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Pax's Alternate History Snippet repository.

Discussion in 'Creative Writing' started by Imperator Pax, Jan 16, 2021.

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  1. Index: Dominion of the Baltic Sea Week 1 E
    Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    Week 1 E

    The mills closing had been an unpopular but ultimately economic reality. Simply put it had been a practical decision based on world conditions of the late and post cold war. There were people who had, and still people who had argued that the shut down hadn't been necessary... they used all kinds of arguments, emotional down to that the downsizing hadn't been necessary that the steady reduction and transitional period had still been turning a profit...

    .. but the writing had been on the wall... it was true there had been 'tax shenanigans' write offs and waivers and the family trust had managed the transition to get out of paying stuff as possible, and that had included the family trust turning the mills over to the university trusteeship ... maybe if they had waited for gentrification to continue the trust could have made a bigger profit but that was an iff... and no one had been thinking like that...

    ... and it would have been a gamble given the eventual financial recession half way through the war on terror...

    Stewart was standing a little further back. He'd grudgingly left the mk 18 back in the toyota, but he had modern single point drop leg, an update from the double blackhawk drop legs of the early war on terror when they'd still been running thin skinned humvees and the old guard were still complaining about being told to wear armor. The Glock was unsuppressed, but had a weapon light and he was a wearing an expensive maritime plate carrier.

    It was a far far contrast to Charles's black fancy turtleneck and sports jacket. That was more endemic of the problem. Viktor had gone to OCS on completion of his masters, deferring the nearly complete dissertation, but he'd still gone to the colours like a million other men after the towers, and the GwoT had begun. That wasn't how Charles Alexander saw things. He'd been interning at goldman sachs he had bigger ambitions... so as far as he was concerned, and he'd been vocal about it, Viktor had gone to war not because 'three thousand yankees had died, but just because he wanted to kill people'. He didn't view Tony or Michael the same way, the marine noncom, degree not withstanding, was just dumb muscle... Charles didn't distinguish the technical qualifications to the skill sets involved in Raider applique.

    Charles had other ideas too, and while not whole formed, they had potential.

    "Its true that the market pressures which made the mill long term unviable no longer exist," What with being almost four hundred years in the past, ... alternate timeline, whatever, "The market conditions which make a mill like this viable and economically productive don't necessarily exist either."

    That wasn't to say that in theory it couldn't be made productive, which was something to talk about but there were other other other issues. All kinds of them that would need to take priority in terms of manufacturing before they started dealing with money and heavy capital ventures. They finished up and he closed the door watching the beamer pull away.

    They needed to make sure the town didn't starve first. Tony waited until the BMW beyond visual before speaking, "What an asshole."

    "Yeah." Luke replied, even as the sergeant turned over the engine.

    "Where to?"

    "Chemistry department." He replied, "This may not be viable, but between the university and the technical college, we can manufacture modern ammo." They'd end up having to throttle down production of course... they currently had a much higher volume of precursors that they'd eventually use up, but they could produce ammunition... the shortage would be in primers... still even that was doable he just needed to make sure he had a claim on the equipment and the alcohols necessary to do it, and that meant moving.

    There were other industrial tasks that could be looked at of course. Screw manufacturing, and the use of 19th and 20th century button jigs but ammunition was a consumable... and a modern infantry unit shot a lot of bullets. Drawn brass was easy, and the machines were already set up.

    And Tony brought the valid point that even accounting for rechargeable batteries they were going to lose a lot of technology. Night vision gear, tubes, and peq 15s and the other kit modern infantry relied on was going to become scarce as batteries were used up... batteries like 123s were going to be harder to replace... maybe not impossible but they'd require sources of minerals... that he certainly off the top of his head couldn't name a local source for.

    They dismounted the Toyota truck to a relatively crowded campus parking lot. He had to wonder how long until the city, or county started weighing siphoning gas from parked cars... and if the cars had been cleared off the road. The gas would remain stable locked up inside fuel tanks for a time... but it wouldn't last forever... and it would be inefficient to dole stabilizer out to individual cars.

    Fuel shortages would be a problem as early as the end of the month probably... maybe not for off road diesel but that was largely for tractors... but there were going to be shortages of that eventually. They didn't get very far, he'd started categorizing computer inventory, and writing things down when his iPhone still reading a cell tower signal, and also linked to the University WiFi and configured to accept wifi calling buzzed angrily in his chest pocket.

    Forty minutes later he was looking irritably at the bag Walter had just tossed on the table.

    Maybourne's first arriving bag was... Luke eyed it. The AR 15 was normal, the pair of glocks wasn't really pushing anything... but the tomahawk was a bit silly even if they had carried them in Afghanistan. The two fixed blade knives as well for that matter. Those were the glaring oddities he saw everything else was for the most part normal for a day bag even the dromedary bags. Normally he just kept bottled water in his car for day to day travel... but too each their own. The pointy objects were... well he had never considered needing to conceal a knife in his belt. Most of this was par for the course.

    Maybourne had gone back and opened the back passenger door to the Toyota, and retrieved another bag he had tossed in about an hour earlier, and waved to a deputy who was standing around "Here see these ammo cans they go in the back of your cruiser, right?"

    "We should have room," The man replied... clearly hoping that would be the case... and given the way the springs on the suv were struggling already.... Luke spared a glance at the boxed 556 ball ammo. He could guess where the bulk had come from.


    "I need an honest assessment of where we stand."

    "Beside that it aint normal?" Devil hissed, "That's why I asked about the planting, but you right. Are right," He leaned back and took a swig from the water bottle. "Mass Casualty Event is pretty serious concern."

    "No that's not what I meant." He told the other other ex marine present.

    "We're gonna throw a drone up Luke its electric they figure its our best option." Oliver remarked he was running his hands through his freshly cut hair like it was itching, and if Luke had to guess he'd probably been in the middle of a hair cut when the calls had started going out. "Its not a great drone, but its something."

    He wanted to laugh. It was fucking absurd. When they'd invaded iraq the special mission units had had access to drones... and of course hte modern corp had access to significantly more common drones... never mind Army aviation battalions field what were basically predators of their own... he was under impression they'd been rebranded to mitigate the Air Force complaining... but it wasn't 2001... a small drone could be a couple hundred bucks a good camera and moped engine... the problem was flight time, and resolution.

    Someone cursed as they fumbled a barrett and the light fifty dumped into the park dirt. They were at the edge of the line... further south than the last time they'd gotten a call out, and even though he was pretty sure he could guess what was going on. It must have been another of Wallenstein's foraging parties... which meant if it was Wallenstein the army must be close... whatever little drone they were going to put up wasn't going to cut it.

    They were going to need to find out what was going on at Stralsund to the north west of them on the coast of the baltic. If the county was pulling ammo from where he was thinking this stuff was coming from they probably hadn't mentioned it to the city, but they probably thought this was going to get bad... or rather that if the early modern army got in among civilians it would be bad, both materially, and psychologically...

    The great benefit to the whole fucking mess was that it went both ways. That would be true when a west virginian town called grantville arrived from another alternate earth... that the change in topography, and the oddities it created were such that local mercenaries weren't quite sure how to deal with the change. With a comparable tech base it wouldn't have mattered, they'd have figured it out and then it would come down to which side had more soldiers and the better position... or really the side with the most guns... which was in most respects what it did still end up coming down to.

    ... both now... and in the future.
    --
    Notes: whats going to happen in the current version is that this will update through April as we continue to work through May 1628, this first week first post change, including dealing with coverage of both the skirmishes but also the internal face and side particularly dealing with people are in commerical jobs, university students, bankers, the urban population not facing that outward pressure.

    This also clearly calls forward to when Grantville arrives in 1631, and pointedly that down time military commanders were not stupid per se and that the geographic transformation of a sizable piece of landscape courtesy of a ring of fire would probably make most officers some caution, there are exceptions to this but that will be dealt with later, particularly as we need to demonstrate the dangers and lethality of volley fire at distance (and this is the early modern period, this is the period of the tercio and pike and shot, guns are commonplace as the standard infantry weapon in the way they were of infantry blocks and lines of a hundred years in the future).
     
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  2. ATP

    ATP Experienced.

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    Muskets were not that dangerous yet.Polish winged hussarls were still capable of going through any infrantry - for example,during battle in Biały Kamień in 1626 swedish army stopped them only becouse they have field fortyfications.
    And even then Winged hussarls almost win and killed more swedes then lost people charging those fortyfications on horses.

    Year later,during Trzcianna battle/1627/ poles massacred swedish calvary,when infrantry run behind fortifications without even trying to fight in the field.

    Modern mill - they are lucky to have it.

    Now,all they need to made deals with Poland and Sweden.Both countries do not really have reasons to fight.
    And rulers of both was smart enough to made reforms - in Poland case,making King stronger,in Sweden - weaker.

    Becouse absolutism was road to revolution,so what could last was relatively strong King with standing army countered by power of gentry,Church,and cities.
     
  3. Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    I'd disagree that muskets aren't that dangerous yet, but I do agree with your point the single biggest advantage an army can have even ahead of surprise, would be good fortifications to fight from. The emphasis there is fight from, too many positions have been lost because of a sudden rout it doesn't matter if you have muskets, or rifles if you don't fight when the other guy comes over the top the other guy wins, whether thats because the people quite the field entirely, or it exposes the rest of the army to pitched battle without supporting arms, or what have.

    As for governance you need an executive (the king in this case) to have enough authority to make important decisions but not so much authority that there is no oversight to his actions, some powers need to be devolved to local governance some powers handled by an actual legislature that operates on a rule based system on how its going to make laws.

    To use this period as an example, Gustavus Adolfus relied on debasing the swedish coinage frequently, that is a distinctly medieval solution to a currency problem, but its a terrible long term financial solution, either because a) you have a bunch of near worthless currency or b) you have to round it all up take it back in and remint it which is its own expense. War time exigencies are a thing, and a short term solution its not horrible but this goes to the amount of expenditure of currency in the 15th and 16th centuries as monetized economiese verus the 13th and 14th centuries European wars had been that makes the wars more feasible logistically. (Certainly the traditional explanation is to just blame the black death, but its also change to banking reform, there is agricultural reform continuing to spread)
     
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  4. ATP

    ATP Experienced.

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    Indeed.In 1410 during Grunwald battle Poland have 50 banners of knights made from levies.They win,tried to capture Malbork,almost did it,and go home.
    So,when Teutonic Knights reinforcments come,our King have personal guard and some lithuanians only.Still win/Koronów battle/ but,since he do not have army,get almost nothing from his victory.

    Another problem was gentry levies.In 1410,or even 1514 they still knew how to fight,but in 1628? only those on tatar borderlands knew how to fight.rest was useless.
     
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  5. Threadmarks: October 1917 [Conclusion]
    Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    October 1917 [Conclusion]
    The official minutes would refer to this as the fall conference of 1917, which looking back was to be read more heavily than that label meant. There was one of these every year so that label was both a continuation of 'tradition' and innocuous in its label. It reminded him of the meeting in 1914 where the cadre had decided that no, expecting every member of the cadre to be responsible for a company sized element was absurd but that something still had to be done. That was the crux that something had to be done.

    One hundred men were gathered today. Cadre officers and the proxies of those absent. In the conventional organization of those preceding years the cadre had formed standing committees especially after 1915 and the change in the body. Allen nominally sat on several, but particularly was only an ancillary member of the farming committee. In that committee his vote normally proxied to the chair.

    The committees formed sub groups to manage specific projects. The heavy industries committee had a litany of subsidiary units responsible for each of the corporate sides major heavy industries. It was part of vertical integration. Steel, Coal, and the Oil ventures sat among those. There was another body that handled the export goods that had been dominant before the war, chief among them were textiles, and clothing goods that had been shipped to the American market.

    Today's gathering was the first step towards actually putting everyone together to contend with the consequences of the United States' entry to the war and the government's assumption of new powers. It also was the first step to major restructuring. To answering questions about education and others.

    That was a major indicator ... it was told in the eighty odd men in uniform. Less than twenty men were in tailored civilian suits. Fewer than five were not visibly armed. To be sure part of that was the selection of proxies for votes... all of the selected proxies were officers from either the 2nd brigade of Artillery or from 3rd Regiment Infantry's staff contingent. There were eighteen Chinese infantry officers present, seven of whom were Hui two of whose number were little birds. Those were the staff's technical service officer, and the staff intelligence officer.

    That would have been unusual for staff officers in the states given the commander of a regiment was to be ranked colonel. Intelligence and the TSO billets were ranked as they were due to the unique conditions of their environment. It was also of course a statement on what would be coming in the spring. 3rd Infantry was already preparing for its inevitable duty to become the core of a new Rifle Regiment. The selection of her officers to fill that role by sitting here was a statement of that.

    He was therefore glad that this meeting was limited to the hundred men in the room. That Colonel Shan was outside with command of the division and responsibility for general security.

    "And that is the outline of the 3rd Division. A time table to which I consider to be conservative." The speaker concluded... conservative because it had taken the states back home three months to mobilize 17 divisions of the national guard for federal service... for fighting in France.

    It wasn't the same thing.

    Cole kicked the back of his seat and leaned forward in a comical approximation of their academy days, "Its funny the accountant is the one who thinks we can magic a whole damn division together before the first wheat harvest."

    "He's right that we don't have to furlough anyone though." Obviously farming had been a potential consideration. The real consideration had been the matter of financing in general. It touched on that Yuan Shikai had tried to avoid changing the tax system of the republic from what it had been in the Qing, even though as time had gone on he had gradually lost certain revenues to the provinces. Fundamentally though the last national land evaluation had been drawn up by the order of the first Ming Emperor, and that no subsequent monarch nor official had been able to update those rolls for threat of uprising or rebellion. It was not a tax system designed to or even built with the modern international flow of goods, and certainly not the titanic volume of goods of war time trade in mind.

    Neither though had the cadre. They were going to have implement tax changes, even though that was not what they had originally started as.

    The Cadre had begun first as a railway firm, and expanded into growing into lateral fields of industry. It was not a conventional extend clan kin group holding the shares, and the cadre shares were now far more concentrated in a handful of individuals with the hundred's ranks filled out by experts. It might be thought of as a holding company model.

    Reinsch might have used a term like 'group enterprise capitalism'. Such academia meant that, basically underneath the main ownership the capital holders was a clear managerial class of experts who conducted good scientific work. Percy, he was sure, would have looked at it, sniffed dismissively and said it was all very American. They were however taking on the traditional mantle of clan organizations, of a parent firm, of subsidiaries and hierarchical structures that simple didn't exist in the states. There were to be changes in employment, and changes in worker care.

    They had been building housing of course for years, but other changes were to come in the face of changes likely to effect the western provinces and new industries. Industries that were being funded by the profits of the war and were largely expansions into lateral or ancillary fields, or investments to be made to support further future growth.

    There was a significant interest in what the end of the war in Europe would hold. What new technological wonders and patents licensed ... after all there had to be some trick to explain Germany's ability to sustain its war machine three blood years against the other great empires of the war, and of course recruiting engineers who would need jobs.

    It was a portion of the conference dominated by the mechanical. Of tractor and trucks. Inter-urbans were to be considered of course, Allen had always been impressed by the Belgian tram system in Tietsin but it wasn't particularly ideal for the movement of goods.

    The conversation was actually aimed at furnishing stores, and more important than even that the movement of raw materials to actual factories to produce finished goods... but it was true that the utility of the truck as a weapon and manpower carrier, and the tractor's utility as gun carrier had been noticed and acknowledged by the assembly.


    In historical records penned in future days the Fall Conference's minutes were used to demonstrate a clear continuity of policy, and a clear link to future policy. The Conference's failure to reach a conclusive plan for future long term goals what would become the first five year plan did not represent a failure of the conference per se.

    The Fall Conference had never been intended for that. It wouldn't be until later that Yan Xishan working from a model of the US national guard suggested foundations of a much larger body of reserve troops to contend with provincial emergencies both man made and natural. It was not that the idea would not have occurred perhaps at some point in the future. It was that Yan was more cognizant specifically of his province of Shansi's particular conditions. At the time of that proposal though no one had expected that the expected dearth of cheap surplus rifles would be interrupted from China by John Jordan's proposed eight power agreement.

    Not that that ultimately was a problem foremost among most aims were the creation of the charters of the provincial A&M colleges which of course included the armories and the armorers to sustain an infantry battalion's rifles. By that point of course there had already been a working model from the school in Western Zhili and by that time of that proposal Shansi's machine bureau had received its hartford tooling.

    What, the Fall Conference, had not overlooked was the question of aeroplanes, of the air war going on in europe, and of the US's Signal Corp's new found production control authority over spruce harvesting and lumbering in the pacific northwest. The US had been selling the seasonal stocks to the British, French and the Russians, of Spruce as old world timbers were overharvested from already depleted woodlands, or worse actually threatened by fighting if not poor management, that the US with its entry into the war needed to take control.

    The US was now interested in that process, in the Air War. Ironic since of course this was in essence an about face on 1907 the debacle had been the US military leadership. Where command had not been interested in pursuing the idea despite there being some, admittedly, tepid support from the civilian leadership in the war department to let the signal corp experiment. Now though with the air war a proven concept, and the German's Gothas bombing England the states were on board.

    There would be American aircraft pioneers holding stars, who had been advocating for all sorts of new gadgets in the technical journals since before the US entry. Those papers had made their rounds... air power was now in vogue.

    It would be in this venue, and also that of the equally new weapon of war the 'tank', that would be the downfall of John Jordan's 1919 arms embargo. British legal custom of the state department was to adhere to the letter of the agreement, Jordan's proclamation regarding Chinese arms traffic specifically singled out rifles and prevented artillery the state department was less willing to block aircraft sales by British manufacturers or to block Vickers Armstrong from selling tanks in North China after it was clear there was a market for them.
    --
    Notes: Regiments are Xians principle unit of organization (and indeed this is the default Anglosphere organization, thus the US until the division replaces it, and only the US makes that transition where as you still see British units tracing their lineage to royal regiments on napoleonic or even earlier lineages through consolidation), and this is still a period in their development where all officers are effectively Infantry officers but this also reflects two factors in that since regiments are relatively self contained their staff component is relatively large with a component to handle railway operations (logistics) telegraphs, early radiotelegraphy, and also intelligence is looking out for bandits in particular in addition to more conventional threats, as well as political intelligence. Secondly as mentioned its contingent reflects that the 3rd is the planned basis for another division. This is basically roughly twenty percent of the units commissioned officers. Again as a call back to the White Wolf years, the idea that each cadre member would command a company would have created ten regiments very much hearkening of the old Original US Infantry Regiments. Very much a symbolic gesture, but one ultimately discarded in 1914 as simply impractical.

    Also as an economic term, Keiretsu and Zaibatsu are occasionally used interchangeably by me in accounts. This is technically correct in the historical sense... but keiretsu historically (in this period) would have referred to the second or 'group' zaibatsu, i.e. Companies like Toyota (who aren't actually around just yet,) not 'first' zaibatsu like Sumitomo. If anyone is associating keiretsu with its post world war 2 usage that's almost entirely a product of the US Occupation and business relationship post occupation the word was so frequently misused that the Japanese went okay fine we know what you mean and started using it in the 'American' fashion. Keiretsu in its historical usage is different than its modern usage, but summed basically it refers to these large oligarchical companies that emerge out of the meiji period and the early 20th century of Japanese industrialization and with the second form are very heavily shaped by the boom years of ww1.

    As will be built on later, and further down the road this goes to how Xian's government policies are structured, even before the 1920 constitution goes up, as to where priorities go.

    Collective Defense: The Army. This is intended as simply an observation that the province's security and well being is contingent on internal and external security in practice this is the reason Britain makes the Prussia jokes.

    Public Order: The Law, and Legal transparency, Civil/Criminal proceedings, Law enforcement [This is about both legal governance, tax collection, tax codes as well policing powers, criminal proceedings ultimately]

    Public Goods: Public Compulsory Education, and Public Health (Public Health in this case is referring to Epidemic Management in this period, its talking about disease and it is a late addition that makes its onto Three Priorities of Governance because of the dangers of plague, and the Influenza outbreak (So this is basically the same logic behind the CDC's foundational powers).

    In practice, down the road, after the 1920 constitution goes into effect, you'd have other public goods, like municipal and county public works projects for things like roads, but also the rebuilding of the dykes, and canals as flood prevention. Public Order, the development of the legal system, the legal code and development of police and public safety apparatus develop but at this point that's limited.

    What these priorities are not, is to be philosophical for the cadre, these are put out there as the basis these are to address immediate real world problems in the province of Shensi (and also technically Western Zhili), down the road Shansi, the 'western Commanderies' all adopt variations of the Shensi constitutional. Pre-Constitutional Xian though its still working towards finalizing an actual written constitution.
     
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  6. ATP

    ATP Experienced.

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    Great chapter,as always.Tanks - they no need them yet,too fragile.Wait for Vickers E,or maybe italian Fiat 3000B.
    Planes - you got it covered in Germany and A-H.Just choose one factory and take engineers to China.With engines from A-H - but not from Porshe!.

    On another topic - family was important to chineese.Even now making bussiness mean making deals with entire family.

    P.S I just read Carrpll Quigley "The Anglo-American Establishment:From Rhodes to Clivden" about british secret society made by Cecil Rhodes which controlled England from 1891 till 1945.
    What it mean for you?
    1.From 1905 till 1918 they were rabid anti-german.
    2.From 1919 till at least 1938 they were pro-german and advocated gave germans/and italians and japaneese,too/ all they wanted.

    Which mean,that at least till 1938 you could not count on England supporting your China against Japan.
    But - in OTL Chang was supported by USA,Italy and Germany.You could use it,too.
    From germans - in OTL they buy 10-20 Hs-123 dive bombers.Here you could mass produce it - it was very good for supporting infrantry.
     
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  7. Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    So what had happened was Kaiser Willhelm comes to the throne (and among other things sacks Bismarck, which in 1880s the British upper crust consensus was that England could work with the Germans) It bears in mind that Wilhelm was a grandson of Queen Victoria (now I can't speak for Quigley's book in particular, so this is from my own research) and even as a child was a handful, there a number of accounts that Victoria though Wilhelm was kind of spoiled (by all indications, ironically much as with Albert and Elizabeth, Wilhelm was the Edward of his generation, he was the older child, he was always doing things that were inappropriate for the crown heir from a public perspective and he had the assumption he knew what was best) and this starts to come to a head towards the end of Victoria's reign (and I speak of this in terms of regnant periods because of how much of a shake up that death had on British high society)she was getting old, times were changing and her popularity in Ireland was part of what kept Irish republicanism in check as a social factor

    Wilhelm among many many other stupid comment not only volunteers to intercede on various problems, he makes a point of showing up whenever he's not wanted this includes not just the Irish debate, but matters in North Africa, (particularly with France, in Morocco, Egypt) and British high society is very structured during this period where fundamentally Eton, and Oxford and Cambridge are where all of your British elites go to school so its very easy to have this old boys network thats in all the important positions, and so that everyone knows each other (This shows up slightly more prominently in Sharpe's Patron particularly with Wellington) but effectively everyone (or nearly everyone, Lloyd George comes to mind) went to the same schools, they knew the same families, went to the same families, which meant that your British social elite frequently saw first hand how Wilhelm acted (unlike with say American or French social elites).

    The other factor is that the majority of British aristocracy is Germanic in origin, its only (and this is touched on here) very recently coburg-gotha splits to establish the Windsor branch, KGV and the children of his line (Edward and George) and this marks a symbolic shift away from that German lineage but it doesn't eliminate those sympathies, Lord Moutbatten (prince Louis) comes to mind, and post war there is a backlash against the French (this is because the French convince the British to side with them for war reparations but the French turn around and start pushing for other things in the post war, and this annoys the British elite, hence that London does this pivot where if the French are going to insist on 'stirring up trouble' that the attitude shifts (and this coincides with both economic down turn in Britain, and the emergence of British fascism (mosley, liddlehart, and the like and this includes people like Edward) The idea by 1920 was that 'Germany and Italy were 'mistreated' and that as long as it doesn't effect British interests well its not our problem. And with Japan thats more complicated in dealing with Stanley Baldwin's PMship and then Chamberlain, who suceeds him and only too late recognizes that that yeah continental affairs will in fact effect England.

    The laconic summary is that before 1891 the British were of the opinion that France was annoying enough that Bismarck was a necessary evil to mediate French ambitions on the continent and in Africa (again the French had recently threatened war over Egypt (re Suez)) but after there is francophile movement that comes to power that wanes in influence post ww1 particularly with again both external pressures and internal economic ones, and then Churchhill returns to power attempts to reconcile and assimilate a coherent position with the French in order to stabilize europe and you get ww2, and then you get Atlee afterwards. [EDIT: And this is a very short summary, and certainly misses the nuances of just Britain in the fifteen years after the war, before rearmament pulls england out of the depression]

    Bringing us back to British leadership thats why in this timeline I'm comfortable with the PM list mirroring OTL, we'll get baldwin macdonald, baldwin again, chamberlain, churchhill, Atlee Churchill comes back, etc until basically either Thatcher or potentially Callagahn (her predecessor) but thats well into the cold war
    --
    So into the early thirties Xian relies on German (and German shell institutions in sweden&switzerland) for various developments including airpower and anti aircraft weapons, because the British in the late interward (basically McDonald's tenure as PM) become unreliable on asiatic matters, and that goes into the situation within the Foreign Service office as well, which pushes Xian eventually to move more towards the US goods under FDR's first term (basically after 35)
     
    Last edited: Apr 2, 2023
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  8. ATP

    ATP Experienced.

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    British - in OTL they have brillant idea,that if they gave Austria,Czech and Poland to germans,there would either would not be war/Lionel Curtiss/ or they would fight soviets/Chamberlain/ that is why they in 1938 sabotage french tries to help Czech,and made them capitulate without fight.
    And,they truly belived,that giving germans all they want in East and partially Africa would made them England tool!

    Idiots.Cecil Rhodes made his society to made British Empire stronger,but they destroyed it.

    Back to weapons - good idea,you could buy from Bofors 40mm AA,37AT,and 75 or 80mm AA.
    P.S For Hungary Bofors made 40mm version of AT gun,so it could use the same ammo as AA,and cut costs.Dunno why Poland do not did the same,we always lacked moneys.
    And your China could do the same - especially,that 40mm schells could kill infrantry and destroy HMG nests.
    37mm anti - infrantry schells were too small for that,and that is why they sucked when target was enemy infrantry.It was more like hand grenade or even petard effect then schell.
     
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  9. Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    And with rhodes, Rhodes was resented because he was the youngest son of a british churchman, his success made him a nabob, or what would been the term used if he'd made his money in India. Rhodes success drove the established aristocracy up the wall, and with Chamberlain he was adamant that there was no way the Soviets (the bolsheviks) and the Nazis could ever come to accord so that there was no point worrying about it (and yes that fight did end up happening, but the british presumption was it would happen sooner rather than later)

    Pretty much the Bofors list line up pretty much with what I've got, the 40mm I'm of the same opinion, and yes 37mm the main reason Xian doesn't go to that caliber is its lack of HE (and this is also the argument, citing the US interwar testing why the 37mm was disliked as a light artillery piece, and its the artillerymen who will be making these testing decisions)

    Basically Xian will end up replacing its 1 pdrs with 40mm some time after 1932, and again the Vickers 1 PDR is a good gun if its the late 19th century not so much by 1930, but like the 37 mm it doesn't have a sufficient HE charge be useful against those heavy machine gun nests
     
  10. Index: The Other Side A
    Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    The Other Side
    A
    With a sigh the police officer looked at him and then closed the door. They didn't need introductions, and settled into irrelevant small talk about how fucking crazy the world was.

    A weekend without electricity had driven his students up the wall. In the wake of the Ring of Fire Ren Faire had gone out the window. Never mind the threat posed now by the roving bands of killers... so no most people had sheltered in place unknowing of what was going on around them, and that had started the rumor mill

    There were no aliens though.

    The Assistant Professor for psychology could empathize that those kind of thoughts weren't that crazy compared to the reality with how things were. Without electricity he too had been going stir crazy. The city's government had instituted a curfew of all things, an actual enforced curfew. He couldn't honestly fathom why they had felt the need to go that far; there wasn't any where to go after all. Neither had his students. The threats from wherever they had found themselves were from people. As far as he could tell there was no serious risk of wild animals, and as long as you drove carefully getting around really wasn't an issue. Still the curfew was in place, and the University administration had demanded everyone abide by it.

    That was the problem. You tell kids not to do something and they wanted to do it anyway. What was the university supposed to do? Take their keys? It was ludicrous. You also couldn't just expect them to along with a perceived unreasonable demand. It was authoritarian not authoritative and the young people with all their vim and vigor just wouldn't stand for it. So they were seeing deviant behavior break out.

    He really did want to know just what the city council thought they were doing. A weekend by itself could have been dealt with. They would have been good to go with little more than complaints if the power had been back on by Monday morning, but it hadn't. They were coming up on a week now, and the University administration was getting impatient because they were getting pressure from the student body. He was right there with them, since normally most of the students would have left their dorms for summer by this point. That wans't an option here of course.

    "Yeah, I hear yah," The detective grumbled as they crunched through the growing dry grass. It was the recipe for a disaster, which was why he was rushing to tell the dean just that. That had been when he'd found the door locked. "Alright, you haven't seen him?"

    "No like I said there was supposed to be a meeting this morning." The professor remarked.

    The police officer nodded and looked at the office and fished out a master set of keys and unlocked the door. The professor heard it click and immediately started talking about how without the ability to go home, or the ability to relieve stress via the modern conveniences they were going to have a riotous mob of students upending everything around them. The whole thing was driving him up the wall. He barreled through administration waiting and into the Dean's office without even bothering to knock, and right into a suede loafers.

    "Oh god." He felt the blood flow from his cheeks as his stomach roiled. Hanging suspended from the fan was the man he'd been coming to vent his frustrations to, the man who hadn't been at the meeting this morning. He hadn't even considered how the man might have been handling the stress. He quickly lost control and vomitted profusely beneath the dangling feet of the hanged man, before scrambling back.

    The police officer stepped back, and pulled the walkie talkie radio brick, and started saying something... he wasn't surprised... and it made a certain amount of sense why they had wanted him to contact the police. He let the police officer help him out of the room, and sit down.

    It took him several minutes for him to compose himself before he manage without wanting to vomit. "How did you know?" The man asked as the detective tapped at the touch screen of his phone.

    It was a pretty typical call... they had started pulling people and slotting a roster as soon as people started making comparisons to the 08 recession, so he wasn't surprised. It was better that they didn't have to run anywhere to get help. "I figure it'll take the coroner the better part of an hour to get here." The detective replied sparing a glance to the office. Ordinarily in a case like this procedure would have been to try and get the man down... try and resuscitate... he'd called it in before the doc had lost his lunch... and speaking of he got up and with a grimace opened the office windows... he would have tried to go find some bleach but he'd wait

    That took longer than he had thought it would... not the least of which was since the university was running on limitted power... and thus minimal services. The professor was the chatty type, a mile a minute ... All thoughts of how that might have driven his students up the wall when they hadn't had electricity but parts of the school staff did were gone now. Not gone, really, just at home, without power, or phones... there was no one to call, and that meant physically finding someone. The Meeting of faculty was going to be much more interesting than he had originally thought... and not just because of the spate of suicides since the Ring of Fire.

    "I thought that maybe," The man grunted weakly but was talking and that was good, "Technically since it was a faculty meeting a lot of the other university staff wasn't going to bother coming"... He paused and trailed off, in other situations certain faculty probably wouldn't have bothered coming to such a meeting.

    "This isn't the first one, we had a guy find some body the day before." That had guy had half ran half stumbled across the concrete footpath towards a foot patrol shouting incoherently about what he'd found.... the lacrosse freshman had been sloshed so it wasn't like they had known. "It took a while to figure out what was what."

    "I think, somebody from the business school mentioned that. Something about the switchboard working."

    The Campus Police department was was technically certified a fully authorized state police agency. Fifteen officers, including the reserve team, coupled with support staff handling communications. It wasn't a lot. "We don't have a lot of guys," He said, "But the switchboard works, and so does the internet," However that worked. It had taken pulling someone from communications trying to find the chief before someone from the 'detective' bureau to show up and investigate.

    It was supposed to be calming the younger man down. Get him acclimated, but Walter Riley didn't think it was working. Too much stress from everything else. He got back up out of the office chair and stood in front of the professor. He was an older man who looked almost elderly, his wiry figure making him look much older than fifty. He'd left the state police after twenty years, and had picked this up as a reserve. This was his first dead body he'd had on campus, and he didn't like it, but it had been his turn at the queue.

    He hopped his thumbs into gunbelt as the professor looked at him... really looked at him. The man was looking at the gun under his shoulder. His model 645 full size smith and wesson semi automatic was slung in a Miami classic shoulder holster in what was probably not approved by department regulations. He had in addition to it his department issue smaller glock 19 on his belt as well, with the detective's shield next to it so he might have just been skirting by. Besides who was really going to complain, especially with a body hanging from the ceiling. None of the professors certainly... the people who were now filing in.

    There was a voice behind them now, "Do something." Another doctor of psychology squawked at last, "We have to get him down. You can't just leave him there."

    Riley rounded, and met the doctor's brown eyes, and then nodded. "You're right," He agreed, "but he's a hefty fellow gonna need a hand." he'd already taken pictures with his cell phone, though it was apparent that it probably was just what it appeared. Getting the body down would have been less trouble if they hadn't had to dodge patches of vomit, while lifting two hundred plus pounds of dead weight of a man.

    They rested the man beside his desk, and Riley took a few more pictures with his cell phone. The computer had woken up, but just a login screen nothing he could do there.

    The staff formed a sullen queue and left the policeman to his work as they headed to the apportioned meeting grounds in the University's newest building. The Doctor of Political Science, an associate professor, who served as the Dean for his department had his back to them, but the psychologist recognized the head of the ROTC beside him and a handful of other men. The doctor who had called that in made sure to point that out to Riley as the man came forward to talk to them.

    He marched forcefully towards them prompting them to turn at this heavy series footfalls, and looked upon them with a sullen expression trying to keep his eyes up and at the new man, but the noise wasn't him trying to be loud it was the men from the coroner's office following him in tow. Three hours. That was how long it took the coroner to actually get to the school from the call in... it was now after one.

    --
    Notes: This is in part a series of different peepholes into post ring of fire ahead ot the changes over the summer months of 1628. This is a combination of two different versions of this scene technically three if you count both the faculty perspective and CP perspective.

    Additionally while it will likely not go up in this I will probably be posting a version, in the misc thread, of a distinct Xianxia branching of the Autumn of Empires timeline. Now that will obviously not be canon to AoE even relative to the original more gaslight/urban fantasy version of the original timeline, but will entail spirit beasts, and the circulation of Qi, and alchemy being a thing that on top of all the other early 20th century problems one had to deal with following the end of world war 1. I am using the term Xianxia, rather than Wuxia, or Xuanhuan and admittedly depending on progression the latter might be more accurate. This deviation from the timeline won't effect saturday updates, and won't involve gamer or interface elements common place in a lot of the genre thats common place.
     
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  11. Threadmarks: November 1917
    Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    November 1917
    The roster was starting to be tallied, and it wasn't so bad. They were certainly going to lose Reuben and Ada to the 'Filibusters' they'd go to middle America for sure. That was no surprise, Powell had brought Ada in in 1915 specifically to handle management of the original steel mill at a time when the shares were consolidating into main ownership, and a significant portion of the cadre were management / leaders / experts. Reuben was further down Powell's side of the corporate ladder, arguably his machining background was a slightly bigger hurdle since they'd need a man to replace his skill set in the east.

    That was another matter. Expansion had been steady before 1914, but not explosive. They had been active in Western Zhili but hadn't had any where near the customer base or potential work pool of what had happened after Bai Lang, and after war were declared in Europe. It was no longer 1910 or 1911 and things had changed. Sam leaned forward on the other side of the desk. "Its not practical,"

    "No its not." They couldn't allocate slots on the cadre for major capital resources... bluntly speaking cadre slots could not be senior factory management, and even major project engineers were likely too numerous for the body size. "It wont come into play immediately, the war in ongoing,"

    "Not as much as I'd like." Sam agreed. "Powell is moving that we should go ahead an plan for work over there next year. I suspect he's already on the ground." There were organizational problems at other levels as well. The creation even just on paper created the issue of promotions to general, and admittedly brigade created the same issues. "The war has grown us too large too fast, if the war ends next year I have no idea how we would handle it."

    "Have you changed your mind on Siems Carey?" He asked straightening. It wasn't too late if it came to it they could levy for a piece of the thousand miles of rail that the deal outlined.

    "No. Its too focused on the coast, and down south. I agree that's no good." The route was very likely meant to go down through fukien that was to say make a route from shangai to run along the coast to hong kong. Something the British had wanted for a while but simply hadn't been able to get started before the war. There last real work had been two years before the dynasty had collapsed. The other connection was finishing the link from Hankow to Canton. "And it didn't occur to me really to me until just now, but think about it the French fuss over it this spring. Duan starts talking about going down south in July. The Japanese are clearly onside, Reinsch is on side." which wasn't an oddity, "Terauchi then yanks Hayashi back to Tokyo." That was different than just being onside... you didn't just pull the minister and send a personal envoy

    "Are you suggesting Duan is a wizard?"

    "No. Not Duan, this isn't his doing, from the feel of Tietsin. This is the Research clique. They're the only ones with ties to Japan, the states, and England. Liang had helped organize the parliamentary votes for getting China in the war. Liang talking to Reinsch or Lansing, no one would pay attention at all to that... hell no one pays attention to Reinsch talking to anyone." Because Reinsch didn't play the game. Reinsch wasn't an industrialist, or a politician, or a general he was a university professor... admittedly a professor with powerful political connections he'd gotten the job because Wilson thought highly of him. It was no surprise Reinsch bought into Siems carey. He'd bit down on the idea even while Carey was balking at the noise the french and russians had made... and from the sound of it was Reinsch who was badgering Carey into trying to get back on.

    So what then... he voiced the question a minute later.

    Sam shrugged and leaned back. "Going south of the Yangtze would be a mistake. Feng has a point the provinces there are consuming resources right now that peking's treasury just cannot support. Duan's expedition, regardless of his success is too expensive to manage on feudal taxes, and foreign loans." That was really the problem It was the key problem that continued to rear its hideous ugly head.

    He pushed his own papers aside, "Estimated exports to the entente is in the tens of billions of dollars, Sam. Thats not just steel the US is export, but certainly that market is overheated. The French buying up the wheat futures in the midwest is inflating food prices, and the farmers are used to the new prices." US exports to europe were roughly double the value of what the US was taking in from the entente powers. Over a billion dollars in gold had been used to help pay for goods from the states, and credit extended heavily by New York to Paris, and London. The result of all of this was in short, "... New York took London's spot as the beating heart of international finance. There is no going back from that, but for us, even if those dollars are being handed over by the British..."

    "When demand stops or slacks off it'll cut overseas capital influx." A recession was likely to follow... that was just the science. "We need to take precautions. That means reforms to insulate that productivity will need to be reduced, and what we can't reduce redirected."

    "That might not work," Sam pointed out, "Look I agree the change to employment was my idea. The restructuring to divisions makes sense based on," he waved at the papers, "Who we're going to lose, we're going to be gambling with the change over until we find our footing."

    "I can't make Powell stay, he want to leave," A grunt punctuated the short comment, "and they want to go let them go." He replied. "We've made good money." They'd largely been insulated from the wage explosion so costs of operating had remained largely stable, "Powell wants to go down to Nicaragua or Honduras build a railway concession there, better he goes with a blessing than thinks we're holding him back. Besides if we're going to be operating more heavily in Shansi, Yan is the only one with the influence in the province and the brains for it."

    Old Ma had refused Bill's extension of the offer. The Ma family, the different branches could agree to participate in the effort and agreement... but the old man was too old and he knew it. If he took a position and died in six months. There would be a fight internally. They couldn't pick Hongkui cause that'd pissed the uncles off... who rather rightly would think they were being sidelined by the younger generation.

    Old Ma was more concerned about instituting a public school system aimed at Confucian morals than advancing his position. He was a degree holder. That position wasn't unique among the extended Ma clan either. Hongkui's father had a degree under the old Qing system of examinations, and supported Confucian education as well.

    It wasn't even a compromise since the primary school education had been drawn up when Yuan Shikai had been insisting that Mencius be covered in primary school education It was in short he wanted to be sure the current system remained in place. Did he have other interests? Of course, every man had interests... but some men were looking for a legacy. More than just an endowment to the arts in any event.

    Yan would take a seat, Old Ma wouldn't, but while that wouldn't effect the provincial development outlook, what the ywere really aiming towards was Shensi province's tax reforms... which was going to be controversial. They needed to enact land reform, and bring people into the system, they needed a replacement to the old Confucian scholarly order... and well that meant both the army as an institution but prosperity more broadly, prosperity and security.
    --
    "Fire."

    Rifles barked.

    A mix of the company standing, prone, and kneeling.

    The recruits were getting their first taste of real ammunition on a non static range. For Abel Company 1st battalion this would have been a turkey shoot. These were younger men, though not the veterans. Greenhorns.

    There was a reflexive growl from the NCO, "We should be grateful they're all shooting in the right direction."

    Everyone had to start somewhere, but, "Indeed sergeant."

    The sergeant straightened at the comment having been overhead. "Go give them some pointers."

    "Yes sir."

    "They're new troops Al."

    He knew that, and realistically most of the shots a rifle man fired under return fire missed. You were always going to make your best shots when you had the enemy by surprise or when he was breaking... once he was broke and running it got harder.

    These young men were shooting at and a training unit a variety of targets at both known distances, that was to say marked, and moving iron silhouettes. Unsurprisingly a lot of the shots were impacted the perms and ground around the rough man sized figures particularly the ones on tracks. What distinguished today's class was that it wasn't unique, that it was part of a uniform body of instruction that stretched over several distinct training fields and therefore was in scientific principle capable of producing troops that could be dispatched to any unit.

    In Shansi Yan was currently refitting the old provincial examination center. A collection of barracks would be added to the area for dormitory housing but most of the classroom instruction would be able to use older facilities until new buildings went. The process of expansion of training centers meant for the time being pulling experienced NCOs out of the ranks and shipping them by train to one of a handful of towns, and it was the general consensus that it had worked when they had made the move to Xian, and it should work here.

    Yan was skeptical of six months of education, but he had relented on confirmation that British professional army had had units that had taken as much as a year to prepare to deploy. Of course that wasn't to say he was entirely as amenable to the curriculum. Yan Xishan wasn't an old man, actually being in their age cohort, but he had his officer's training in Japan and thus placed a greater emphasis on the bayonet, and had been quick to point out that Bai Lang in 1914 had mounted cavalry charges, and almost certainly there would be bandits who would still do the same.

    That there were an increasing number of such ruffians, that bandit gangs were trending larger was not lost on them either. Thankfully the bayonet pattern that Yan preferred was nothing unusual. That the British Empire had adopted their Japanese allies pattern sword bayonet had in turn already resulted in the need for manufacturing. So they'd make a little more time for bayonet fighting, and instruction.

    "The majority of men bleed out before they can get to a doctor." That was how it had always been... he'd seen the reports from the war between the states, but in the Philippines especially and in the Russo Japanese war medical care and its lack of rapid application cost men's lives. "We barely have doctors for our own people, hell we don't have the manpower to cover second division's medical people."

    1st Regiment's battalions all had enough experience handling packing a wound, setting a leg, or tying off. They'd learned basically all the lessons that the Philippines insurgency had taught because often enough bandit fighting didn't involve standing line engagements.... but with the situation being what it was, that needed to be distilled to battlefield medicine for aidmen in a standardized fashion. "And that's without Percy fucking complaining about where stick the surgery." He agreed, but, "They have to start learning somehow." The sergeant was presently chewing the younger men's asses out.
    --
    Notes: I'm going to go ahead and note this here, once we do get to the cold war, or if against all odds there is a banana wars CYOA or some other drive to cover that side of the pond in this timeline, with east asia largely secured much of the conflicts between the Soviet Union and Nato interests will be in Africa and Latin/South America. Particularly to the prior will be the outbreak of the 1st continental war at the end of Ike's term, and well the fallout of decolonization. [It bears in mind that Lumumba didn't make it eight months before the coup, June 1960 he comes into power and then he'd dead by January 61]. I do prefer to be somewhat circumspect on this because it is spoilerish for post WWII but Kennedy would have looked for another fight and was susceptible to western European influence in a way that Ike wasn't, Kennedy was just easily lead around by those and didn't know better. LBJ had his own problems as well being particularly subject to getting buttered up. Thats well in the future though.


    There is a Russian Warlord CYOA (based on a series of HoI4 Mods admittedly) that can be found here if anyone is curious: https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/general-qq-cyoa-thread.1263/page-2347#post-5111391
     
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  12. ATP

    ATP Experienced.

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    Adding medics would help.And,they do not need to be doctors.In russian army it was so called- "felczer" - Enough to help in most cases.
    P.S Happy Easter !
     
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  13. Threadmarks: November 1917
    Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    November 1917
    They had been in conference preparing for... for a lot of things, there had been a couple of probing raids over there border with Szechwan. A couple of thousand brigands shooting at one another... which was bad because it suggested that instead of coming to an agreement some gathering of confederates had ended up militantly disagreeing, and that fighting had pushed them north and far enough that they wanted to try the way into Shensi.

    So that was their priority. How did they reinforce the boundary? How did they check any repeat attempt... and how quickly could they put green troops on the line to cover a wider frontage...

    That was just their problems. Their local problems.

    Percy should have damned well waited rather than barging in. Nakamichi had at least had the benefit of having been in all morning, but apparently some fool thing had happened in Russia and the Bolsheviks had seized power. "Percy I can't just go to Tietsin at the drop of a hat." That was nine hundred kilometers as the crow flew, and longer by railway.

    "So what if Duan having problems. Set backs happen in the field. He's just stumbled a little." The englishman protested.

    There were some curious looks at this. Indeed stumbling might not be wholly inaccurate. The initial reports were not so bad taken individually. Some troops had managed to get in Duan's package train, due to of course lack of infantry to guard the train... but that wasn't the problem per se.

    If Percy though had come from Peking he may have known something about the goings on in the capital, or with the Beiyang that hadn't yet made the rounds. Of course vice versa was true. The papers were going to talk about the bandits trying the border, coming over the Bashan and the fight with the defenders... it had been in sight of a decent sized town after all... but it wouldn't have gone out yet... and the North China Herald wouldn't have had time to remark on it, so none of the other papers in Tiestin, or Peking never mind any other republishings would have had time to reach the diplomatic community.

    They weren't overly concerned about that, even though that was really the news that was making the rounds. Allen stood up, "Cullen."

    The cavalry boots hit the floor, "Alright I'll take a brigade," Meaning he'd take a mixed unit, "and go on then." He shook his head and moved by, though not before throwing a look at the englishman. The gendarmes would be only part of the move to reinforce the bashan range to their south, but it would reinforce the troops there with a larger combined arms force... just in case anyone else came over the border in szechwan started feeling froggy.

    He doubted they would after having tangled with the 2nd Infantry Regiment, but better safe than sorry.

    The problem was how unpredictable those small incursions could be, but also because there was so little warning for what happened over the border.

    At the smallest level a village of a hundred might have two or three guards at anyone time and that might rotate between a dozen or so of the menfolk between fifteen to sixty over the year. If it was just the villages as a whole, but it became more complicated thant that at the lowest level it wasn't just hte village. The headman could have a couple guys, but so could the biggest farmer, or the wealthiest merchant. They could have tennants as their guards or they could be subcontracting out to a local private 'bureau' for protection services.

    Those were just the building blocks. Collections of groups built up together forming sworn brotherhoods, trusts and alliances, groups of villages would form leagues against their neighbors, men with the same name would find some shared common relation from way back when, or invent one, to organize on behalf of the clan. That could create a pretty large group men with the right leadership.

    It was that unpredictability that was the problem rather than say an actual field threat.

    Percy barely waited until the door of the adjoining office was shut before he started in about Lenin and his German money. The german's gold, and the Kaiser's other dastardly deeds. It didn't help in the slightest that the French ambassador seemed to have finally annoyed the Japanese counterpart that Reinsch was now afraid that the Japanese might stop cooperating entirely. Personally, though he didn't interrupt Percy to tell him, Allen suspected that was a negotiation tactic to make sure the French didn't object too hard over the canal & rail deal when it came up probably next month.

    "How long has he been there?"

    "Since we walked in the room." He glanced to the staff officer who had looked up from his papers.

    "Should I leave the room, sir?"

    "Yes," "No."

    Shanyang stayed seated but fully removed the headset he was wearing.

    "John Allen."

    "I didn't walk in for no reason." He replied shaking his head, "Alright Kang, have we received anything from Tietsin?"

    The captain shook his head, "No sir," Then to cover his bases he clipped the next sentence, "Nothing since this morning. Its actually been quite quiet."

    "So who is in Tietsin then, I thought you said MacKinder was still travelling." He didn't wait for an answer, "Captain, call the American Legation." The advantage of the structure of the posting was, yes it was shared with the British, but Reinsch was so frequently sight seeing that the elder Forrest was effectively in charge since he effectively served as the channel to bypass the Philippines and run things directly to the state and war department in tandem. "And while you're at it as the watch officer of the 15th to send a runner to ask the Russian legation what they think."

    Percy wasn't really comfortable with the captain staying in the room, but that was tough shit. He probably wasn't comfortable taking a seat with his back to the officer either. Not the least of which was the shaved pate had his service pistol in a shoulder rig that would have been very easy to draw from sitting, but then again Percy might not have even noticed that and might just thought this was above the junior officer's paygrade. All the same the captain started making calls, and Percy stopped eying him.

    Allen rested his arm on the back of the sofa and watched the Englishman shuffle in his khaki uniform uncomfortably. "Well, ahem." Percy cleared his throat. "Our situation is,"

    "Bad?" He suggested.

    He sighed, "Yes, bad is a word."

    There was an eyebrow raised. Allen didn't comment on the gesture, and watched the englishman as Captain Kang waited for an operator to connect him to the legation. "I assume that the Bolsheviks have done something?"

    "They seized the foreign ministry in St Petersburg. There are very sensitive documents there... and from the speeches that this Trotsky person has been giving... there going to try buy the Germans off. Make peace."

    It was funny how he lead with the seizure of the foreign ministry, and then Trotsky... "Whats Trotsky saying?"

    Percy swallowed, "I'm afraid he's borrowed some of your president's earlier talking points..." And that was it... if Russia backed out of the war, and if the French were worried the Japanese were going to suspend cooperation... then it might very well look like the ability of offensives would grind to a halt... especially if the Virginian occupying the white house got it into his head to take things at face value and ordered the AEF to hold in reserve in favor of some idiotic impassioned plea for peace...

    ... which would do the president no favors after he'd asked for the declaration of war, after campaign for not getting involved... and then having to pivot to 'make the world safe for democracy' ... "You think Wilson will get cold feet?" It wasn't really a question, and he didn't wait for a response, "So tell me what I'm supposed to do about it Percy?" The English... and the French for that matter never could do anything simple. They wanted to keep Russia in the war... and part and parcel of that was to support an eastern front even a limited one. "Japan will never agree to it." He knew from repeated cables not only were the estimates ungodly expensive in money it was a butcher's bill Japan wasn't prepared to pay. Old Man Yamagata opposed involvement in the european for those reasons, and still largely distrusted the Russians... Terauchi was never going to go against the old man.

    "No, we're not asking them for full mobilization just a couple of divisions to intervene and hold the railways open."

    He didn't believe Percy for a minute, the turn of phrase was entirely too practiced. If the British were asking for that it was probably only so they could leverage it to then ask for a few more to maintain the peace before long start lobbying for something akin to the Boxer rebellion... but he didn't say that... but he wouldn't have been surprised if France or England weren't looking at the Bolshevik uprising as if it were something like the Boxer rebellion.

    Whether that was really what was going on, it didn't matter the Bolsheviks were two things. Firstly they were socialists, and secondly they were Russians... it was far from difficult to guess that any requests to Japan was going to play on the inherent distrust of revolutionary political parties and that and existing distrust there in.... and he was willing to wager that the FSO was probably going to start trying to pressure Reinsch in Tietsin to start cabling not just the state department but Wilson directly to try and get the president's ear.
     
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  14. Redacted

    Redacted No

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    it would really help if each story had a distinctive name. Hard to keep track.
     
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  15. Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    Thats why I have them in separate threadmarks

    the Chinese Warlord CYOA derived timeline is Autumn of Empires, and the 1632 timeline is Dominion of the Baltic Sea
     
  16. ATP

    ATP Experienced.

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    Two mistakes -
    1.Soviets were commies,not socialists.Socialists would win in election,commies knew that they are unable to do so they made revolution
    2.They were anything but russians.I read memories of few poles who survived that period hiding - soviets murdered all russian elites they could find,and ruled with minorities from jews/Trocky/ to poles/Dzierżyński/ and many more.
    Soviets basically killed Russia.If you read "Letter from Russia" De coustine/very good book about 1839 Russia/ then you would see difference - elites in Rusia have honour,and serfs loved land on which they worked.
    In soviets elites do not have honour,and kolchoz workers hated their job,so they were keep to them and send to gulags if try run to cities.

    And,since american send Trocky there,they should be not suprised with his work.
     
  17. Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    In the case of socialist versus communist, I'm referring to actual period literature for that usage. I agree with your point, but in 1917 that is not a readily dilneated term. So this is in many ways a case of (Communist versus Socialist) being subject to the same kinds of linguistic drift of Zaibatsu versus Keiretsu, and in the case of 'Russians', again this is the foreign anglo (and anglo-japanese) perspective rather than objective fact of.

    I recognize Stalin for example is not Russian, but thats not a distinction a lot of early 20th british conservative commentators are not likely to recognize, and indeed is not one the Genryo the elder conservative statemen in Japan would recognize, due to their own associations [and this trend lasted a long time in leadership, and foreign service, and the State department literature]

    I agree with your point but this is more a usage of period narration versus objective narration
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2023
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  18. ATP

    ATP Experienced.

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    Fact.Many polish commanders in 1939 and 1944 thought the same,and when soviet officers gave them world of honour that notching bad happen,they come to negotiate.
    And ended in mass graves or gulags.Sometimes both.

    And we are speaking about poles 25 years later.
     
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  19. Index: Dominion of the Baltic Sea May 1628 / The other side of the coin Part 2
    Imperator Pax

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    Dominion of the Baltic Sea May 1628 /
    The other side of the coin
    Part 2

    The Mayor had just finished another exhausting session with the city council. There had been a wide range of reasons to do it... it in this case was the dreaded nationalization of resources. It wasn't really imminent domain, they weren't taking the land. It wasn't just Lowes either, but people had basically already stripped Walmart of food.

    With the dollar defunct there had been a lot of talk about 'barter' economy, but most likely people were likely to hoard things, and the consensus in both the Mayor's office, the city council and various community figures was to avoid that. Lowes had been the big issue because she doubted anyone would have complained... they needed the supplies in order to start winterizing houses they were somehow all the way across the Atlantic so the consensus was that winter without electricity was going to be terrible.

    That was guessing, but it was something they had to think about.

    They were just trying to get ahead of that. There were other reasons, but the threat of having to deal with winter in six months was the big one. Also without electricity they needed those generators, and the ability to siphon gasoline so again it made sense. That hadn't stopped people from being upset, even though they themselves hadn't been directly effected. The trailers were another thing they needed, those they would be able to hitch to the municipal service trucks and use as a light logging industry. That specific idea had been put forward by one of the men on the city council; his exact motivations for that were unclear. It did seem that he'd been talking with both some local businessmen, but also the members of the local medieval club who had some idea about walls that could in theory be used from the abundance of trees that had both come with them, and if needed the area around them. It seemed a little far fetched, but he had made such a racket over it, that they'd added that idea along with everything else.

    It was an amazing thing to watch people make a fuss about it, but was right wasn't easy. In order to help the most number of people they had to do this. Tomorrow things would be better though, since then they would have the generators distributed and they'd be able to better organize food distribution to people in town. Once mothers didn't have didn't have to worry about feeding their children, people would start to come around and things would calm down. She just hoped the county saw it that way.

    Besides it wasn't even like Lowes or Walmart were really here to complain. They weren't taking stuff from actual residents they were taking possession of the store's stock, and since those corporations weren't in town they couldn't really complain. She leaned her cheek against her hand as she hunched over her desk, and waited for Paul Ferrer to figure out if the computers would work or not.

    She understood why the power had stopped working in a broadly simplified explanation. Nothing they could really do about that. Right after the event the back up generators had kicked over pretty much without anyone needing to do anything and the city's government center continued to function as had cell phone towers. Fuel for those generators had been something to conserve... and in hindsight it might have been a good idea to turn some of them off before they ran them dry. They hadn't acted fasted enough.

    Finally she turned on her notebook computer and waited for it to boot up. It took a few more minutes, but then she had wi fi again. Not Internet... or rather only local network connection. Her email chimed a minute later. The perfunctory message was simplistic, a simple test message that had it been from an outside the network sender might have triggered the spam settings... she was actually surprised it hadn't.

    She composed one of her own and sent it off.

    Five minutes later another message came, with more in depth instructions. She repeated the process of turning her iPhone on and connecting it to the network. The city's app system worked as well, which meant in theory they'd be able to use WiFi in place of the normal cellular network... though only in places that they had wi fi connected to the local network.

    It would be dependent on electrical power, and that would be a problem. The city center was obviously going to have to have power, but she wondered exactly how they would provide for even the rest of down town. Well since the computer was working again, she sent off an email query for ideas to the rest of her staff who were supposed to be testing everything. Testing would really mean playing to make sure the App alert system worked.

    There was of course no reason why it shouldn't work now that it had power, but given it was now after five and there wasn't anything else to do it made sense to check. Besides most of her staff were under thirty, and even she was already starting to go stir crazy without access to the near constant stream of updates from facebook.

    --

    The following morning, as a second weekend got ever nearer, a small panic had broken out. The disturbance had its roots in more than one thing, but the kick off event had been the 'nationalization' / seizure of inventory. It wasn't so much the reasoning behind it most people doing the actual rioting that developed by mid morning hadn't put that much thought into it. The people who were just running around with their heads cut off also hadn't bothered with paying much heed to the reasons either. Most the disturbance really was just a way to blow off steam from all the accumulated stress of having been thrown back almost four hundred years.

    By the time anyone had found found George Campbell he'd been dead for at least several hours, longer probably, but not much longer. "Looks self inflicted." Merle grunted. The sheriff's deputy had long since holstered his side arm, and the police officer next to him with the shotgun still readied looked a little sheepish.

    "Do you see a note?"

    The looked around the bank's small office space; it was an older layout. George Campbell had managed to, if this was suicide, make a real mess when he had checked out. The over turned chair, sprawled body, and papers everywhere did give a strong impression that there had been a struggle. Couple that with the fact that it was dark as shit without electrical power, and being limited to only flashlights, and the handful of idiots who had among other things burned a suburban a few blocks down it had made sense to be cautious as well.

    Not that if it had been a murder the murderer would have been still sticking around by the time they had gotten here. "No, his ex wife lives in town." The deputy muttered. Technically both the bank man and his family all lived in town. The only reason the sheriff's department were here was how short handed the city was.

    It would be good if this was a suicide. Callous as that might have sounded the police officer knew it would not only make his job easier... he mused rifling through the papers with the flashlight in his mouth... and his job being easy when it closed this case would ease things up the ladder. It not being a murder meant there wouldn't be the chief and the mayor breathing down their neck to solve it. He didn't like the idea of trying to solve a murder in this situation. Even with all the technical gizmos, even accounting the wait time for the state crime lab, crimes against people were fifty fifty about getting solved... or more correctly closed.

    It took them several more minutes of searching through the dark, but there was a suicide note. It wasn't especially clear... might mean something to the family about why, but it would let them satisfactorily declare it a self inflicted death. The two men backed out of the room, headed out of the local branch office, and locked back up after them.

    Not that there was really any point to doing so. Since the Ring of Fire they doubted anyone at the bank had come in before mr. Campbell had showed up to commit suicide, even if they had it wasn't an issue. There were probably employees with keys, but they wouldn't have a reason to break the police evidence seal the officer affixed to the front glass double doors. All the banks in town were closed... in no small part because most of them were apart of much larger financial institutions, which had large corporate facilities in the state capital. A capital which effectively no longer existed... and neither did the even more distant corporate headquarters of Wells Fargo, or Bank of America... or whoever.

    Not that there had been much reason for the local county bank, or the farm bureau, or any of the credit unions in town, to open since the ring of fire either. The dollar was worthless without the US economy to back it up. Without large commercial institutions things like mortgages meant nothing, and credit cards were worthless, but so too were the accumulated debts. That would have been the logical way to look at things... except the economy was gone. The dollar was worthless, and without that currency no shops and businesses were running. That was so much more apparent on the ride back to the local command post... which was its actual label though most people settled for precinct... that serviced this end of town.

    Everything was closed, and had been closed. The people who worked there were probably going stir crazy. Unlike the local starbucks though municipal services were still working. The only private company still working was the power company, and that was largely in concert with the fire department dealing with natural gas. As a result it was a long stretch of empty roads, driving past empty parking lots. That being stuck at home had contributed to the stress build up that had played a part in the riot, the mayor nationalizing the goods of certain large store chains had probably played a roll only as being the spark that had set the kindling on fire.

    George Campbell had killed himself because he knew he no longer had a job. He had killed himself because there was no going back to his normal life. There was no point in pulling money out of the bank's vault because that money wasn't worth anything. That was why he had painted his brains all over the ceiling as he had leaned forward in his chair over his desk.

    They'd check the house, but it wouldn't be a priority now. The officer wondered if it should be... suicide and all the man probably had stuff that might be useful to other people. That wasn't in his job description. He held up the plastic evidence bag with the man's wallet, and keys, and gave them a good shake. He wondered how well the neighbors had known the bank man next door.

    Merle glanced at him, "Don't worry about." The deputy grunted barely open his mouth as he moved to step out into the parking lot. In a normal situation next of kin should have been their job, but it wasn't going to be their immediate job. The morning had had too much excitement, and on top of that there was no guarantee the wife would be at home. Not saying she wouldn't be either, but they just didn't know. "If it falls to us we can do it around five, until then..."



    The Mayor might complain but the police chief was willing to take the heat after people had started setting cars on fire. It was why he brought the shotgun out for the building, but deputy was fishing his county bushmaster out. He watched Merle's line of sight to where it lingered across the street... buildings built back in world war II, some probably before, and some after. Merle looked at him raised an eyebrow "Whats up?" He asked finally.

    "I'm thinking this is gonna suck." He was looking at how he had his hand resting his hand on the top of his glock, "You should keep that handy. The shotgun too man."

    The cop quirked an eyebrow, he'd never remembered getting ridden nearly this hard by someone from the Sheriff's detective bureau... sheriff's department at all... not this hard... before. "Yeah?"

    "Yeah I think so," Johnson replied, he threw a look to the east side of town... what was the west now since things were spun round. "Lets just say, man, that," He snorted, "Nothing... you'll probably see it sooner or later, you'll get what I mean." He said it wasn't just that, and he threw a thumb back down the street of the suburban burned out.

    Merle wondered running a hand through his increasingly shaggy brown hair what the police chief would say about that... or the mayor.
     
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  20. ATP

    ATP Experienced.

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    Well,dollar is fiat money now.People use it,becouse it is backed by USA goverment.No USA goverment,no dollar.
    Property of big Corpo who are not there anymore should be nationalized,too.
    And their debts considered as non-existing.
    New money - use silver and gold,like everybody else.
    New fiat money would fall without superpower backing it.And they are not superpower.

    About Winter - i read,that some were so harsh,that Baltic sea partially frozen,and even somebody made inn there for people who used sleight pulled by horses to get to Sweden.Forget which year,unfortunatelly.

    P.S Dutch made a lot of bussines with Poland,you could try made deal with them if you want fiat money.
    Both Sweden and Poland would have no enough gold and bankers to cover it.
     
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  21. Threadmarks: November 1917
    Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    November 1917
    Percy was very uncomfortable about what the Bolshies were going to do about the papers. About the things Trotsky was going to say... and desperately hoping that Washington would clamp down on the papers... that Wilson wouldn't break consensus with London. The Englishman was very, very uncomfortable, to the point of fidgeting as the Russian railwork was laid out in front of him.

    Lansing had been publicly, probably privately to Washington's elite as well, but publicly optimistic about Kerensky's coming to power. Enough confidence that he'd put his name on things, but that had soured especially as 'joint rule' with these 'soviets' had started coming up more and more frequently. If Lansing was a little more even handed on his walking back of his public commentaries, the people in Wilson's interior service were more alarmed about Bolshevik success, particularly on the state's domestic front. The Justice Department wasn't at all happy.

    The new situation though had spun up like gas on fire. Frankly Allen wanted to laugh at them, all of them, "Russia is as much an agrarian country as China is." He grunted, in part he was trying to placate some of the alarmism... because these were things they didn't have the resources to do anything about, and he wasn't going to hand wring or get the vapors, "Hell most the population lives in one half as well." The map in front of them was the proposed division of Russian spheres of influence, what in the actual literature between nations were called 'markets' put forward by the French and British and agreed to by Kerensky in exchange for support months earlier. Kerensky had agreed to a lot and he was likely to be excoriated by all sides ... and frankly it was hard to say he didn't deserve that... except that Lenin and his friends would be worse.

    A protractor and rulers sat on top. He had smudges on his finger tips, and the side of his hand.

    Percy leaned on the table and looked at the work, and finally the Englishman seemed to deflate. He nodded at the outline. "That'll do I think. I think it can work."

    He was glad when he left the room. Left them to the rest of business. He wasn't the only one. There were some grumblings about the rail project already, about things. The war though, the basically complete disappearance of German and Belgium market presence, and then by 1915 Britain devouring their own production and voracious for more was only part of it.

    In the eighteen nineties Vickers had come into Russia bringing the very latest in oil technology. Drilling sites like Baku proved lucrative in the short term, and very productive. Then the fighting over capital and efficiency had started. The French who'd long seen it as their remit to be chief capital source for Russian development and Belgium supporting as well, had started to complain, and complain directly to the Tsar. Then the, russo-japanese war had happened... and well Vickers had been a bit shaken up by the Russian belligerence but also other factors of their business and standing with the public. The Russians had gone from about a third of the oil production to under ten percent before the start of the current war.

    The French had wanted the Ukraine as their market area. They were looking for farms, and coal. That wasn't being short sighted. They were looking for coal for its use in steel for the things they needed right now. The British interest in Oil was looking forward. The zones of control had signed off concessions to the US that frankly Wilson probably didn't even want... the Russian government had been in such a mess that they needed the financial reorganization, and the promise of more influx of technology and expertise that simply didn't exist due to historical distrust and concerns over eroding old 'feudal privileges'.

    "Should look on the bright side." Dawes observed ruffling through papers. He stopped pulled a printed map grabbed a red pen and circled a few sections of traffic that had come from State... and ultimately Stevens.

    ... if that was the case... the Russians could be pushed out of China entirely. If there was no Russian leverage, the French pressure was substantively less of a concern. Did that mean there would as a result be no French participation? No. The French would argue that their treaty concessions, real or imagined were still binding, despite the lack of available French capital... and it was the lack of money that would stymie French projects.

    Stevens had put out a preliminary report about his mission to Siberia. The port of Vladivostok was not particularly modern, but it was the only one the Russians had really. There was less bellyaching about the Russian gauge size than he'd been anticipating, but the condition of the bridges was atrocious... and that was a limiter on speed... and not the only one. The Trans-Siberian was too long... it didn't have natural intersect points with large towns. It didn't intersect with any major other rail lines... it was a trans continental railroad for the sake of building a railway to the sea...

    There was a ruffling of papers. "Outlining the practical solutions the most expedient method of repair is of course the replacement of the decayed, and greatly neglected stretches of track." There was a pause, and some conversation, Some of the 'decay' as it was caused was probably legitimate weathering... some of the problems were that even if you had graded the embankment properly the rains came, floods came, and it washed your work away.

    Maintenance hadn't been done on potentially hundreds of miles of track in the last decade... some longer... and an even larger volume of eastern railway had been neglected due to lack of resources during the war. Then, of course the recognition that some of the steel used in the tracks originally simply had been sub par, of poor quality.

    Stevens outlined hundreds of miles of track non contiguous that it would simply be prudent to replace them with new American manufactured steel and put down steam driven ties. If that had been a single section of track, even a long section... it would have been perhaps a season's work... but that time expanded because Stevens didn't have a crew under him, he had limited engineers to survey, and he didn't have the material... and because that mess wasn't one section.

    The condition of the Trans Siberian thereby forced a reduction of speed. It forced trains travelling along it to not just travel slower, but also stop relatively frequently to clear tracks, as well as to occasionally bridge gaps in the tracks. That was just regular normal delays. He rubbed thumb and forefinger together expunging the dark smudge of graphite from the pencil.

    Dawes answered his look. "You know the ask is going to come, don't you?"

    "That Percy's," The Foreign Service... hell state too... "scheme is to build some grand coalition to needle everyone to try and leverage the people dragging their heels," And that when everything was said and done credit, and public accolades would be used as political capital to try and sway people with public social fawning for the next thing that needed doing regardless of what they'd really done... that was just how the game, "Stevens is worried," He said changing the subject, as he rested a hand on a circular telegram, "That this kind of work could take until 1923."

    Which was conservative an estimate to be sure... the Russian Army had had to build railways for the war... but the British weren't going to want to let Russian troops come off the eastern front to do that kind of thing... which meant an appeal to washington... or maybe Tokyo.

    Dawes tapped his temple with the red pen and shook his head then reached over and tapped where he had circled Lake Baikal... or more accurately the fortress of Irkutsk, "They have to hold here. Its just geography, this link has to be held. That means they need a patsy government, someone they can say is Russian, but who will do what London says." and it was what London wanted, Kerensky had been France's poodle as the joke had started going around.

    Then there was to be Japan's interest, as history would ultimately hold out... but such things were years in the future, and for now they were concerned about rolling stock, and the rails they moved upon, and the payment for such works... rather than the larger political picture. Green Ukraine as that patsy would be known would not come into recognition by England and her Japanese allies for a few more months... and even that was nothing compared to later political theater as the British and Japanese would hand over arms captured from the Germans, or from their own stocks later still. That was in the future, when there could be no denying that the Russian Civil War was well underway.

    "I take your point. That doesn't change that Stevens has a point, he'll need a crew to work those cuts, if he's right about that erosion, those spans."

    --
    Putting aside the business of international railway ventures there were matters closer to home. The railway was the motive power that kept people and goods moving. To that end four separate tracks pushed westward from Xian's westernmost station. This was a contrast to the two track line expansion work to Zhengzhou, which would still maintain a single line as it ran north into Western Zhili, and then into the east of the province.

    It would not, and never intended as an anti invasion measure. It was a non competition measure. Going directly west from Zhengzhou would put them into competition before the present day with Belgium... so they had never built a line to the coast except the short route from Peking to Tietsin, any traffic to Weihaiwei or to reach Tsingtao had to run on existing British or German lines which meant transfers.

    As they pivoted west there was less and less industrial competition, but there were still decent sized cities that there were worth building routes to, and decent sized towns that had enough of a population base to pass through. It would be the railway which linked the western circuits. The four tracks went out to Qinghai, to the big lake, and then diverged to individual stations. One went down to Lhasa, but the others went into the provinces of... the 'western commanderies' western trio, whatever one wanted to call the area as one went through the Gansu corridor, that no longer had a governor. Zhang Guangjian was the last sitting governor... but his position was in part a hold over of how things had been when Yuan Shikai had been alive.

    The created something of an institutional matter. Ma Anliang had no clear successor right now, and the best they could hope for would be the old man kept chugging along, but that only was delaying the inevitable political fracas of either no successor or the fighting of a successor being chosen and some other part of the clique's disagreement with them.

    "We have to establish colleges along the A&M model." The accepted idea from 1912, and not unique to them, other outfits had set up colleges. There was the farming college in Zhengzhou that had nothing to do with them.

    "Yeah, and we still have the same problem as when you brought it up last year." Cole declared interrupting JP before he could start up. "Running the ones we have now, is one thing, we do not have the manpower to put one in Lhasa, or Qinghai, or parts west."

    Accepting that the resistance to the motion had weakened since last year, the limitation did stand. The protests of government work had largely evaporated over the last thirteen months. "You can take it to the floor." Allen agreed, "But practically speaking we don't have the teachers." He doubted John Paul had the votes already... but he could probably get them. Most likely what would happen is the cadre would then agree that construction of institutions should be done. Staffing though would be trickier.

    From the way Powell was tapping his foot he was about to start hearing how they had a moral obligation to stamp out illiteracy, which certainly he found no fault with, but it didn't "Teachers don't grow on trees." Cullen grunted, "And to further you have to count that there aren't the institutions to get people from a to b to c. A college can teach adults, yes, and that will help, but elementary schools are functionally nonexistent, as are junior high and high schools." and logistically it had been one thing to construct schools of childhood education in Xian for a ten year program or a twelve year education. It was one thing in western Zhili where there were large cities that already had factories who's parents were employed in mechanical manufacturing in an industrial world.

    You could say that was true for Taiyuan, but Urumqi, or Hsining, or Lhasa not so much... but Sinkiang in the far west had significant untapped resources... and Bill was currently absent because he suspected that included oil, but even if they didn't the province already dug coal. Coal which would fuel steel.

    "Do we need to expand production though?"

    Japan might buy what they could make, but for how long was the question. It was true Wilson had vented some of the pressure in the market, by capping prices... if for all the wrong justifications to do so... the war couldn't last forever, and was opening another steel mill the right move? Probably not... there was going to be a glut once Europe stopped being at war... there were so many producers ... they could use the coal though.

    ... and the capital to that steel mill might be better suited for some other metal working good instead... there would be other goods to make after the war... things that they'd need locally.
    --
    Notes: This is going up early, and Saturday should see the conclusion of November 1917

    With the Bolshevik seizure of power it is as good of time as any to talk about timeline divergence, and on a global scale this timeline largely remains fairly similar to the real life in broad strokes, particularly in terms of western Europe. Now the Soviet Union will form in a few years, Lenin will die due to complications of getting shot in a couple month and his pre existing medical conditions, but for the most part the twenties and thirties in Europe and in the european periphery will go along.

    There are all sorts of conflicts that take place after November 1918 regardless of whats going on in the western capitals. So WW2 will largely happen in Europe disconnected from events in Asia. It will really only be when the Cold War begins in this timeline that there will be significant divergences in the global historical timeline.

    Like I said with PMs, Thatcher may still end up as PM due to the way the stability of British political institutions are, not exactly the same thing, but Nixon is also sort of a given though thats more because he was Ike's VP, and if WW2 happens more or less as normal Ike as president is very probable response to succeed Truman. After though, Jimmy Carter was anomaly of US presidents his elect was one things where specific confluence of social pressures got him elected, and then electorate forgot about why they elected him, and frankly even without the shenanigans he probably wouldn't have been reelected. So yeah really Nixon is the last president thats its likely will share with OTL.

    The establishment of the Fifth Republic (France) has its roots in the first world war, thats not a typo, France's political problems are at least that old, and the presidential republic didn't fix all of the problem late 19th century france had that the first world war blew wide open. If the second world war goes largely to OTL DeGaulle is a possibl, and if so Pompidou is a pretty strong maybe... but if Degaulle is not a given, then Pompidou, who was PM for deGaulle isn't. Thats going to be important post ww2, but especially after major divergence in the timeline in the sixties and seventies, because as a timeline global oil demand is going to be higher just as one example.

    Anyway, just something that needed to be touched on, especially because one of the divergence points here are the changes in Central Asia hinted at here, but those do not readily effect Western Europe. Western Europe, the Franco-Entente, are involved but it doesn't effect their core areas so the consequences don't actually play a role until much later. (There will be knock on effects, but they won't have effects on Europe for decades after 1918)

    I also want to make clear that the use of 'the Ukraine' is to reflect period usage standards.
     
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  22. Threadmarks: November 1917 [Conclusion]
    Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    November 1917
    [Conclusion]

    Baxian was the name of a county in the area under Chunking and because it was an important river port that meant it was of British beyond just Chunking being in the 'British sphere'. The warning of movement in the area wasn't a surprise. Chunking had quieted down a bit after the shelling incident but mostly as they had adopted a wait and see approach to events in the north.

    Powell stepped and shut the door and moved to sit down. "Phillip, what do you want?"

    He stopped and shut the door, then sat down. "I need an advance out of the operating budget. I know its the end of the year, and I know there is a month left."

    He glanced down at the telegraph card, and slid the Szechwan map over it. "What do you need it for?"

    "There's been an earthquake in Guatemala. Its made the paper." He added a bit unnecessarily as if would question that such a thing had happened.

    "It has." He agreed.

    Even if it hadn't came out that the General Staff hadn't been actively monitoring cable traffic coming both ways, which of course Powell should have known, but that those intercepts included all outgoing traffic including those by cadre members... they still would have ended up in a row. "You've already received guarantees from Edenborn. The operating budget can advance you a million dollars." He held up a hand, "No, you listen Phillip, I will back you on this." But he'd better make good on this whole plan, "Coffee, the railroad, electrical generation. The president there has a deal with united fruit that they'll auction off railway concession. Get it done. Buy off anything German investors lost when the country entered the war on the US behalf."

    "Churches, hospitals, schools?"

    "The latter two sure." He shrugged, "Don't get too far ahead of yourself. Focus on the plan, but make sure if you do outreach its effective. Layout an area then make sure that area gets done." He paused, "I'll cover for you, don't ask me for another advance though, its an advance, and its coming out of this years earnings, so there will be questions, so you can expect Dawes will want concessions."

    "I can deal with the old man." Phillip promised straightening.

    He wasn't going to argue, now wasn't the time. If Phillip did view this as now the time to jump in with capital, "When does the boat leave?"

    He didn't exactly answer the question, "I'm on the next ship to the Philippines, then back to San Francisco."

    "It'll be arranged when your stateside." He'd make the calls.

    "Thanks Al."

    "Telephone, telegraph."

    "I got it." The door closed. He was for the stairs and fast from the sound of his boots as if the boat would leave without.

    Allen pulled the copy of the telegraph. Not the artilleryman's cable to and Edenborn's response, but Edenborn's cable to him this morning. The cable he hadn't mentioned as coming in. The cable that if Powell had been thinking straight might have figured out existed... or might have stumbled upon by happenstance.

    It didn't matter. Bill stuck his head in. "Where the devil is he off to so damn fast?"

    "To break ground in middle america." Allen shrugged, "I expect Dawes just solidified his place as colonel general of our artillery."

    "Are we actually going to bring that back?" He shrugged, the truth was they hadn't thought that far. Black Jack was the first Full General in US service in nearly thirty years. "He skips lieutenant this time. " Bill's observation referred to the three star rank of the service, and that Black Jack had in 1907 skipped from his regular army rank of Captain to brigadier general skipping the traditional colonelcy period or perpetual major status.

    Allen didn't mention that the whole business in Manchuria and the Russo-Japanese war was why, and why he'd left the service as a major. "Regardless I doubt Phil will be back to us anytime soon. Any objection to me sending the rest of the 105s down to shore up Cole and Shang?"

    The texan shrugged. "Do it."

    It was done. He was glad the British had made payment for manganese ore and steel needs. Otherwise the money would have been harder to justify... of course there were other reasons for that.

    They jokingly called the middle america venture the filibusters. The eventual precursor to the state that would emerge later would be a largely dead on arrival suggestion of a federation of central america. That idea though would worm its way into the Middle America Groups head and while El Salvador declined to participate in it. Three countries eventually ended up becoming one... largely made possible by a large trunk and branch railway, a lot of dynamite, and this thing called radio certainly would help.

    ... but that was someone else's story.
    --
    He made a point of not speaking to Phillip while he waited in Tietsin for the ship that would carry him to the Philippines. "This is good though." The elder Forrest remarked smoothing his smoking jacket, and that it concealed the forty five caliber government work. "Don't complain, its not like he's taking ten thousand dollars out of your pocket." He reached over to the glass. "Black Jack has Daniel on staff duty."

    "I'm aware."

    "He tell you that or did you ask him?"

    "He told me," In between cursing about being himself stuck away from the front proper, but he assumed his father knew that, and that he didn't need to say that, "What do you make of Mackinder?"

    "Were you expecting him to be another of our Minister Reinsch?" He put the glass down without drinking from it. "No, I'm not worried about him." He shrugged, which was non verbal for then what are you worried about. The civil affairs colonel cocked his eyebrow at the gesture, "What do you think I'm worried about?"

    "Trotsky?"

    "Well that little bastard isn't making things easy, he's got friends, but really its the president, and being an easily duped sort." Trotsky's publication that had gone out had heavily borrowed from Wilson's own talking points in lampooning European secret diplomacy. He then gone a step further on that measure by then sending letters to all the ambassadors suggesting, reiterating a peace without annexations, a white peace without indemnities... or the same damned thing Wilson had put forward this time last year. "We need to be pragmatic about this. Can the British transport troops through Siberia, or into central asia?"

    Could they use the rails yes, "Both. I've seen Stevens reports." But it would be slow but the railway work could be done. It wouldn't be the overall work, but Vladivostok to Irkutsk was certainly feasible. "But the British wanted the caucuses," and the French had received Ukraine as a sphere of influence in Russian market space, "I can tell you projecting there from this side isn't feasible. Its too slow."

    "The British have a navy for that, or so they claim, I suspect its this balkans thrust they've been talking about, but whatever the case our concern is Siberia. The British wish to secure with their Russian allies," Which was a hilarious thought in itself, "a foothold by which to keep the Russians in the war regardless of what the Kaiser's lackey thinks or attempts."

    Banging on rhetoric was all well and good, but that was a much more complicated thing, than simply broad sweeping speeches. "So we're back to the matter of mister Mackinder then?" Officially the parliamentarian had been given some fancy title and the post of commissioner, but he was not a member of Lloyd George's war cabinet, neither was John Jordan for that matter. The welshman's war cabinet was a handful of men that included men like Jan Smuts as Cullen had noted. "I assume that the British want more than just the railway link."

    "There is at present a collection of pro British factions assembled. They have apparently convinced and managed to smuggle some generals and nobles out." Lansing was preparing to make sure Terauchi was against the Bolsheviks. A further expansion of secret protocols of his and Ishii's understandings of the other's position, and would in combination with the British support for the Czechoslovak legion, and the British support for the whites combine with Manchurian, and northern Chinese soldiers and labors... that was to say contributions both by Zhang Tsolin and Duan Qirui to be the building blocks of intervention in Siberia as 1917 drew to its close...

    ... the future was that looking back historians would question whether or not if the British had been more supportive of the Kornilov coup against Kerensky if the Royal Navy had been more present in Petrograd's harbors then perhaps could something more have been done to stop the red terrors... but that was the prerogative of historians and people of the future to ask what ifs. Lloyd George had decided he needed to do something, and it very much was to become a matter of British pride to intervene in the war.

    Almost half a million chinese laborers would serve in Russia over the course the first world war, and more than a hundred thousand troops drawn from more than a dozen different 'warlords' Puppet states would be established, international support extended and the game would be played.

    The older Forrest shook his head. "There is something else."

    "What?"

    "Lansing is going to ask Terauchi about standing with us against the Bolshevik, not going to lie the Secretary is a bit embarrassed over the Russian business." An embarrassed Lansing was a dangerous Lansing, "You have plans to meet up with Yamagata's boy, this trip to Taiwan, Akashi has going on."

    The eavesdropping on phone calls wasn't a surprise. It was annoying but he wasn't surprised. "The railway situation is a problem. I'm not going to Vladivostok, I'm not putting men up there. I need somebody who can do the job."

    "Yeah?" There was an amused skepticism, "Well whatever thats good, getting Japan involved. I've seen Steven's handwringing of a report, but the Virginian is too likely to take it at face value and the Corp of Engineers is probably too busy with France. What do the British know?"

    "As of yet, nothing." It wasn't finalized yet hell he had made all of five phone calls this past week, the conversation about Phil leaving for latin america had put him off guard for questions... the British contract had provisions for subcontractors, and for expanding jobs... though not exactly what he'd had in mind... Steven's report was alarming.

    "Fine, the truth is Stevens seems to have lost his nerve he's fretting over the Bolshevik situation and the line needs to be done rather than just be written off. Lansing and the British are going to approach Japan about what we collectively can do... and we're not going to tell the French. We're not going to tell Reinsch, and we're not telling John Jordan either."

    ... what the hell? "What happens when they find out?"

    "It'll be fait accompli." As if that would be that simple, but one thing at a time.
    --


    Notes: There is a reason that El Salvador doesn't join the middle america project is because by this time, that it occurs, or even at this (segment) in the timeline El Salvador already has a strong oligarchic and centralized influence bloc. Yes, it is US aligned (or more accurately in 1917 Anglosphere aligned, it has strong ties to England despite not declaring war against Germany), and does become a defacto military dictatorship, and is anti communist but unlike the other three El Salavador has during this period has a relatively strong central government and as a result no regime change, no banana wars. The great families have a vested interest in not having their power diluted by such a federal government.

    The subsequent government has no interest forcing it in. They're both anti-communist, and they're both aligned with other US interests among other factors. So thats why El Salvador declines to participate. The middle america thing is really more of post Russian civil war / late inter war period matter until the cold war era.

    And I should mention, because its a useful detail. On the 15th of November 1917 Duan resigned from being PM again, he was back in the job effectively 3 months later. He basically goes, "Fine" then in December as will be mentioned takes up in the newly formed War Participation Office... and then gets asked to be prime minister again in the following year. As will be noted in the opening of December, and over the course Duan still wields significant influence in the Beiyang establishment.
     
  23. ATP

    ATP Experienced.

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    So,They try kick off soviets from Siberia.Or,to be precise,prevent them from taking over.Could be done in OTL by Japan,if USA do not saved soviet asses.They take Vladivostok,and gave it to soviets.
    Either idiots,of Wall Street really have long plan for turn half of Earth into commie hellhole.

    What your China could do here? help kick off soviets at least from part of Siberia,and keep useful refugees - not only russians,but also poles and ukrainians.

    P.S i read some memories of poles fighting soviets - apparently,there were chineese soldiers fighting for them.
    And torturers in CZK - they teach soviets how keep prisoner suffering,but still alive.

    That,i could belive.
     
  24. Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    So in IRL Allied intervention wraps up in 1920 the Russian Civil war lasted until really about 1929 with the Reds defeating the last (really this should be calling mopping up) resistance of the greens and black holdouts and indulging some fratricidal blood letting where upon Stalin would largely secure power and that would maintain, such that soviets were finally admitted in the League of nations in '34, and two year later Stalin begins the great purge. With that in mind:

    Here, first and foremost Lansing is acting without consulting President Wilson (and when we get to Versailles, the paris peace conference its all but unheard for a President to go treaty negotiations in this time frame, that is something POTUS isn't supposed to do, and Wilson both at the time, and indeed in historical commentary gets a lot of flak for), this is a joint English FSO US State department and also FM Ishi move. Now, Lloyd George on the English side knows what going Terauchi does not at this stage. [Now in IRL Lansing does eventually convince Wilson to support a Russian intervention but that was in combination to pressure from Lloyd George, as well as the French by that point]


    The end result of this here, is that Five Japanese Divisions under a separate chain of command from Kwantung Army (that will be important down the round) are mobilized by Japan and eventually secure " Green Ukraine", which is this White Russian Puppet state in Eastern Siberian that the British, and Japanese prop up. The British also going into Kirghiz / Central Asia with an Anzac group and prop up a cossack dominated White Russian faction in basically central Asia. The Royal Navy in the mean time after WW1 ends goes into the baltic and supports those countries much as OTL.

    Well in the interim Edith gets her husband to sack Lansing he appoints Colby (who is basically useless and doesn't really matter in this context, he would matter more in the Middle America side of things) Harding wins, despite strong resistance from the state department apparatus there is a strong push back to this from the idiots on wall street who adhere to the progressive idea that 'trade prevents war' and Ford in particular was very against the first world and he makes a lot of statements to normalize relations with the soviets etc etc, and this coupled with Hardin's 'return to normalcy' campaign that suits POTUS fine.

    However since the US under Wilson never ratifies either Versailles or the League of Nations, and things like the King Commission will be touched on later in the twenties the US doesn't have as much leverage to actually pressure allied withdrawal (Japan and England) out by 1920. England eventually withdraws but by the time they do what in the modern day in Kazakhstan is in a completely different condition, and it also doesn't stop France, and England sending arms to Poland during the soviet Polish war [Thats for things that happen in the twenties that does the soviet cause no favors]

    Long story short, the Soviets end up having to resolve the Russian Civil War with the choice of what do we want to retake , and that ultimately is the choice of taking back bessarabia and ukraine as a whole versus trying to project and rebuild the Trans Siberian after the civil war (since one of the results of the war in 21-22 is that the Whites and the Reds both rip the rail line to keep the other side from using them, well beyond what they did historically)

    The international result of this is that the Empire (Britain and friends) and Japan gets France and Belgium and most of their allies to 'recognize' these white successor states as independent (the Soviets have very little international recognition) and the Soviets have too many internal problem in this time frame to do much about it with the ongoing war in the west. So after Stalin comes to power he more or less lets things in the east freeze planning to come back to it later and that later continues into the thirties

    This will be touched on more when we actually et into the events of the twenties.

    Here Zhang Tso-lin out of Manchuria ponies up troops to help in Siberia, and in Central Asia, the Cadre sends troops there, and also does the railway network. This means that there is enough of a garrison and holding force and logistical presence to stop the soviets from either reclaiming irkutsk or taking over Central Asia.
     
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  25. ATP

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    Interesting,and could happen.It would be funny,if Mad Baron get his mongolian state here.And Ossendowski,one of his commanders in OTL,could remain that.Or discover real Agharta this time !
    P.S ihope not,there supposed to be war dcemons there.
     
  26. Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    I think, and not having my notes in front me that Ungern does actually remain in control of Mongolia for a while, into the thirties due to not having a soviet border and he'd only be what in his fifties
     
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  27. ATP

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    Then wrote about his state - it would be interesting how buddhist monarchy would look like in RL.According to what i read,he was real beliver.
     
  28. Imperator Pax

    Imperator Pax Talon Master

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    HIstorically I would expect a buddhist monarchy in Mongolia would be similar to how the buddhist monarchy in Bhutan operated, state sanction of existing monasteries, some kind of state recognition of the highest ranking or respected clericial establishment with a mongolian state there is the question of how that would effect the tax base (especially in a post Qing Mongolia), what if any exemptions are avaialble, and how that effects the army, and industrial, there are at least some railways, there is an arsenal, exactly how modern it was in 1917 ... well I doubt it was very modern since supposedly the whites upgraded it and then Japan may have upgraded it again... it was pillaged by the soviets [which suggests the arsenal, or an arsenal may have been in what is modern day inner Mongolia, records are sketchy]


    Foreign policy wise how ungern responds to Japanese Buddhist establishments, Japanese Zen Buddhist schools were heavily active especially in the north
     
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  29. ATP

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    So,with monks do not paing taxes and serving in army he could have problems,but - still better then soviet rule.
     
  30. Extras: Naval lore blurb across the timelines
    Imperator Pax

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    Naval lore across the timelines​
    --
    Notes: I'm going to go ahead and touch on this here... and frankly I could discourse this topic on, with Saturday's update. Naval matters across different timelines I'm going to start with the easy one first:

    Freiherr von Zemo saves the Reich... Zemo hates the navy, mostly because he hates the admiralty but also for purely political measures internal and external. Imperial Germany's naval ambitions are curtailed in this timeline, and the only reason that the navy isn't completely abolished as a service is the success of this timeline's version of Albion other wise by 1918 Zemo's army faction of politics would probably try and dissolve the navy.

    Now part of that is economics; the Naval expansion pre war prevented the army from having the forces on hand to execute the Schlieffen Moltke plan is the espoused reason, but it goes beyond. Naval machinery is expensive. The navy failed to win a decisive victory at Jutland (again propaganda in this timeline has the outright accusing the Navy of incompetence for failing to act during Beaty's cowardice, objectively thats not the Navy's fault, but the Army doesn't care, and that's also propaganda aimed at the British as well).

    Post World War the peace treaty is designed to kickstart an EU style economic union early, or more accurately restore the pre war economic integration, and expand that to the independent countries in the east that have sloughed off the crippled russian empire (Lenin has an unfortunate run in with von Kroenen, and Trotsky stays in New York rather than return to Europe) no Red Revolution, a defeated france means no Kerensky. .

    So in Naval terms in this timeline the German Peace Treaty immediately leans into something to the Washington Naval Treaty of X number tonnage here based on how many oceans you border (Atlantic, Pacific, Indian) as part of the peace treaty process, with lesser tonnage allocated by Sea (north sea, baltic, sea of Japan) and this is specifically realpolitik designed to keep Germany out of a pacific war down the road while banking on that England, is not on good terms with France, and that Japan's Young Officers might still do something stupid down the road thus forcing England and the US into a war. SO in short the German Navy is small and conservative.

    --
    Moving on

    1632. Ordinarily I would say that in such a scenario realistically the idea of a US Navy and of sweeping naval such is high fantasy, its a little more fathomable in ISOT, but with grantville its extremely fanciful. Again naval scope of things relatively conservative, part of this is both the limit of industrial ability (this will be touched on down below) but also the conditions and geography of the Baltic.

    Now canonically in 1632 Grantville manages to serious magik some ships together, and that will sort of happen in the form of iron clads initially, and eventually much as in Rising Thunder (what will be touched on next) is that these are an emphasis on propulsion and seaworthiness rather than fire power. Here, there will be seaplane tenders , not true aircraft tenders but spotting planes for artillery for the most part though it is not feasible to in the time frame involved to construct a nominally swedish navy to do what could be done in Rising Thunder, or in Sharpe's Patron which is the other iron clad centric. All three at least initially rely on coal, but rely on different gun arrangements.

    Here the geo strategic goal is of course sealing the baltic and then later projecting out to the opposite side of the peninsula to protect the rest of the 'neo Kalmar Union'. The goal is less about trade and maritime commerce than it is in the following two stories due to other factors in the timeframe.

    --
    Rising Thunder

    Ok so Rising Thunder takes place in a post Confederate Victory Timeline based off Grand Tactician and like the actual US Civil War leaves the US with two situations. The First Napoleon III in Mexico, the second is that the civil war has resulted in the US (and I'm using US as a shorthand rather than typing America) with a massive number of hulls.

    The immediate geo strategic goal of the US here is reimplementation of the Monroe doctrine, and ideally expulsion of both France, and Spain from the new world as a long term goal. This means staying on with England. The US at this point in 1864 still needs British support as a counterweight it doesn't have the available resources to kick both spain and france out at the same time. So the strategic plan is to either convince spain to sell and get out of the new world (this was tried historically, Spain refused) and alternatively to support fillibusters and rebels to knock Spanish influence out by military force.

    Again this timeline is post civil war a more nationalist and less isolationist US emerges, this means eventually more and further naval activity. In both the pacific and also in Africa, both North Africa (i.e. Morocco) as well on the western coast (i.e. Liberia). It also means a much more belligerent France, both during Napoleon III's reign, and after with regard to the revisionists. That has knock on effects on the rest of europe. A more expansionist US and a Mahan with a greater support from the Congress means a minimum of three fleets, a home waters fleet, an atlantic fleet and a pacific fleet, and that likely means an earlier canal getting built.

    This means from a naval technology standpoint iron clads as a starting point but then something akin Texas, but with a greater support for building protected cruisers for commerce protection, per Mahan. Again coal power, domestic steel production eventually something along the lines of USS South Carolina as the successor to these ships with oil superseding coal from at first oil fields in Pennslyvania and then Texas, and California... and then US Mexico so a second round of naval build up in the 1890s to replace coal ships.
    --
    Sharpe's Patron
    In the short term no major changes, its only post Trafalgar that in this story there is a major shift in naval technology, and the reasoning for this is industrial. England has ready access to coal, India has ready access to coal, and iron, and so on, basically the expansion of industrial processes in the 'first british empire' early in the 1800s, and emphasis here is on patronage of at first the industries of Scotland, and then a greater settlement of Canada and Australia by Napoelonic particularly Irish veterans later.

    Basically post Trafalgar there is an expansion of British industry in scotland at first in part for maritime trade, these are initially coal fired steam ships, and then coal fired steel hulled ships to further the blockade. There is an early development of triple expansion ships (basically what defines the First Generation Post Civil War Ships of the CSN of the late 1860s in Rising Thunder) allowing for much greater range with an emphasis on transatlantic trade, and also enforcement of the British blockade of continental Europe. They are primarily armed with high explosive shells, again primarily fighting french commerce raiders, they're capable of running them down against the wind, the ships of 1812 when they first arrive are unstoppable hence Dreadnought being the first warship in this class.

    In this timeline it as an emphasis on this on an early exploitation of coal and triple expansion steam boilers the redirects British Interests overseas to free trade agreements with the broader english and commercial world. In this timeline there is no Washington state, the US what will be Canadian border is the Columbia river. The British build an earlier transcontinental railroad in this timeline, and in return the British Empire more authoritively forces spain to go along with the monroe doctrine. This means a loss of Cuba in this timeline much earlier, it means more British bases in the pacific it means a British fleet opens Japan to trade... or more correctly its the BIE "Hey our agreement with your ancestors is still valid right, right?"

    This is very much an emphasis on maritime commerce
    --
    Finally for the largest of the three timeline /stories AoE... Xian does not have a port. Its carrying trade is conducted by anglo-american merchant shipping, and this is how Xian likes this before the second world war. They don't have a major port system its an infrastructure that would cost them money so it is not a priority, when their principal export across the pacific are to the British Empire, and the US. So from 1913-1937 trans pacific trade are carried by British or American ships. There are financial incentives such as avoiding tariffs for this, lobbying, so forth.

    However that doesn't necessarily hold for the rest of the timeline. The MAK have ports, they have an interest in maritime commerce and also an incentive to have some naval assets, and they have the ability to through the British and US procure other vessels during this period. This even leads to largely footnote schemes to try and get around treaties the US and UK sign in the interwar period regarding ... well first...

    Marine Diesels. Unlike the other timelines diesel power plants and their development are the interwar venture of note, again this is primarily driven by maritime commerce requirements predominantly influence by non military factors. This as a direct result factors into submarines, and how to counter submarines... and that will play a role. The MAK has a small navy by the time world war 2 is declared in Europe. Now from a manpower perspective the MAK has a population the equivalent of Canada? They could theoretically send troops? Right. Well yes, they could so the MAK supplies destroyers, for convoy duty it supplies pilots for fighters for the battle of britain, but its principle contribution to the allies is not an army but rather the preservation of maritime trade.

    Again the middle american cadre it trades with, it exports goods to the US and to the UK. To the commonwealth nations. It cannot have a uboat threatening its trade. Xian is too busy fighting a continental land war and thinking about building a road to what will become pakistan to be worrying about the logistics of shipping let the UK figure out how its going to get stuff to Iran, or India we will figure it out once its there, until then... land wars in asia.

    But the difference in the interwar is of the two cadres one has a reason to look at naval power, and one doesn't. Now post war both of them have reasons, means and opportunities to do that, but interwar thats a different story. One example of this is when Argentina goes to Great Britain for destroyers in the late twenties, the Cadre isn't in a position to act on that but it keeps it in mind, by this point well the writing is on the wall about which way things are heading.

    The less conservative proposal is yeah we need destroyers, but the Australians want to build Cruisers... unfortunately cruisers are treaty limited during this period. The original plan is however to piggy back off the Australians now this is economics, this is political horse trading. Australian industry and the navy wants to build up its domestic shipbuilding in the twenties it has six major yards at this point (IIRC) and they're an important imperial trade partner, and within Imperial politics the Royal Navy wants the RAN to build up rather than eat up British yard space so everyone wins. Or everyone would win if the Australian Government wasn't staffed by idiots who don't want to actually spend money on keeping those shipyards going. So the cruiser idea for that reason, and because of treaty limitations goes no where. The MAK goes well lets build auxillaries and have our people cross over visit the yards in construction, the Australian government is still sort of hte problem.... and the end result of this is that by the thirties the MAK goes to England with the original, hey those destroyers youre building for Argentina they use british ordinance we'd like to place our own order.

    HM's 1930s government is thrilled by this. This is money for the British docks that don't require expensive tooling up everything is underway. It is a cost inexpensive option for everyone that keeps yards running. The MAK is able to build up its navy during the interwar period, to where it can participate in the battle of the Atlantic.

    WW2 happens. The MAK is the participant, nominally in the European theater. Xian is not. China does not symbolically declare war on Germany, Xian spends the entirety of the war from 37 to 45 fighting Japan, predominantly on land. After 45 China still is not immediately unified, Hurley tries to get the north and south to talk, Truman is president now, there is all the stuff going on with Japan, and what Roosevelt wanted with decolonization... and Hurley makes a mess of things, resigns to get out of it, and leaves Truman in a lurch in a job that he's already not prepared for.

    So 'navally' Xian doesn't in the short term have a lot of options, so it follows the MAK model before the war ends. It stands up an office a bueracratic structure for its navy on the basis of supporting an invasion of japan as part of the anglo and american alliance against Japan. That never happens but the plan creates the navy. Xian goes to the Royal Navy and to Vickers and lays out a proposal as a part of the Commonwealth trade notion. Atlee is in power, he authorizes a lot of technology transfers, but he also nationalizes vickers, but the end result is that after China is reunified Xian begins the process of naval build up using at first British style ships, Anglo-Sino joint training crews, and British experts to construct yards in China.

    The end result of this is eventually carrier air power. Its the broader adoption of naval airpower that in the timeline as a whole results int a much wider adoption of the F 14 as an option to replace and or complement the Phantom. This is a US aircraft, but the adoption of it in timeline is that it fills an all weather strike aircraft role. It enters service, it has teething issues, changes are made to the airframe, but eventually in this timeline the countries which adopt the Phantom, China, Australia, the UK, Korea, Iran, Indonesia and Japan go on to adopt the F 14 because it a much more widely produced airframe here.

    Thats well into the future... and I need to go work on today's actual update.

    So basically in summation: Zemo: Nothing major Naval wise in this timeline to comment (Not in the time frame of 1914-1925). Similarly for the main timeline of AoE, the naval side of things aren't that important, if I do go and do the Destroyermen, again that takes place in the forties, and into the fifties Xian doesn't really have a fleet (that also gets into Destroyermen as a timeline/alternate earth).

    Rising Thunder is more focused on a period style distinction between ship patterns. There is a ship design break down between your battle fleet and your patrol fleet. Where as in 1632 (Dominion of the Baltic Sea) and in Sharpe's patron the major iron and steel warships are primarily focused on seaworthiness rather than raw firepower, for similar reasons.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2023
    ATP, SpadeofPain and Frankfawn43 like this.
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