It can be fun to put an alternate airliner into service, but unless it’s really big, really fast, or both, a lot of people wouldn’t notice much difference. That being said, the same can be said about a lot of things and it’s never stopped alternate history writers before.
I’ve even made a couple “formal” tiers:
Tier 1: Barely Noticeable
Planes like these (in this case the MD-XX and the An-218 “777ski”), are going to be barely noticeable to non-aviation afficiandos, however different they may be on the inside.
Tier 2: Standing Out A Bit
The dreaded propfan is one instance of these airplanes having one obvious standout in addition to their other more subtle features. Others include a distinct shape like the 747 fuselage or even a “four engines all in the back” like the VC-10/Il-62
Tier 3: Really Stand Out
LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01
These involve strange but technically plausible shapes like lifting bodies or circular hulls of various nature. Their mere appearance makes them stand-out. This ironically applies to delta wings and civilianized early jet bombers.
Tier 4: Exotics
These are the ones that ascend into pure science fiction.
I’m torn with submarine names for the MX-SSB class, a real proposed design that I’m using in All Union
(Bottom picture made in Stable Diffusion from the outline of the sub above)
The problems are:
The class is large at circa 50 boats, so the naming scheme needs to support such a large class.
There is no historical precedent since the US never used diesel missile subs, much less in large numbers.
Both fish and people just don’t seem right to me (subjective I know)
I’m leaning towards lakes (ie, the Lake Tahoe class with some/all of the Great Lakes thrown in), but am wondering if there’s something that just can click. Thoughts?
The words “Sports Alternate History” got me interested in the new Sea Lion Press anthology If We’d Just Got That Penalty. I read it-and the result was sadly as disappointing as the New York Jets season. (Which Jets season? Answer is “Everything since 1968 is valid”). So in the interest of fair and honest criticism, I’m giving an honest and (hopefully) fair review.
I’ll start out by saying that sports AH and short stories are an uphill climb. Sporting AH tends to be fairly trinketized due to the end result often plausibly nothing more than different results on a trophy or standings chart and the divergences just “if the ball only moved three inches to the left.” That being said, at best this has middling short stories.
At worst, there’s ones like a really convoluted pure exposition “tale” involving changes to both Haiti and various forms of “football”. It’s a sincerely well thought out and well-researched premise that ends up being executed in the worst possible manner. Others have the impression of being benchmarked against internet alternate history, which is kind of like benchmarking your isekai story against jumpchains or your basketball team against the Washington Generals.
SLP has made some good alternate history, but this unfortunately isn’t it.
The Holzer Centrifuge is a uranium enrichment centrifuge I’ve used as a Macguffin in various settings of mine. It is one of the smallest viable centrifuges and a simpler yet less effective design compared to its contemporaries. It has a maximum capacity of around 0.9 separative work units per centrifuge[1]. In practice with inevitable inefficiences and losses this leads to a mere 0.5-.6 in practice, one of the weakest individual centrifuges to ever spin in its hideous mission.
In All Union, the Polish Holzer centrifuge (named after the ethnic German scientist who led the program), served as one of the primary enrichment sources for the nation’s uranium path. The goal was ease of assembly with just domestic resources, hence why Holzer centrifuges were around 40-50 years behind their contemporaries and low-powered even by the standards of other first-gen designs. Nonetheless, they accomplished their goal.
[1]A napkin calc is as follows, with L being length in meters and V velocity in meters per second. Don’t really ask me to explain what an SWU exactly is.
Poland produced at least 50,000 Holzer centrifuges and operated 25,000 of them. Using an enrichment calculator and going by 0.6, the fully functional cascades would produce 77 kilograms of weapons grade uranium a year if working with natural ore to start, or 270 kilograms if working with reactor-grade LEU.
So in Action PC Football, I decided to simulate one of the classic Madden moments. Up by multiple touchdowns with one second left in the game and somehow almost in their own end-zone, the Packers naturally try a pass play with the quarterback in the shotgun formation (standing some distance behind the center when he snaps the ball).
Rodgers throws the ball to wide receiver Greg Jennings, who catches it and runs. With a broken leg. He makes it across the field to score and avoids Darren Sharper, one of the most hardest hitting safeties in the league.
So under a far more grounded simulation, I used the play analysis tool, running 10,000 repeats of the epic play.
It was a traditional pro set of 2 running backs, a tight end, and two wide receivers, including Jennings.
The pass was a medium fly route. “QB Must Pass” was set on, because otherwise the ball would often get thrown to someone else and that wouldn’t be Jennings putting the team on his back now, would it?
Wide Receiver and Running Back wear and tear was set to the highest level to simulate the effect on Jennings’ leg.
Otherwise no special plans were done.
Jennings reached the end zone and scored 21 times out of the 10,000 plays.
51.7% of the passes were complete. The average distance Jennings made it after catching the ball was 10.3 yards.
7.4% of the passes were intercepted by the Saints.
Now that the focus has changed (a little), I figured I’d do an infodump of something in my mind that I probably wouldn’t get to and honestly shouldn’t elaborate on in the next All Union installment. Enjoy.
In All Union’s timeline, Poland has the world’s fifth or fourth-largest nuclear arsenal.
Plutonium Production Reactor: 2x H-250 (PL) reactors: Nowe-Vistula
On May 20, 1992, Poland detonated a 1.1 kiloton plutonium “physics package” at the Opole Test Site. This was a rushed, improvised device of essentially no practical usability. The bomb was cobbled-together from reactor-grade plutonium taken from the Ignalina power plant in nearby, friendly Lithuania. It was intentionally fizzled to prevent the explosion from being too big, and was controversially detonated above ground to ensure the world knew. But a frenzied construction of nuclear arms and infrastructure began.
The fuel cycle starts at the processing plants. The main and largest by far is the redox chemical plant by Gdansk. The process there is inherently proliferation-resistant due to the fact that it takes a long time to make LEU, and an impossibly-long time to make weapons-level material (as in, over a decade). Low enriched uranium is taken from Gdansk and assembled into fuel rods for reactors home and abroad.
Poland in-universe has seven civilian reactors in two plants. One has three units of 300mw reactors and is located about 30 kilometers northeast of Bydgoszcz. The other has four 600mw reactors and is located near the German border slightly south of Szczecin. All are pressurized water reactors, although the Szczecin plant is of a substantially more advanced design.
However the uranium can also go into the three centrifuge collections, where it is enriched to weapons-grade levels. This makes up one half of their nuclear weapon path. Using LEU enables them to work more effectively than they could with raw uranium.
While the first proper plutonium bombs were made from “goosing” the Ignalina reactor, it was not a sustainable long-term solution. The Poles responded by building two Hanford-style graphite-pile production reactors near Nowe.
HEU and weapons-grade plutonium is taken to the highly classified Powidz assembly facilities (home to a historical/real air base) where the actual warheads are made. Every remnant is taken to the gigantic reprocessing/separation center at Ostroda, known as Nowa Energia (New Energy). There everything from MOX fuel systems for export to depleted uranium bullets are made (the Polish nuclear program makes a lot of DU, so they incorporate it into their arms industry).
For the finished products, Poland is believed to possess around two hundred warheads. It uses a dyad of aircraft/air-launched missiles and ground-based TELs. Naval deployment has been considered but is not believed to be practical as of the setting present.
Sea Lion Press published an anthology featuring alternate World War Is called N’Oubilons Jamais. Full of short stories, there is one that makes the anthology worth it all by itself. That is “The Modern Knight” by Jeff Provine, and it is amazing. The divergence is that instead of tanks, they go for people in Ned Kelly style body armor. The result is something that looks like a World War I version of GTA V’s “The Paleto Score”
Anyway, the rest of the anthology doesn’t quite come up to that masterpiece, but it’s still well worth your while.
With the B-1(A) cancelled, Rockwell took a look at a variety of bombers that ranged from “deliberately low technology for the sake of development time and risk” to “LASER GUNS” (seriously). The bomber needed to have a payload of 50,000 pounds, mostly in the form of sixteen nuclear-capable cruise missiles. It needed a strategic mission range of about 5,200 nautical miles with said payload.
The five main examples were:
Subsonic, low technology/cost
Subsonic, lowest weight
Supersonic
Stealth
LASER GUN
The resulting report makes for very interesting reading. One of the more interesting proposals that’s mentioned but not elaborated on there is the modular plane that could be a bomber, an AWACS, a transport, and more.
What implied stats emerge (I’m not an aviation engineer) show the cargo version of the bomber as having neither the raw payload capacity of a heavy airlifter (the payload charts only went up to about 40 tons/80,000 pounds) nor the ruggedness of a light one (the takeoff distance, though impressive for a heavy bomber, is less than a dedicated airlifter). And that’s even before considering the issues with a modular pod (there’s a reason why very few transporters like it have been built). Still fun to think about.
I talked about my fictional 7th Marine Division before. Now I have a more detailed personal organization (though still undoubtedly rough and with inaccuracies). Here it goes. ORBAT chart courtesy of the Spatial Illusion Unit Symbol Generator.
Paramarine Regiment
The Paramarine Regiment is like many other light airborne units, with the exception that it has four battalions instead of the usual three and its artillery battalion has thus been increased to four cannon batteries likewise, along with the other regimental support units similarly beefed up. This is to allow each battalion to serve as an independent combined arms unit to hold ground if necessary (ie around a battery in a fire support base with a battalion of infantry and an LRP platoon and light AFV platoon).
The actual battalions are largely standard triangular airborne infantry battalions.
Raider Regiment
A lighter force with less organic capability, the raider regiment is simple, with three battalions, each of three raider companies and a heavy weapons company. A regimental intelligence battalion is included because of the importance of intelligence and planning to their missions. It’s meant as a direct action-slanted commando force ie the classic Rangers.
SOF Regiment
The SOF regiment has three SOF battalions, below which any formal organization would be varied and inexact by nature (each has a number of teams, varied as you’d think, but around 10-15 each). Its communications/intelligence battalion is there similar to the ranger regiment.
Divisional Assets
Divisional assets are just more support and administrative elements, there because the 7th is not intended to be a “field” organization.
Logos
Some Stable Diffusion concepts for the logo of either the division itself or one of its subunits. You’ll notice a theme of black birds. Yes, I know crows are already the mascot animal for electronic warfare units, but oh well.
Usage
It goes without saying that in All Union, the 7th Marine Division was formed and saw action, including the 2002-2009 conflict in Western Sahara that marked the largest and bloodiest war the US military fought in that TL. If I ever need a fictional American commando force in my writing, I can always use it.
TK Blackwood’s 199X Fuldapocalypse (or should I say Yugoslavpocalypse) continues in Black Seas. Not surprisingly given the title, it centers around the biggest missile age naval battle ever. The centerpiece is an alternate history classic: The nuclear Ulyanovsk-class carrier (I’m still debating whether to have them be in All Union or not, btw…)
That alone makes it a guilty pleasure for me (I’m definitely including the slightly similar Kherson-class “Ivan Tarawa” large landing ships in that universe, btw…). It’s certainly able to juggle a ton of plot elements as well as any other successful technothriller. Plus it has an Iowa-Kirov showdown! (A sadly realistic Iowa-Kirov showdown, which is all I’ll say about it, but still)
So yeah, this is a worthy successor to the past entries in the series and a fun WW3 naval showdown in its own right. I highly recommend this.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 