Volcanic explosions happen one at the time. It's fair to say the average nuclear blast has less climate effect than the average volcanic explosion but there would be a lot of them if everyone launched their arsenals at each other so I'm not confident in it not being enough to cause some runaway effect.
 
Nyvis said:
Volcanic explosions happen one at the time. It's fair to say the average nuclear blast has less climate effect than the average volcanic explosion but there would be a lot of them if everyone launched their arsenals at each other so I'm not confident in it not being enough to cause some runaway effect.
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Sorry, I was unclear in my phrasing there. I didn't mean to compare a single nuclear explosion to a single volcanic eruption, I meant to compare a large number of nuclear explosions going off at once to a single volcanic eruption.

Even if you have a huge number of nuclear explosions, you're not going to get as much debris in the atmosphere as you would from a large volcanic eruption (e.g. Tambora).
 
You could make the year without a summer a century without a summer, kill mankind off in the Victorian era rather than the modern era.
 
That likely wouldn't kill off humanity, reduce their numbers in parts of the world prehaps but not wipe humanity out.

You'd need something more dramatic than a dramatically extended year without a summer or year of darkness or even a far more severe younger dryas to have a chance at that I'd suspect.
 
The simple answer is that we don't know what would happen and all the gods of men and mice willing we'll never find out.
 
What changes would have necessary for India to avoid partitioning (other than not having Lord Mountbatten being appointed Viceroy)?
 
Mazeka said:
What changes would have necessary for India to avoid partitioning (other than not having Lord Mountbatten being appointed Viceroy)?
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I understand Jinnah's split with Congress was as much a matter of personalities as anything. Keep him sweet and the Muslim League loses one of it's main leaders and said league did not have all that much support in the Muslim Majority areas to begin with
 
Are there any examples of a Japan wins WW2 TL where China just ends up assimilating them, kind of like what happens with every foreign conqueror.
 
Terran Allias said:
Are there any examples of a Japan wins WW2 TL where China just ends up assimilating them, kind of like what happens with every foreign conqueror.
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That's a misconception: the Manchus were the only foreign conquerors who rapidly assimilated fully. The Xianbei were around as a distinct group as late as the Yuan dynasty, and some peripheral groups, like the Salurs and the Yughurs, are still around. The Khitans assimilated into Mongol culture (which was much more similar to theirs), not Chinese culture. The Mongols are still around, including groups inside (in some cases deep inside) China. The Jurchens conquered northern China once in the 1100s and again in the 1600s, and only assimilated after the second conquest.
 
What would be a good point of divergence for a competent, prussia-esque (industrial, some limited liberal reforms, still monarchist somewhat authoritarian) Russian empire?
I was also thinking of having it substantially stronger ties to the pacific, maintaining all of the fort ross claims on America(which would include the pacific northwest up into northern California) as well as Manchuria and even the Korean peninsula if highly tenuous. I think that that may be possible in a industrialized Russia, given the power of railroads.
 
Bluespark9 said:
What would be a good point of divergence for a competent, prussia-esque (industrial, some limited liberal reforms, still monarchist somewhat authoritarian) Russian empire?
I was also thinking of having it substantially stronger ties to the pacific, maintaining all of the fort ross claims on America(which would include the pacific northwest up into northern California) as well as Manchuria and even the Korean peninsula if highly tenuous. I think that that may be possible in a industrialized Russia, given the power of railroads.
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Getting Russia industrialized is already a tall order, given that to get that going, you basically need to properly defang the landed aristocracy and their absolute rejection of any attempts at bringing progress to the country. So, you need a way to break the power of the nobility enough that they can't delay industrialization as much as humanly possible.

Prussia's industrialization was strongest in the Ruhr valley, a late acquisition where an industrial base was already developing. Russia doesn't have any comparable acquisition, so it'll have to build up its industry basically from scratch. Good news, the Donbass easily rivals the Ruhr valley when it comes to industrial potential.

The main question is what impetus does Russia have to focus on a Pacific Empire? Russian America was remote and hard to reach by Russian standards. Outer Manchuria wouldn't be seized until the 1860s, while Russia was also busy subjugating Central Asia. And one of the reasons they focussed on the east was that the Crimean War had basically halted their expansion plans into the close abroad of the Balkan. An industrializing Russia probably would be in a better position to expand into the Balkan and consider it a superior option to do so. The Pacific is far from St Petersburg, after all.
 
Have the attempted Decembrist coup/confused demonstration actually work out in imposing Konstantin as Emperor and forcing Konstantin to accept being Emperor, and in so doing set up the conditions for an accord as a semi-constitutional monarchy, with empowered liberals further imposing themselves upon the empire?
 
Red Flood is a mod for HOI4 and still in development, but I just wanted to recommend it as an example of non-plausible alt-history being fun as hell.
Does it make sense that a schizophrenic (iirc) artist takes over France in the name of Futurism, and can then go on to declare war on reality or go full primitivist and make France into Gaul again? No.
Does it make sense that some random esoteric socialists (who honestly took too much mescalin) in Altai can reunite Russia and make it into a decent, if weird, place to live? Not at all.
How about a former Bolshevik taking Technocracy literally and to it's logical extreme, replacing everyone's names with sequential letters and numbers while completly capital-R-Rationalizing society and founding a country named the One State? Absolutely not.

Also as of the most recent update at time of writing, Futurist Stalin.

Is it fun as hell to make and see that happen?

Yes. It's partially because there is some genuinely good writing - not TNO level, but they give a sense of how things really are better than just descriptions on national focuses - but also because it's willing to be absurd and own that fact.

It doesn't shy away from the fact that, yes, some ideologies and governments are going to kill civilians and destroy infrastructure for various reasons and that's something you, as a player, have to reckon with if you want to play those paths/countries, both in narrative events and through gameplay effects such as losing manpower/population or factories.

So, yeah Red Flood makes no sense, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

(Also Germany is a Spartacist Council Republic at game start, so there's that for all the non-authoritarian socialists out there, though Goebbels can come to power and do some weird Socialist Nationalism thing, though I don't think he hates the Jews, so there's that.)
 
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If Reagan never ran for president (due to various irrelevant factors leading up to 1980) and George H. W. Bush was elected POTUS (1981-1988), how comparable would be the GOP conservative shift to OTL by the time 2000 rolls around? Would it be just as extreme, even worse, or slightly less horrible?
 
Alane1 said:
That likely wouldn't kill off humanity, reduce their numbers in parts of the world prehaps but not wipe humanity out.

You'd need something more dramatic than a dramatically extended year without a summer or year of darkness or even a far more severe younger dryas to have a chance at that I'd suspect.
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More importantly, not even the Chicxulub Impact caused a winter that long. The Impact Winter of that lasted only 3 years. For comparsion, Chicxulub impacted with a yield of about 100 terratons. This is the equal of a million Tsar Bombas. You know what that yield doesnt include? The fact that so much debris would have been flung around by the impact there would have actually been secondary impact craters formed by the larger chunks of debris. Meaning it threw even more material into the air. And it doesnt consider the western hemisphere wide firestorm that went off because of said debris reentrying Nor the possibility it was a global firestorm.

If that couldnt do it, chances are nukes cant either.
 
What were the chances of Russia under Yeltsin fracturing even further with multiple warlords and successor states by 2000?

(No, this is not related to The Death of Russia.)
 
So An ISOT in Grimdark - Germany 2012 sent to the Warhammer World just posted its final epilogue update. It was a little emotional, seeing one of my favorite timelines end. Yet, I've also realized that I very rarely see long broad-scale timeline have a nice wrapped-up ending. Some do, like Male Rising, but a lot of them peter out after the main event is over and they don't know where to go next. It's nice to have closure.

That timeline is a strange thing nowadays. It was created at the height of the "powerful modern country sent to the past and starts Fixing Things" trend (with Warhammer Fantasy's pseudo-rennaisance setting it's got the spirit even if it's not an ISOT to OTL), and has outlasted every story that did that with a historical setting. Also, the two authors are far enough politically I'm impressed they work together- one seems to be a social democrat, the other's a kaiserboo. I'm pretty sure some of Germany's in-story political struggles during the later parts of the timeline are allegories for their RL disagreements on how the country's politics would develop under that setting.
 
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