Above The Sky - An Alternate Space Age

[Nicholander]

Above The Sky

An Alternate Space Age

It's a new age on the planet Earth. The superpowers of the world have started to look up to the cosmos, 30 years after The Great War, the next technological revolution has begun. Humanity has breached the limits of the atmosphere, and world's eyes now seem to be turned skyward. The age of rocketry has come.

Now, before I show the rocket launches and such, Here's an explanation of how the world is in this timeline:

The German Empire, Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, The Ottoman Empire, and a modernized Qing China still exist. The United States is not a super power as it is today, as it is a much more agricultural and less urbanized. The Great War ended with the Christmas peace in 1914, the same year it began, because the Christmas Truce turned into an actual peace, and there were no territorial changes or anything. A white peace. In 1927, Italy declares war on Austria-Hungary to get back the Austro-Hungarian controlled areas of Italy, and the German Empire thus declares war on Italy. Italy surrenders after it's clear there's no chance of victory after Venice and Genoa are lost and Austro-Hungarian and German soldiers are rapidly approaching closer to Rome. In the peace talks, The German Empire makes Italy give Capo Passero Naval Base for 100 years. And there is never a World War II, nor the Great Depression.

So, without further ado, let's start this:

Wernher Von Braun actually designed the V-2 rocket in 1940, though The German Empire's government was not interested in rocketry technology. But in 1944, they finally decided to start development on Von Braun's V-2. After a few small test flights of the V-1 (In this universe it's for rocket engine development, not a cruse missile)

Mission: V-2 TF-1

Vehicle: V-2

Launch Site: Capo Passero Naval Base

Mission's Nations: German Empire

Objective: Test the V-2 ballistic missile over the Mediteranean

Intended Orbit: High atmospheric (70 Km apogee)

Launch Date: August, 16th, 1946

V-2 TF-1, ready to begin it's flight into history.

Lift off!

Rising steadily...

Gaining altitude, and the Sun.

A bit later, Sicily and Southern Italy are clearly visible.

Apogee. You can see the stars! We are near the cosmos!

Plunging back into the thicker atmosphere.

Just before impact into the Mediterranean. You can notice a bit of the nose burned up during reentry, but let's ignore that.

This mission is a success! The V-2 is proven to work and be effective, so future tests and maybe some scientific analysis of the upper atmosphere can be done.

Feedback is greatly appreciated, and you may notice some similarities with Reaching for the stars, which is true. I got the idea for this after looking at that.

Edited July 18, 2014 by Nicholander

[Nicholander]

List Of Craft In Above The Sky

V-2: V-2 TF-1

Edited July 17, 2014 by Nicholander

[Nicholander]

No replies? Okay.

Here's the next part:

The Russian Empire was vast, the largest nation on earth, well, not including colonies at least. The launch of the first V-2 by the German Empire was worrying to the Russians, and because they we're viewed as the natural rivals of the Germans. So not to be outdone by the German Empire, they ordered that a ballistic missile be designed, and there were 3 main designs that were submitted (Along with a few other missile designs that were made by smaller and lesser known teams or people), one was designed by Valentin Glushko, another designed by Sergei Korolev, and the last one made by Vladimir Chelomi. They all found this opportunity to get funds to hopefully be able to move onto larger rocketry. Though finally, as was proven by ground tests and a failed test flight of Chelomi's design (It exploded 17 seconds after launch), Glushko's design, the Tsar Missile, was chosen to be used and produced for military use.

Mission: Tsar Flight A1

Vehicle: Tasr Ballistic Missile

Launch Site: Kasputsin Yar

Mission's Nation: Russian Empire

Objective: Test Glushko's Tsar Missile over the Black Sea

Intended Orbit: High Atmospheric (80 Km apogee)

Launch Date: July, 26th, 1947

The Tsar Missile on the launch pad in Kasputsin Yar.

Lift off!

Rising through the clouds.

Near space, burning to reduce the apogee so we don't burn up on reentry.

Engine cut off. The flight continues and successfully crashes into the Black sea. (Sorry that I forgot to take any screen shots of that!)

The mission is a success! This shows that Glushko's design work's, and is humiliating for Korolev and Chelomi, who now need to find another way to get funds.

[unrepentantAuthor]

This looks interesting - I'm a fan of alternate history, and this could turn out to be a spectacle indeed. Are we seeing a general Eurasian space race, then?

Feel free to send a PM my way if you fancy discussing the ahistorical element of this!

[Krosulhah]

This is pretty awesome!

[wasmic]

One thing: it kinda doesn't make sense to have all the empires still exist. Revolutions (peaceful and violent) would probably have broken out and caused many of the empires to become republics or constitutional monarchies (like England and the Scandinavian countries). Other than that, this seems quite interesting.

[Alias72]

Honestly describing an accurate alternate history diverging at WW1 is difficult. though there are many ways that history could have diverged, they all conflict with personal interests. For example any history in which the Austro-Hungarian empire isn't destroyed by war offends, to a degree, the Slavic peoples of Yugoslavia (especially Serbian nationalists.) as well as those who believe that ethnic nationalism is an inevitable determining factor in the borders of nations. While this does not make prediction impossible, it biases critique on the history as measuring militant national intent becomes difficult.

Extending my example we say that the Hapsburg empire continue into the 1920's under Archduke Carl; already we have a number of people complaining about Serbian patriotic nationalism being too powerful to allow this, but then we get into an even trickier subject as we talk about what attempts Serbian nationalists would make to prevent the Empires survival. Because Serbia was the "good guy" defending itself from an imperialist aggressor, discussing an alternate history in which the kingdom of Serbia resorts to terrorism to undermine the Hapsburg Empire could be seen as taboo, though extrapolating from what members of the Serbian government had been doing terrorism is a plausibility.

*here it is important to note. The government of the kingdom of Serbia did not directly endorse terrorism, however many in it's government, especially in the military, helped plan and execute racist propaganda and terrorism outside of their "day jobs". one excellent example being the black hand, which helped orchestrate archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination, and had previously killed the king of Serbia. The black hand was actually disbanded and its key members executed for treason in 1917.*

Honestly the biggest problem most people have is that their nation does not come into existence and yet you depict a world in which everything is "fine" or sometimes even "better".

Anyway this makes open discussion of plausible alternates difficult and reduces legitimate source material for researching said plausible alternates.

[Nicholander]

Well, I see that a lot of people say that this is ASB, and why did you all bump this? Oh yeah, it's in my sig, gotta remove that. Anyway, I say that this is dead, and the only reason I started this was because I though that a Russian Tsarist Jupiter flyby probe leaving the solar system lonely floating would be cool to represent the 60's democratic socialist revolution that happened in the timeline. So yeah, this is dead.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Nicholander