Search results for query: *

Forum search Google search

  1. Return of Horrible Educational Maps

    I was watching this episode of Expedition!, about the USS Seadragon, and this map caught my eye behind the host. I'm not a big map aficionado, so maybe it's an effect of the projection, but it looks very peculiar to me:

  2. AHC: Nuclear powered Battleship

    How about something like this: 1. Nuclear fission is discovered in 1936/1937 rather than 1938/1939. Ida Noddack proposed it around 1934. George Gamow developed the liquid drop model around 1935. It's plausible to get nuclear fission a few years earlier. 2. Earlier discovery of fission leads to...

  3. Why didn't 18th- and 19th-century cavalry use shields?

    So, disclaimer: I have no experience with horses or combat. That said, I question how useful a shield would be on horseback. For deflecting a lance or arrows, sure. But in terms of 'fencing', I would think that a horseman is in one of two situations - his opponent is on his sword side or his...

  4. What if the Pope declared a Crusade against the Ottomans in 1470?

    I'm not going to disagree with the rest of what you say, but I have a book here - The Lost Kingdom of Burgundy, by Christopher Cope - that suggests that part of the 1473 meeting at Trier between Frederick III and Charles the Bold was that Charles would lead a crusade against the Turks as part of...

  5. WI: No US Civil War

    The final paragraph of that concludes that the whole idea was basically a fever dream of the Confederates. I also note that your link takes me to a group that has apparently been banned for malicious content. That page cites a handful of sources. First, there is The Real Lincoln. There is also...

  6. Could Britain defend Canada from a United US with a Civil War level effort around ~1860?

    I don't think that it is so much an issue of understanding what a blockade is as that I am thinking in terms of a "real" (i.e. non-paper) blockade, whereas you have a broader vision.

  7. Could Britain defend Canada from a United US with a Civil War level effort around ~1860?

    Yes, but only needing to interdict certain ports would have been true of the Union navy as well. More coast is going to mean more ports. British ports around the world will no doubt be useful if interdicting US trade elsewhere, but that will have little impact on their ability to actually...

  8. Could Britain defend Canada from a United US with a Civil War level effort around ~1860?

    Is this really that plausible? I'm not an expert on the blockades or navies of the time, but a perusal of wikipedia suggests that the US had hundreds of ships on blockade duty, and there were still a lot of ships that got through. The British navy is bigger, but a) The British will have to...

  9. WI: Great War of '63

    There's a fairly detailed (albeit old) paper on the respective importance of wheat and cotton here (cotton in the first half, wheat in the second). He does cite some sources (both government discussions and editorials) discussing the potential shortfall of wheat (frustratingly, he generally...

  10. AHC: Nazi invasion of the USA by 1950

    I'm not going to disagree with you on the general quality of the German bomb program(s), but this is not how a nuclear reaction works. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but a moderator (in a nuclear reaction context) does not prevent the reaction from growing too much, but rather the...

  11. WI: Louis VII dies without male issue

    I appreciate that elective kingship was by this point effectively a ceremonial thing (hence why I said 'nominally' in the OP). I don't really expect that there would be any sort of election for the throne, but meant rather that if some kind of succession crisis occurred, two ways to avert it...

  12. WI: Louis VII dies without male issue

    This is a what-if I've been musing over from a wargaming perspective (so I've tended to presume events proceeding in a way to provoke conflict), but I think it's a potentially interesting POD even if none of that materializes. Louis VII dies in 1180 with one son and a handful of daughters. The...

  13. French-Hungarian-Polish Union?

    Louis of Orleans, brother of the King Charles VI of France, was betrothed to one Catherine, the daughter (and heiress) of the King of Hungary and Poland. Historically, she died young, and the marriage never happened. If it had, my understanding is that Louis would have eventually ascended to the...
Top