Stalker was inspired by the film stalker and the book roadside picnic and both didn't have any reactor explosions it was a aliens or some kind of space something for the movie and the book it was just aliens.
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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
- Alt. History Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- Lost in the internet
And ironically, the Strugatsky brothers faced censorship for Stalker/Roadside Picnic, not because of any political leaning (in fact one could argue that Stalker, the book, is pretty anti-capitalist) but because of the coarse language, which the censors thought was inappropriate for the young readers (OTL sci-fi was viewed as a youth genre)
The PRC is going off in South America I believe, not really touching Africa. The "proving they're better communists than us" thing is in reference to their willingness to fund random Peruvian Maoists or whatever in the USA's back yard while we write off the whole hemisphere as a hopelessly lost cause with the CIA so close and us so far.
Could totally do an alt-timeline STALKER where the setting is some horribly polluted heavy industrial town instead of Chernobyl. Just swap out the nuclear reactor for an old chemical or metallurgical complex that poisoned the land instead, we have zero shortage of those to draw inspiration from TTL.
Ahh~ this reminds me that apparently the USSR is shortly going to embark on large scale ecological devastation via some large scale river reversal projects. If that creates suitably dramatic enough outcomes it could work as a backdrop as well.
Hopefully we can skip the major nuclear disaster scenario in this timeline, though I imagine eventually there will be some smaller accidents. Like a major Earthquake causing some issues.
Well quite a few people who did the stalker film did likely die do to cancer from chemicals from a factory one of the people who helped filmed it said, and likely the other real deserted water filled industrial facilities they used as sets likely didn't help as well.
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
STALKER where the ecological disaster was catfish.
Wonder how TTL T-80 will be like. Are we going down the same route NATO did by using a welded turret? How about reactive armor? The Soviet Union produced reactive armor which was superior to Kontakt-5 in the 60s (KDZ-68) but refused to adopt it and didn't develop another one until the 80s. The hull armor can also be significantly increased without increasing costs all that much.
It is almost 1976. TTL T-80 should be coming soon.
It is almost 1976. TTL T-80 should be coming soon.
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Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
Right now we have two MBTs in service, the T-52 and T-64. Our latest information on them comes from turn 82 results. The T-52 has had at least one round of modernizations already, and we are anticipating it becoming obsolete after America gets their TOW missile system running. The T-64 has had a troubled development cycle and the first models had major reliability issues, which hopefully have been fixed with newer models. There was supposed to be an uparmored version featuring better turret and frontal armor entering mass production in 1974, or this turn. We haven't heard anything about a next gen model since turn 78 results, back in 1968, where the army said it was placing bids. Nothing on the bidding process or prototype, which makes me think they won't be anytime soon. Possibly the T-80 will be delayed slightly compared to OTL since we were in a state of detente until very recently and tensions with China are low. I imagine the army will be getting a nice increase in income next budget cycle though, after Ashbrooks election.
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Kinda, an updated MBT is very much in the works to be both more affordable and more capable then the t64 by removing a lot of perceived and actual engineering excess. Frontal armor is going to get entirely replaced with reflective plates with a HHA sloping upper plate as a weird hybrid between an OTL Abrams and Leopard to reduce vulnerability/risk to ammunition behind the plate by rejecting angling in favor of thickness and the ability to move forward the ammunition reserve outside the AZ. The same hydropenumatic suspension will likly predominate as on the T64 to give the vehicle some turret depression though for you at this point its a mostly mature system. The move to an integral power pack is just following the trend as the lengthened hull means that to an extent it has to be integrated for balance with decisions more focused on a domestic 900-1000 hp engine or a 1200hp less compact german one otherwise transmission with pre-selection in a semi-automatic system. The turret is if anything the big item of debate between a more conventional turret with k composition inserts with large size, but that then surrenders the side geometry for off-angle enguagements. Conversly, the other thought is a welded turret with HHA reflective plates and RHA front and back plates to lower build costs and operational costs that is a bit shaped wide like the T90M turret, if far less capable through using litteral first gen reflective plates along with moving the MG above the gub breach to reduce areas of vulnerability. Targeting systems are going towards laser range find automatic lead calculation across the board for all tanks, but the first systems are going to come on the T64B/new tank.
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This is somewhat strange design direction truth be told, not without merits compared to IRL soviet armour (better mass efficiency, protection against shaped charges, greatly improved protection against steel body APFSDS rounds) but also not without flaws (not really much better against depleted Uranium or Wolfram alloy penetrators, worse volume efficiency) especially early iterations of that technology, unless we are going towards much heavier tanks where mass efficiency is much more important.
That description brings to mind turret with composition similar to what was IRL and is in quest used for hull (steel-fiberglass-steel) forming a rather box shaped turret similar in shape to one seen on say Leopard 2 or Abrams but then question arise why not just take that box shape and fill it with reflective plates to maximise armour thickness in frontal arc (representing middle ground between simplified shape but still using reflective plates, granted at this point you start thinking about maybe putting new autoloader in the back of turret with ammo separated by bulkhead from crew and suddenly Leclerc).
Though speaking of tanks are we sticking with steel body darts for now or is there Uranium or Wolfram/Tungsten ammunition incoming?
From description they look mostly like OTL soviet tanks.
T-52 right now looks like T-55AM with more sloped front.
T-64 looks like roughly like T-64.
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- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The new tank is expected to get heavier with production models likely to reach 50 tons before add-ons as all the technology is well, heavy leading to a greater focus on mass efficiency with armor. Further, the introduction of the TOW onto everything is pushing anti-chemical armor fairly hard at least compared to kinetic protection. The other thing is that you are increasing the internal volume anyways via power pack, ammunition requirements, and the technically sophisticated suspension leading to the lengthened hull/use of reflective plates vs heavily angled armor. You might also do something even beyond the T55AM, sticking further frontal armor onto it along with a Drozd upgrade kit and a more advanced optical/laser range finding system for export and fraternal socialist republic sales of cheaper vehicles.
In terms of ammunition being introduced, M735 equivalents have started being issued to units with M60s due to experiences in Algeria/US analysis of T52 hulls. This is accompanied by the MBT-70 actually getting fielded in numbers, though with a second generation shillelagh ATGM at this point that sorta functions, but the big advantage is the well, 152mm HE chucker and 1500hp turbine. In practice its going to get converted to the use of the L11 once US defense gives up on using an ATGM as the principle anti-tank weapon. The British are still using the L15 round with far more concrete efforts to move to a mixed body/expanded tungsten perpetrator if not a monolithic one to come later in the decade, which will be sped up once the US adopts the L11.
On your end for tank projectiles, your better grasp at machine tooling has placed you less far behind comparative to OTL and likly to get thick(35-40mm) monoblock penetrators ala BM26/29 out before the end of the decade due to the rising Western armor threat. The arguably funnier thing is due to the need to keep allies partially relevent you may actually issue a monoblock penetrator for the 100mm gun in the early 80s, making a cursed T52 that can theoretically enguage most vehicles, at least for a time.
That's quite a capability gap:
IRL 3BM-26 projectile for 125mm cannon was steel body with WHA slug at the base, supposedly better against complex armour found on say Abrams but sources are scarce about performence.
IRL 3BM-29 may be DU penetrator, quick search indicate that it was 3BM-28 (115mm APFSDS that should be DU penetrator) adapted for 125mm.
Still getting non obsolete dart issued for 125mm before Abrams hit is good news (assuming BM-29).
There is nothing cursed about T-52 getting good APFSDS, IRL D-10T have very comparable muzzle energy to L7 and there were even some darts from the latter adapted to former.
Wonder is this will cause USA to develop proper HE shell for their 120mm without waiting like 15 years.
Even more armour? That'll be a lot of armour, T-55AM already got girthy armour addon. I guess older T-52s are getting laser rangefinder box over gun barrel like T-55s got while T-52U will repurpose coincidence rangefinder space (one part/optic get replaced with rangefinder, rest get filled up with metal or left empty).
What is the population in each republic? Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc? We have 100M more people but where do they live?
- Location
- Northish
Given that never had collectivization and had much less purges of populace, along with our better performance in WWII, I imagine Russia has the largest population by far. We had a baby boom so big we frantically had to make more schools and child care just to keep up.
- Location
- Northish
Oh yeah that is much less devastated breadbasket that will fuel population growth for decades to come.
- Pronouns
- He
And also the development of central Asia it means more people
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
As long as it doesn't completely fuck over the environment in a half-century.
I mean we will but in an exciting way!
Oh the environment is incredibly fucked, both on a global and local scale. Globally a more prosperous USSR/Eurozone, PRC, and India are all going to annihilate the global carbon budget and move warming effects up by decades compared to OTL. And on more local scales, same deal, all those factories and farms and cities that come along with our prosperity TTL are all poisoning the land in greater concentrations and in more places than OTL. All the canals we've dug and dams we've built have ruined all the freshwater ecosystems, all the forests are being cut down, all the mining towns and steel mills and chemical plants and industrial farms are filling everything around them with horrible toxins. And that's not even getting to the essentially inevitable river reversal or the mountains of plastic everywhere...
But hey the numbers went up, so we're winning!
But hey the numbers went up, so we're winning!
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- Location
- Northish
Eh, we never were going to get the common people to give a damn about the environment until the side effects got too bad to ignore. The US public didn't give a crap about car emissions until they were breathing smog and neither will the Soviet people. Eventually the politicians will start screaming at us to reduce pollution while we try to stave off the worst of global warming.
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
Cars aren't the problem, it's the sheer amount of heavy industrial plants powered by coal that's ruining air quality. If we're lucky air quality is the same as OTL 70s. It's probably much worse, given all the factories and power plants that exist in this Union that didn't historically.