So.....1949.

So, I'm thinking on the whole retro-rockets red glare setting (cold war in space) .  The main difference (or POD as the alternate history hipsters call it) is this:  Stalin had access to something that he felt was a useful counter to the Allied A-bomb much sooner than the actual 1949 date that the Soviet A-Bomb arrived on the scene.  My assumption is that given an earlier counter, his actions 1946-1949 would largely be similar, or at least similarly motivated as his actual actions before his death in 1953.

So, this opens the question, what was his action plan for the USSR post WW-II ?

But first, a digression.

Well, in all truth, we have nothing but speculation about alternates.  Particularly so in this case, as Stalin played his cards very close to his chest, tended to have multiple plans that would be modified by real world changes, and never told anyone what he was doing.  And he lied. And used threat and intimidation.  And lied.  Plus, if you looked cross-eyed at him, you died.

That said, I'm not a historian, so I can take the luxury of making decisions about questionable issues with input from the game setting I want to describe rather than relying entirely upon documented facts.  So, while all the following is at least,  as I see it, possible, it is not necessarily likely.  In fact, the most likely possibility, insofar as we have no idea at all what the actual quantifiable probabilities involved were has to be exactly what happened in the real world.   Which, due to a lamentable lack of nuclear torch fighters duking it out among Jupiter's moons doesn't work for the setting I want.  So, I'll go with some other outcomes.

However, the "and then Nikoli Tesla/Albert Einstein/unnamed Genius/alien benefactors invented/introduced grav. drive in 1929/1939/1949" has been done before (did you notice ?) and tends to create a future Alt universe with what we think of as the future as envisioned by us, now.  Make sense ?  I suppose I'm interested in "what did the future look like in the 50/60's to those in the 50/60's", and how do we get there in a game ?

So, what defines that period for me ?
1. Cold war and global polarization
2. Inevitable apocalyptic conflict
3. Crap computers and the last generation of narrow access to information and communications.
4. Crew cuts, lantern chins: jocks and nerds, as opposed to slackers and geeks.
5. Less pesky information about the solar system.
6. BIG projects, engineering uber-alles. Skunk works.


More to come.