VJ-101 VTOL fighter in transitional flight (NB: transition with a small 't', thank you)

Some spillover from yesterday’s thread…

• While SSTs and ballistic transports will make getting around that planet that much faster especially time spent in the worrisome skies over Europe and the UK, the airship will also make a come back. This will largely be in response to the increasing dangers of the sea lanes and will also reduce the need for massive harbours and maritime points of entry as airships will be able to deliver relatively large and bulky loads direct to the target location. Customs and Immigration will, of course, be tearing their hair…

• What will happen with the Irish problem? With the Sovs posturing over half of Europe, like, more than the half they had the first time round, it is unlikely the Brits will have much tolerance for any bolshie Paddys. In any case, Ireland is too isolated for any meaningful insurgency to be conducted and it is likely that Eire would become part of Fortress Britain whether it really liked it or not. One impact this might have is that the Brits will no longer have the catalysts to develop their mastery of comprehensive approach Countering Irregular Activity and COIN. Then again, they have always played pretty fast and loose with the rules when playing the great game and managed to deal with most of Adolf’s spies and saboteurs in short order without much help from anyone. Perhaps, in revealing ahead of time, those like Philby and Co, the Brit public service will be purged and thus be similarly successful against Uncle Joe’s spies and saboteurs – which really makes the Irish question a non-issue.

• I would like to see France used as a nuclear testing zone by everyone and for this to be encouraged.

• In terms of nitty-gritty, technotoys I would like to see in service: after the TSR.2, the Rotodyne tops the list…let’s use them as feeders out to the floating airship terminals…

• The quest for effective VTOL aircraft will continue with some urgency and aircraft like the VJ-101, P.1152, P. 1154 and XFV-12A will come into service as close range protection for naval platforms, including civilian vessels to fend off pirates and privateers (QE2 will have a hangar deck for two); and also because the much warmer Cold War (Cold War++) will again call into question the security of large concrete airbases.

• At least one permanent space station will be developed in the 60s both to control the high ground and as an eventual stepping stone to the Moon and further. As I commented yesterday, all the biochemicals being sprayed with gay abandon around the planet in 1945 mean that we might want to be thinking of an Earth 2 – and we know now that wormholes are doable…

• Also I do like the concept of Project Horizon that was raised yesterday in a comment by savO – not just because it aligns with my statements re a moonbase but because it has a high cool factor and introduces the potential for combat on the Moon.

• Referring back to yesterday’s pic of the Vulcan in the Sound – I think that pic is actually in Milford Sound – I’m wondering if JB could slip in some sort of Vulcan low-level strike, basically what I’m after is 633 Squadron with Vulcans…

• I’m also wondering if 21C technologies might not be focussed on alternate and clean (though why bother with all the NBC being used?) power sources so that the Middle East never gets the strangehold at the pumps that it enjoys now.

• Israel, instead of stirring up the Arabs, and having decided to work and play nicely with them, conducts a very aggressive covert campaign against the Sovs to encourage the expatriation of Soviet Jews to Israel – alive. This becomes one of the major wild cards in the AoT post-war deck.

• Is there a Marshall Plan? Yes, but focussed on the Middle East and North Africa as the new bastions against Soviet aggression. The Fertile Crescent become fertile again. Central Africa remains a shithole and pretty well plays out the same history as it has here.

• With economies kickstarted by the Marshall Plan, a combination of Arab money and Israeli know-how widens the Suez Canal into a two lane facility. In 1956, Sov proxies from Greece and Turkey (yes, I know they hate each other but if we can have wormholes, we can have Greeks and Turks who get on) get a snotting when they try to seize the Canal to protect it as an ‘international asset’.

• The Falklands War never gets a look in. By 1955, The Falklands Island have become the unsinkable fleet that holds Argentine and Chilean ambitions towards Antarctica in check – the Brits however do take the time to return all abandoned scrap metal to Argentina, just in case…

• I don’t think McCarthyism will occur – what happened to Hoover pretty well sets the scene for what will happen to anyone else who gets out of control and surely amongst the Uptimer 21C lessons must be one relating to the folly of over-simplistic profiling; communist leaning ≠ Sov supporter or agent just like Islamic ≠ rabid nutjob terrorist…what there may be though because the Uptimer histories will have shown its effect, is the introduction of terror as a weapon a la what we see today.  Who might those terrorists be? Well, the both sides of the civil rights movement leaps out for a start; perhaps also some sort of movement kicking back against the Uptimers; the list so far is quite short as most of those who might feel that they were disadvantages in some way by the AoT version of WW2 are conveniently dead – I’m really leaning towards domestic than ‘transnational’ or external terrorists…

• Maybe it is such as attack that thrusts Kohlhammer into the Presidency – he doesn’t need to be elected so long as he sits in the chain of succession as per Coppel’s 34 East or By Dawn’s Early Light (both stories where the chain of succession extends lower than the Vice-President)- maybe terrorists gatecrash a White House dinner party (we all know how easy that is now!) and Kohlhammer finds himself at the top of the food chain.

• We’ve solved most of the worlds ills except for the Sovbloc – likely to be solved with a bright flash or flashes on the horizon – and South America – i think that South America may be where the global plot gets its tail twisted – there is little significant history on the continent so less in the way of 21C lessons to be applied in the AoT post-war era therefore we really have to take South America as it comes…

• Will we move towards a standing force in support of the (toothless in our time) UN and will this perhaps be a relatively short leap towards a world government, certainly a good guy alliance government?

• I think that we will see, in short order, a number of new inventions as smart people from the 1940s start to apply their new knowledge. RULE #1 – no wormhole experiments on Earth!! These new inventions will introduce some new life into the Uptimer story as well as more uncertainty as the timeline starts to deviate from what’s left of ‘our’ timeline as as technological edges start to smooth out.

• I’d like to see the rather conventional Sovbloc versus US/UK plotline resolved and tossed out in short order and bring in a new story that takes us out of that comfort zone – what, I’m not sure. Maybe the Israel/Arab bloc might leap ahead in the application of Uptimer tech to new problems, make a breakthrough and become (again) a super-power…? Push the Uptimers into a situation where they really have to think rather than just succumb to the temptation to rehash Hackett’s The Third World War. What-if…the Judeo-Islamic Federation begins to dictate its values as the norm for global ethos and culture, just as we in the west tend to do to the Third World…?