Possible kickoff points:This may be straying into even more murky waters now, but I'm wondering if you have something more specific in mind? I understand if it's just a sketch a few paragraphs long, but barring a back-to-back series of wars that are later lumped together into one collective bloodbath, I'm not sure what'd fit the bill without turning into a true world war.
Actually, there's a surprising amount of plausibility that, absent World Wars to sanity-check such things, they'd advance railway artillery into actually usable landships, find the mega-artillery unusable when field tested, slightly downscale to just normal battleship weapons to piggyback off that otherwise-existent industry, and then basically create moving fortresses where the virtually singular function is to not have fixed command centers to be shelled and bombed into rubble.2.At least few Landbattleships would be made/and never used/
This may be straying into even more murky waters now, but I'm wondering if you have something more specific in mind? I understand if it's just a sketch a few paragraphs long, but barring a back-to-back series of wars that are later lumped together into one collective bloodbath, I'm not sure what'd fit the bill without turning into a true world war.
Granted, we could technically still have the Great War break out, with everything proceeding more or less the same up until the US sits it out. Which would then have consequences of its own, in addition to the conflict never becoming a full-blown world war, in which all the first-rate powers of the age trade punches with one another. Again, though, I think that's too much of a cop-out due to how obvious it is, though I can certainly understand a massive pan-European conflict (or series of related, chronologically "packed-together" conflicts) materializing down the road, in any case.
Possible kickoff points:
- The Bonus Army returns fire and/or the Business Plot doesn't try to recruit Smedley Butler and get betrayed. Cue second American civil war. All European imperial powers attempt to intervene to establish puppet regimes.
- American civilian reporters discover smuggled British weaponry aboard the Lusitania before it can set sail, the resulting scandal of Britain lying and turning American civilian shipping into a legitimate military target without their knowledge breaks America's alliance with Britain and prevents their entry into WW1.
- After decades of all European imperial powers supporting proxy revolutionaries against the colonial empires of their rivals, the various rebel groups team up and try to drive out all the colonizers.
- Instead of the tunguska event destroying an uninhabited patch of forest, it scores a direct hit on saint petersburg, killing the entire tsarist royal family and high-ranking goverment officials, decapitating the entire regime. Cue civil war.
It is a big family. Look up Paul I and the list of his descendants. In spite of only one of his sons - Nicholas - producing legitimate sons of his own - in 1912 there is at least half a dozen male Romanovs, and tens of distaff Romanovs running around.
- Instead of the tunguska event destroying an uninhabited patch of forest, it scores a direct hit on saint petersburg, killing the entire tsarist royal family and high-ranking goverment officials, decapitating the entire regime. Cue civil war.
I think it'd be more sensible to have it be two-thirds like most of the other non-simple-majority mechanisms.Here's a fairly straight forward, but simple AH idea:
The Founding Fathers included a clause in the Constitution that every law must sunset after a lifespan of at most 20 years, barring a 75% vote of both chambers of Congress to renew it.
Alien space bats idea:
Napoleon comes back from the dead to lead the french against Hitler.
In 1920, Thomas Edison announced work on a machine via which the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living. He succeeded. Nineteen years later, the technology had advanced sufficiently for the New York World's Fair to exhibit the world's first proper Séance Engine, an automaton designed to channel a ghost as its control mechanism, serving as a prosthetic device by means of which the ghost could interact with the physical world.
Normally, there is no afterlife*. The dead are dormant, not experiencing consciousness since their original death. Unless something in the mortal world wakes them up, in which case they can use the Séance Engine summoning them as a body**.
Now this leaves all kinds of interesting ideas to play with. Everyone who ever died or who knows they're eventually going to die and wants to be prepared is going to want a prosthetic body. Who makes them? How long until sweatshop owners come up with the idea of renting them? How does society work when nobody permanently dies, the closest you could come being for all the living to forget someone's existence therefore preventing anyone from wanting to summon them, or summoning them yourself and keeping their new mechanical body permanently imprisoned so they can't be summoned into a different one outside of your control, etc.
* Several religions claim Séance Engines remove all memories of the afterlife when they drag someone's soul back into the mortal world or that the things summoned up by Séance Engines aren't what they claim to be, etc.
** The initial prototype was basically just a telegraph. The ghost could send and receive rudimentary signals. Later, more sophisticated versions were more along the lines of mechanical bodies.
There is a movie by Kurosawa, about a murder investigation, with a biased ghost being one of the witnesses ...Which will only escalate when different ghosts come up with different versions of events.
Simplest I can think of: "The ancestors of the Native Americans brought cattle (and horses or other livestock if you want bonus points) with them to the new world."'What PoDs Would Create An Unrecognizable World?'. I gave this premise its own thread on a separate forum, and was tempted to also do so here, though I'm not sure whether it'd be viewed as redundant by the Mods.
Anyway, while I'm not opposed to creative and plausible post-1900s PoDs that put an extremely bizarre spin on things, I'd imagine that the time it takes for the ripple effects to compound in the way I'm asking for means that the bulk of these PoDs would happen long before 1900. No Industrial Revolution, a surviving Roman Republic, or other human species surviving alongside Homo Sapiens well into the present would certainly fit the bill here, though they're far from the only ones that'd do it.
Horses actually started in the new world, and migrated to Asia the opposite direction at the same time that humans migrated to the new world. Later horses went extinct in the Americas.Simplest I can think of: "The ancestors of the Native Americans brought cattle (and horses or other livestock if you want bonus points) with them to the new world."