1969 Notes
January
- The USSR isn’t too happy about the prospect of Japan getting the Bomb, but it isn’t the worst thing they have to deal with
- Denzil Carey is no Rupert Murdoch; above and beyond his business and personal differences, he is a descendant of the heroic family used in many of the works of Ronald Welch
- Chief Justice Nixon is a result of an attempt to pay off favours and remove potential Republican barriers to JFK’s 3rd term agenda
- The Moroccan irregular militias get short shrift from artillery and gas, as a lot of such forces would when there are less political restraints
- The RWIAF is a new force, but has a large population to draw from
- Marcos being offed in the Philippines leads to some significant changes
- One Eye Clinton’s loss of his left eye (and hence not having a left wing…) is no bar to his service. Not sure if he’ll go into politics, though
- The result of the FBI shootout tragedy is that there will be a move to more powerful automatic pistols and the earlier formation of a HRT/FBI SWAT team (here standing for Special Wizardry and Tactics)
- The Soviets down their own UFO in the Krasnoyarsk Incident…
- The Saturday Evening Post lives on, with some new Norman Rockwell covers for a few years to come
- B-47s continue to be used, mainly in the benign air environment over South Vietnam
- The new Swiss food bars provide a literal meal in a bar; three of them feed a grown man working in a physical job for a day. They won’t quite sweep the market as it turns out people like food, cooking and the social act of breaking bread
- Marighela surviving is part of a different turn in Brazil
- The USA is keeping up at the cutting edge of high speed rail as a result of Cold War politics, industrial support and powerful rail interests
- France, too, has its own superheroes
- Syria in particular and the Arab Union in general is really spending a fair bit on their military and shifting the regional balance. Whereas in 1956, the Arab kingdoms were individually dependent on British support and quite vulnerable, they have progressed markedly and, in the Arab Union, built an increasingly powerful confederacy. Even Iraq, Syria, Arabia and Jordan together aren’t quite as powerful as Qajar Persia or Ottoman Turkey, yet. This power shift does go some way towards explaining the British agricultural aid + weather experiments in the region, as it provides a way of building up influence different from hard power. Incidentally, the Arab decision to buy weapons from East and West has been encouraged so they can be…acquired…
- China continues to gird its industrial loins
- JFK’s third term will be interesting…
- Mary Bell’s commutation was inevitable, but she will not be getting out any time within the next 50 years
- Dutch Elm Disease does not cut a swathe through Britain’s trees, nor indeed those on the Continent
- Essentially, what is known of the GDR/East Prussia is that it is being built up by the Soviets as a sort of Potemkin state, rather than it somehow being the most industrialised nation in the world
- The Royal Navy operates its own Yellow Submarine since 1967
- George Harrison travelling through India will impact his character. He might even end up joining a musical group when he gets home
- The Iraqi Army actions were a test to see if the British jump on them. There are preparations for a coup going on, but by whom?
- Trying to change the climate of Central Australia, even in a circumstance where there is a filled Mega Lake Eyre, is a challenge. Certainly not a short term job
- The Long Range Missile Defence of the United Kingdom Plan is ambitious, but is being funded as a matter of profound national importance
- The Two Towers stands an excellent chance of being the first sequel to win Best Picture; the Godfather trilogy won’t appear here on account of the lack of a Mafia/Italian organised crime presence of the same extent
February
- The planned city in Wyoming isn’t just a fit of centralist madness, but reflects some future construction projects that need to be in the heart of the country
- The Silkworm attacks on Montana were just what it’s modern defences were built to counter; the missiles took out 4 of them and long range 5” guns destroyed the last
- The Y-Files Group will have many, many strange cases to deal with…
- Star Trek is notably different in small ways with British, French and German characters as well as Chekov, but the general character is familiar
- The Boeing child of the 747 and 2707 is a very big, powerful plane
- The flying old lady has more bottle than United Dairies
- The Mexican village sees some strange effects from the meteor, similar in some ways with the Midwich Event
- New green trams in London join the red buses, black cabs and blue Underground trains
- Donald Campbell is not only still alive, but is setting new records
- French PM Jean-Louis Beaucourt, the Marquis d’Ambreville is a mixture of Napoleon I, de Gaulle, Conde and Massu
- Canada is really coming along in leaps and bounds, on a profoundly different path than @, but with great power comes increasing introspection on its role
- SEALAB is not abandoned, but expanded. The Sea Race is on
- This is a very different 1960s generation, without the ‘generation gap’, counterculture, significant anti war movement, rock and roll and with universal military service in both Britain and the USA
- The Hong Kong incident begins with a historical accident, but the presence of large British forces that are looking to be assertive makes it blow up
- The librarian could have potentially caused an extension to the Vietnam War if she had kicked out the diplomats for talking too loudly
- African tigers are interesting enough, but Kit Walker getting involved raises the phantom of even more strange happenings
- Indian termination continues, which is a very unfortunate course of action
- The new Soviet MBT is a more powerful T-72
- Cambodia being invaded is not nearly as controversial as @, but opens up the end game
- The early marriage of the Prince of Wales begins to develop
- The US does not end biological warfare research and development
- Golda Meyerson has the Anglicised surname as an indicator of relative influence
- India continues to dabble in greater independence of action
March
- County Cricket undergoes an earlier transformation into a tiered competition
- The establishment of Top Gun is driven by some intense fighter combat in Vietnam, even as there has been no outright abandonment of guns
- The Goodies are quite the group of intrepid adventurers; they still have the trandem
- Swiss voters are a bit more conservative on the question of female suffrage, but change will come eventually
- Harry Callahan's method of dealing with armed robbers is very similar to the filmed adaption in The Enforcer, except a bit less soft and caring
- Dog sleds continue to be used in the Far North, which is quite the military frontier
- The BBC adaption of
The Tripods has a bigger budget than @ and is quite a faithful version
- Franco-American talks on the Congo are designed to cut out the British, but their Thai meetings aren't quite as clandestine as they think
- The Soviet fishing trawler was taken by something big and nasty, possibly one of the last few megalodons. Once it was decided to hunt them down, the ability of modern man to wipe out a species is quite effective, which some might view as sad
- The March 14th Massacre points out that not every paranormal individual is a nice, law abiding superhero type. There is also much darkness
- Cleansing of the Thames is a significant step in what can be done with the modern combination of science, alchemy and magic to counteract pollution. It has some flow on effects, if you'll forgive the pun, with regard to consumption of fish and shellfish from the Thames and Thames Estuary and accompanying cultural/culinary trends
- The RAN's new carriers are large, but not nuclear powered. The older
Sydney and
Melbourne will require replacement by the early 1980s, leaving time to fund other significant naval programmes, including the replacement of the RAN's two battleships
- The lost city in Colombia has quite a few secrets...
- The success of the invasion of Cambodia comes down to the combination of a heck of a lot of troops and the Ho Chi Minh Trail being cut
- It might appear that the de Havilland Blue Moon medium range SLBM is a throwback, but it is intended for conventional or at least non-strategic use, giving the Submarine Service a long range strike capacity. It will also be deployed on cruisers in due course
- The Colorado investigations are a bit of an Easter Egg, as they take place in the small town of South Park
- The King of Jordan dismissed his PM and cabinet because they wanted to distance themselves from defence ties with Britain and the US; he knows the narrow path he has to walk and the stakes at play
- Suslov represents the old school/conservative wing of the CPSU
- The IJN rocket torpedoes turn out to have multiple uses and bring about a potential renaissance for ASuW ship torpedoes in some circumstances
- Advanced British Army body armour will reduce casualties quite markedly over time, being the 'light' end of armour; the 'heavy' comes through Project Knight and its power armour
- Alcatraz continues as a working prison
April
- The wizardly pranks of April Fools Day are harmless fun, but show the capacity of powerful people
- Kipling still going at the sprightly old age of 103
- The Free Polish Armed Forces have probably not been actually deployable for a decade and this retirement finally acknowledges this. It was very much a political entity for the last decade or so, representing the legitimacy of Free Poland. It was made up of the aging wartime veterans as the officer and NCO corps, with the rank and file provided by the children of the exile community and the Polish diaspora from the USA, British Empire and France; even then, it was more of a symbolic hollow force than a useful or deployable element. In terms of units, they almost entirely marched on paper and formed a bit of a social club, with the exception of the ceremonial Royal Polish Guards battalion and Winged Hussars regiment. First to go was the Royal Polish Navy, which was laid up by the mid 1950s after being perpetuated as part of the RN
- A slightly different Supreme Court comes down on the other side of the obscenity question in Stanley v Georgia. As of 1969, rather than Warren CJ, Black, Fortas, Douglas, Stewart, Marshall, Harlan, White and Brennan, it is Nixon CJ (1960), Black, Douglas, Alan Parker (1959), Potter Stewart (1958), Byron White (1962), Warren Burger (1956), Thurgood Marshall (1969) and Herbert Brownell (1954). Historically, there was a big shift between Roth in 1957 (6-3) and Stanley in 1969 (0-9) on the question of the protection of pornography. A very large part of this came down to the shifting social standards of the Sexual Revolution rather than a really dramatic shift in the alignment of the Supreme Court, although the Warren Court was very much a liberal one given to broad and creative interpretation. Here, the US Supreme Court is rather more conservative, reflecting a more socially conservative society and new Chief Justice Nixon is absolutely no Earl Warren. Some cases will not change, given logic and legal arguments, but where the change was driven by more than a decade of social changes absent on Dark Earth, we won't see them. I'm half wearing my legal hat for the cases out of general interest in exploring how and why very different decisions could eventuate, rather than conservatism for its own sake.
- The French use the Maginot Line ouvrages as they did in @
- Kondo Simba is absolutely a nom de guerre and the ALF is playing a long game
- John Wyndham has a longer life and career. He is already kicking on further than @ and will do so for many years to come. In a way, he will be part of a British 'triumvirate' of science fiction authors (akin to the international one of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke) along with John Christopher/Sam Youd and Nicholas Fisk, or at least a bit of younger readers/older children's sci-fi. That is one of the few flourishes of personal preference I'm allowing to creep in, having discovered their works in the late 1980s as a boy through the Thames TV adaption of Wyndham's
Chocky and then developed a taste for the written works of all three in 1990-1992. Fisk's
Trillions of 1972 is an extremely British science fiction story that I was introduced to on audio cassette tape, followed by discovering John Christopher's
The Sword of the Spirits trilogy and Wyndham's
Day of the Triffids;
The Tripods came years later, but appealed to me as an interesting example of British children's science fiction television and an interesting little written work to boot. Christopher and Fisk wrote their best stuff in the late 1960s and early 1970s (as distinct from Wyndham's 1950s pomp) which was and is an era of literature of that genre that I enjoy and appreciate.
- The CIA agent in the GDR discovered some sort of production or copying facility before meeting a most terrible demise
- Aquanautical exploration continues to grow
- Square Eye Syndrome has only one, very horrific cure - cessation of television privileges for the afflicted boys for a year and a day
- The SRAM entering service here has the range of the @ SRAM II with a much higher speed. It will be followed by a long range ALCM and a medium range weapon. These, in addition to Skybolt, give SAC a fair bit of flexibility going forward
- There simply isn't the political support for lowering the voting age in Britain and the rest of the Western world is sticking to 21 for the moment; indeed, historically, the youngest in @ 1969 was Czechoslovakia with 20. The cultural normality of school, then national service, then work or study has been drilled in for multiple generations, rather than being a fairly recent phenomenon and, whilst the postwar generation is large, it isn't truly culturally distinct in the manner of @. As of 1969, the year group turning 18 are 1951 drops. Their early childhood was one of war in Korea, followed by a big war in the Middle East. By the time they entered secondary school in 1962/63, they'd lived through another war scare in 1960 and then have seen Vietnam progress through their 'teenage' years (the very word not being widely used). Their parents are either WW2 veterans or lived through both it and the Depression. They've had a lot of affluence, but not the same rebellion in dress, movies and music.
- The international supervillain who escapes his Swiss mountain lair is exactly who it would seem to be - Blofeld, complete with white cat
- Mobile heat rays have been under development since the War of the Worlds, but the problem of power supply has held them up until now. . Those captured by the British in the 1890s were reverse engineered and tinkered with for over 30 years until they could utilised effectively, initially on skyships and airships, but they never really found an ideal niche. On land, in tactical combat, it offers some advantages, but these continue to be tested and refined into two major streams. The first is a directed energy weapon/laser cannon a la Warhammer 40k, whilst the second is a more genuine heat ray for anti-personnel use: something like the Area Denial System, which can cause pain on its lowest setting all the way up to a beam of superheated energy that can set groups of enemy personnel on fire without vaporising/disintegrating them like some of the film versions of the Heat Ray.
- The news about the success of
Rumble is one salient feature, with the other being that journalists have been kept out of the combat zone until the fighting has come to an end. This is one aspect of keeping the news and information war under close control
- JFK has a lot of political capital, but Universal Healthcare will use up all of it
- 250,000 year old large humanoid bones in Colorado poses a lot of questions
- The Northern Irish meteor isn't anything nasty, but the general procedure at this point is to treat everything as an act of the enemy or a dangerous alien object
- General Barrientos had an older, louder helicopter. That ended up making him lunch
- Ping? Pong!
- The RN presence mission in the Shatt al Arab is a reminder to Iraq and Persia to play nicely. Britain controls Abadan, having annexed it decades ago and has a general interest in local peace and quiet
May
- The Springfield Army Tank Plant is more modern than Detroit and Grand Blanc (GM), Marion (Ford) and Lima (Chrysler), but they will all work together for tank and armoured vehicle production. The big ace in the hole is Willow Run, which has stayed in Ford's hands and has been planned for re-conversion to military production. Springfield also has a lovely nuclear power plant and Monty Burns has a fair bit of political clout
- QM2 joins QE2, with two new White Star superliners following. The names of the latter can possibly be surmised. Historically, the Indian Summer of the ocean liner extended into the early-mid 1970s or so, prior to air travel costs lowering enough to break through. Here, that is pushed a bit further out due to the greater size of the oceans and the comfort/room provided by a ship. The American and British superliners were subsidised by their governments for potential wartime trooping use.
- The Italian 'art commandos' are historical, but here are motivated by some of the more daring art thefts out there
- Presence of a blue police box all over the place? It must be the doing of those silly university boys!
- PM de Rodriguez of Argentina is building up to something, but it will happen in stages
- The XV-21 will see some interesting use over time, as the Americans try to steal a march back on the British success with the Rotodyne and VTOL
- Governor Reagan is very popular in California and across the Western states
- Operation
Ladder is an increasingly South Vietnamese show, as are many operations across South Vietnam, backed up by foreign airpower and artillery. The Hawker-Siddeley Salamander's closest @ equivalent is a combination of the Pucara and OV-1 Mohawk
- The shift from Alexandria to Tobruk occurs in stages. As said, the Suez Canal zone will remain a vital area of interest well into the 1970s
- Vampires in Melbourne is a very rare event
- The War Book is not just a collection of mobilisation plans, but a magical artifact used to carry them out. A very Dark Earth thing
- Rats disappearing from Trondheim suggests a paranormal event
- Berlin to Budapest via Prague, Vienna and Bratislava is around 870 miles, which is a fair distance for a high speed railway
- The Greeks/Byzantines have decided that they can't quite afford to retire its capital ships whilst the Turks still have theirs
- The case of the USAF mechanic going crazy after his meds mixed up with cheese and Scotch is an OTL event
- Narnia comes to the silver screen a lot sooner and in the same serious treatment and grandeur as seen in The Lord of the Rings, with appropriate tonal adjustments
- African coups in self governing countries are turning out to be a bit more difficult when the governments have some powerful big friends
- The L324 375mm Long Range Heavy Cannon is designed for heavy very long range fire support and interdiction on a mobile platform
- The return of the flight of Avengers lost over the Bermuda Triangle is very, very mysterious
- Biafra never really cooks off to the same extent
June
- There are some slight changes to the details of Charles’s investiture as Pragger Wagger and a larger TV audience…due to more people with TVs
- HMAS Melbourne has an unfortunate habit of slicing up destroyers
- This is a different
Secret Army, at least in scale. It covers operations across the whole of Europe and beyond, bearing some resemblance to The Secret War, but in a dramatised format. The @ TV show will be made as ‘Lifeline’
- The 25th anniversary of D-Day is a very big event, with both Ike and Churchill being present
- North Vietnamese Foxtrots are just the start of Soviet efforts to rearm their client
- Spain really shouldn’t have played the Gibraltar game with a Britain at war under current leadership.
- Use of Cloudmakers speaks more to the end of the conflict being in sight and using up old ammunition than any dramatic escalation
- Heyerdahl and Cousteau discovering Atlantis is a very big event
- Portugal is facing increasing difficulty in Mozambique
- England has a few new players joining what is already a pretty strong England Test cricket team
- Albanian goat tragedies are a terrible thing
- Someone is responsible for tainting the Comintern’s fish eggs…
- Canada is the first Dominion and first state beyond the topline powers to begin a nuclear powered surface ship
- The Turkish Connection, or is it French, is going to be a hard one to break properly
- Burning rivers and midair collisions are sadly OTL evened
- Conventional Lance missiles are accompanied by a shorter range battlefield missile that counters the FROG-7. The Army is very interested in missiles
- Peruvian land reform is the first step towards something
- The FBI super computer will counter the emergence of a particular 1970s criminal phenomenon…
- What could be underground in the Mojave?
- Versailles hasn’t been impugned by historians to anywhere near the same extent
July
- Capricorn is designed to test air defences against the developing Soviet threat of third generation jet aircraft. The RAF in particular faces Long Range Aviation heavy bombers coming in from the Norwegian Sea, both bombers and strike aircraft from the Baltic over Scandinavia and anything that can get through the contested airspace over Germany
- Warspite’s partial reentry over Spain is quite intimidating; many nations have ships and planes, but a space battlecruiser streaking overhead is something above and beyond Spain
- US cricket continues its high profile and they are climbing the unofficial rankings of the Test nations (South Africa, England, West Indies, Australia, USA, India, Canada, New Zealand, Rhodesia, New Avalon; Ceylon, Prydain, Israel, Argentina, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are non Test playing)
- Who might be the supposed emissaries of the Incas?
- Kosmos and Orion head straight for Earth, whereas Dreadnought has her Belt mission and the Chinese are still on their way
- New British military rations are designed to cater to evolving tastes and utilise modern technologies
- Fratellini’s predictions of global cooling come from a very oblique reference to John Christopher’s 1962 novel The World in Winter, a post apocalyptic treatment of the consequences of a new ice age
- Egypt continues to contort itself towards nationalist self assertion in a paradigm that is closer to the 1930s than 1969 in @
- The US airmen hanged in Washington historically had their sentences commuted and I think one is still around
- The US Mint continues issuing of high denomination bills, as there is less of a reason not to
- The notorious Football War is worth its own story one day
- Indonesia’s campaign in Borneo and general Konfrontasi continues
- Matthew Gore’s deeds are a reference to John Wyndham’s
Chocky
- Increased cattle sizes are driven by a quest for more beef and a more efficient yield. It is notable that mass feedlots are yet to take over and that it will be unlikely that huge antibiotic use in cows will develop. The bigger challenge is working out reasoning for preventing destruction of the Amazon, but the larger world does have a lot of space
- Barton’s speech on the National Plan does seem to focus on traditional industries, but consider where it is made
- The Royal engagement sparks a fair bit of interest and economic activities from souvenirs et al
- Advances in the treatment of sight issues and eye conditions will have an impact across the world; not needing glasses will occur firstly in the First World and then trickle down
- Arms talks with multiple parties will always be difficult
- Blösche was historically executed by East Germany, which didn’t have the same degree of coddling of Nazis as West Germany when it came to punishment. Here, Germany does not abolish capital punishment in 1949, which was driven in @ by a number of different factors, but continues to utilise it with widespread public support through the 1950s and 60s
- New ships and aircraft make the reinforcement of Europe in a short time truly viable
- The huge diamond found in South Africa makes the Cullinan look small in comparison
- Mention of the Cult of Cthulhu in Mexico is a worry
- JFK’s Manila Speech will later be known as the ‘Olive Branch Speech’
August
- The Chinese had the advantage of the planets being in a different position when they launched
- Progress towards an armistice in Vietnam takes time
- The Coronado Bridge is higher to allow for full sized carriers to go underneath it
- North Vietnam needs to ensure that Northern Laos is in friendly hands to get something out of the war
- California’s long range shoot is the result of 25 years of consistent advances and development in LR naval gunfire, which was at 80nm in 1946. US and British research and development is on the cusp of going a lot further
- The population of Greenfield were quite irritable in the quitting process
- Guaranteed minimum income is rather ambitious liberal program
- Elvis ends up halting an analogue to the Manson Family attacks and dealing justice to the would-be murderers
- The Congo doesn’t seem to have any easy solutions to their problems
- Use of VX against the Indonesians on the British side of the border is a very clear message to pull back while they still can
- The Argentine air and naval exercises are a sign that they want to project power a bit more, but isn’t an obvious Falklands precursor. Remember the presence of Prydain in Patagonia and how it is naturally a more concerning issue to any revanchist types in Buenos Aires; however, it is a Commonwealth Dominion of a British Empire that isn’t in retreat
- Sino-Soviet tensions shift to Sinkiang, their other major mutual border
- Increases in the numbers of dragons isn’t as vital as it once was, but is still significant
- Sultan Osman’s death is no accident
- Repairing severed spinal cords opens the door to significant advances
- Dispelling hurricanes will have some positive and negative results
- The Green Revolution really impacts India for the better
- Giving the diamond to the Crown is seen as the best step politically
- The Spanish found something off Tenerife and it does not bode well. The ocean conceals many secrets…
- Anglo-Norwegian ties are very strong, as a powerful ally an hour away is quite useful
- The Dhofar Rebellion ends up fizzling when faced by more powerful forces
- American food and fast food in general remains peripheral to British cuisine at best. Historically, hamburgers were sold from 1954 in Wimpys/Lyons without truly making a breakthrough into the mainstream of British food. Here, there has been a lag of 15 years driven by a variety of factors and there will be a continuing lack of penetration by US fast food chains
- Austria-Hungary has a very powerful soccer team
- The RAF’s operational testing of guided and heat seeking weapons is deliberately chosen for broadcast in ‘Airmen’ to get the other side thinking
- The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Central America will have a busy decade
- The first email comes earlier
- Australian mobilisation exercises highlight the need for a lot more gear and better mass transit links; military railways will be coming
September
- The Libyan coup attempt is put down with extreme prejudice. The role of British forces is a key, which ultimately does King Idris no favours and furthers the idea that he is a foreign puppet. The Crown Prince managed to escape the fate put in place for him and, at 23, has a fairly hot youthful head. He considers that the 1956 plotters in Egypt who were publicly impaled in Ismailia Square got off rather lightly. Ultimately, the Libyans and other governments need to be able to rely on their own forces and means to stay in power
- Sherlock Holmes is off on another adventure at the sprightly old age of 115
- The new IJA katanas are quite handy and their presence indicates that Japanese military practice still makes use of the sword
- Criticism of the starship program and space in general gets short shrift after the excitement of the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn and the interstellar signal. The chance of anything significant being Proxmired is nil
- Soviet involvement in air battle over Vietnam represents an escalation and also an indication that North Vietnam has been hit pretty badly
- The GI managed to find out how to get to Sesame Street, on a sunny day, no less
- Domestication of the giant deer will be followed by some other species; livestock species are being broadened
- Barnes Wallis gets to fly in his Swallow and isn't done with his designing days yet
- Project Rulison is a technical success, but there is limited demand for possibly radioactive natural gas
- Dracula actually was in Bolivia, pursuing his wicked goals wickedly
- Crash prevention enchantments at international airports will save quite a few lives, considering how many crashes occur just after take off or during landing
- Escape of the Soviet bacteriophage could have some very nasty consequences. The lab fire is suspicious as well as mysterious
- SS
Manhattan's voyage is not only notable for the present, but gives a little hint on the past with the reference to the Franklin Expedition
- Something very, very strange happens after the Korean atomic research accident
- British Petroleum's supertanker orders are a huge bonus to industry in key areas, with each region/manufacturer getting 6 ships. The economic impact of the ship orders is such to provide a huge boost to shipbuilding employment and downstream industrial orders for a good 5 years in Tyneside, Clydeside, Belfast, Merseyside and Teeside, good profits and investment in larger facilities. The orders consist of 5 Batilus class sized ULCCs of 600,000t and 25 slightly smaller ships of only 300,000t capacity. This is in addition to the quite huge boon of warship orders, oil platform construction, new Floating Fortresses, spaceship components and ordinary shipbuilding. The decline of the 1970s, closures of the 1980s and the general decline of the industrial North and Scotland won’t be happening here. I’d be interested in any thoughts and opinions on the social, cultural economic and other consequences of this
- Friday and Gannon caught the mad scientist through the use of an effective dragnet
- The Knights in White Satin
- Jack Smith's swim across the Channel is 35 miles, making his achievement even greater
- The schoolboys being chased down a NYC street is a reference to
The Neverending Story; they were rescued by Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne and a grouch named Oscar
- Project
Knight will result in a section of heavy infantry/power armoured infantry per company, with all the capacity for heavy weapons and options that comes with that. A bit of influence from both Fallout and 40K
- The Vickers 'super jumbo jet' is at a very early stage of development, like its Boeing equivalent
- A modified lima bean from the Amazon will only be the first of a new series of staple crops
- Japanese facsimile newspapers are going to have some further development in a path not taken
- Canadian G-G Sir William Richardson brooks no nonsense from any quarter, let alone a griffon
-
The Brady Bunch is seen as daring because of the blended family idea, not because of any cutting edge content
- Aussie Rules football knowledge might not be great in the reader base due to being overseas, but Fitzroy winning a premiership is a very sentimental flourish
- The L132 is a lightweight 105mm gun that is being trialed for use by certain forces. A comeback for anti-tank guns? Maybe. There is also a much lighter 75mm weapon under development (akin to ARES)
- Greg Chappell has an earlier debut
- China pulling out of the LTBT is a real spanner in the works and not expected at all
October
- The alternate Bergman film not only showcases his style, but begins Pippi’s big comeback
- Skynet is a combination of very precise recon + proto GPS + satellite communications + some other military goodies
- The six foot sheep is the consequence of a lot of selective breeding and enhancements to create an animal with a lot more 'bang for baa’
- The Haitian intervention appears to be a success on the face of it
- HFCS doesn’t make an entry into the human diet, with many positive results
- No one knows who torpedoed the Anglo-Saxon Petroleum tanker
- Exercise Scythian sees some interesting new weapons tested. The Sepoy is equivalent to a souped up Sting Ray in a heavier 'calibre', whilst Calypso is similar to some of the Saab/Bofors developments, albeit with a bit more 'oomph'.
- Turkish elections are a sign of some changes along the way
- The Soviet space launches are no major issue. There was a big historical launch burst at this time, putting 7 men into space at once. Here, there is a similarly innocent explanation, but the West doesn't know it
- The Royal Wedding Fleet Review is a very grand spectacle, befitting the occasion
- Ramesses has some scores to settle
- The Royal Wedding is earlier, for reasons of locking in an heir and securing greater old fashioned dynastic ties with other royal families and the aristocracy rather more conservative views on bachelorhood as well as coming from a genuine attraction and fondness. It will be a bit more like Victoria and Albert than the historical marriage with Diana and is seen as a great fairytale occasion
- The report on the Indianapolis UFO Incident is one that Sir Humphrey Appleby would be proud of
- Somalia was a bloodless coup historically. Here, no one much cares about Somalia to even contemplate intervention, in contrast to Libya and the Middle East. Perhaps this will pave a path for other African events
- American Motors will make a fair bit out of the Jeep
- Executions for espionage are big signs of the different times
- The Crusader begins production ahead of schedule
- Thomas Kelly’s sentence reflects the atmosphere of politics in a chillier Cold War. With a shooting conflict against the enemy within recent memory, there isn't a lot of scope or sympathy for radical views that hove too close to the Soviets. Combine that with statutory penalties and we get this situation
- The end is now clearly in sight in Vietnam
- Kolchak joins Callan, the Equalizer
- Turing is not only still around, but on the ball
- The response to the photographs of Atlantis is big. Combine the fuss over the Titanic with a genuine historical mystery that some had written off as myth
- The Royal African Lion Corps is a fearsome unit
- Coordinated vampire attacks is a fresh horror
November
- The Rhodesian gold rush will have some interesting effects on its economy
- Continuation of the rum ration is a small measure as in its diluted measure would not have any real impact on blood alcohol
- Florida's rise, like that of the Sunbelt in general, follows on large trends and technological capacity
- The final stages of the Vietnam War are akin in some ways to the last stages of the Great War - the outcome is known, the general principles of negotiation points are known and only the last few details are being wrestled over
- Marighela lives on and the circumstances indicate a much larger KGB effort
- Cassius Clay isn't invulnerable, as he was not in @. Storm is a very big and strong fellow
- The Armstrong-Whitworth Argonaut is a genuine intruder, designed to fly into Soviet airspace and engage fighters, bombers and SAM sites. It bears some resemblance in role to the F-117, but doesn't have the same stealth characteristics; it has some other features that enable its missions. Think active stealth
- Reverend Presley going after the case of missing schoolgirls is a sign that there may be success. He has a good strike rate
- The Sydney Opera House looks very different to Jørn Utzon's @ design, with the Lutyens designed building looking more like his putative Liverpool Cathedral with a bit more of the Hagia Sophia thrown in
- The Ashanti Federation (@ Ghana + Ivory Coast, with Togo likely to join and Upper Volta being intensely courted) will change its name; it is just a matter of what
- The British Atomic Energy Plan, when completed, will revolutionise British energy, reduce costs and open up a lot of industrial opportunities in a period where there was @ contraction
- The skeleton found in the Valley of Elah could well be Goliath
- Pacifying Katanga was relatively easy; the difficult part follows on
- German Army personnel are getting quite substantial active combat experience, albeit in a different type of war than that which confronts them in Europe
- The Venusian ruined 'city' opens up a load of questions
- The commander of Odessa, General Martin Hessler, is Robert Shaw's character from The Battle of the Bulge
- Ceylon spaceport operations meet with approval from Arthur C. Clarke
- Entebbe Airport will likely not have a certain future event occur there
- Professor Tenma's robotic creation may well be known as Astro Boy
- New British television stations will result in some distinctly different developments
- The PFI is the Su-27 and the PLFI is the MiG-29
- José María Arguedas doesn't end up knocking himself off prior to his novel being published
December
- The Chronicles of Narnia goes on a lot longer and has a slightly different ending to @. C.S. Lewis lives a fair bit longer as well
- The CIA may well be barking up the wrong tree regarding the Emperor of China and their guesses multiply from there
- Getting the
Simon Bolivar free will cost a lot and the Venezuelans aren't the most flush with cash at the present. Who could benefit from the accident?
- Willy Wonka's competition and its results will be a bit different
- The Thai Royal Rainmaking Project is a response to quite a bit of drought, enough to get the King's attention. An admirably hands-on monarch
- Frosty the Snowman is thankfully a benign creation
- The Soviet position in Tehran will be rejected, based on the last article
- Tolkien winning a Nobel for Literature gives him recognition in his lifetime
- The prospect of Yukio Mishima rising to the leadership of Japan is an ...interesting... one
- German arms exports have a market in countries that fall between East and West
- Finding an invisible boy in Trieste is naturally a difficult task
- The Department of Magic picks up on some strange portents, which point towards what happens on December 31
- Soviet atomic locomotives are an interesting development. Every major power had a go at designing atomic trains in @, so here, the most likely suspect comes out with a very special one
- The attempted French tea theft is an absolutely dastardly crime has been prevented. It would have struck at the very heart of Britain and the Empire; it is a very big store, spread out over Britain and points abroad, comprising a 5 year supply of tea for a country of over 130 million people. It has been built up (and rotated) for over fifteen years. The two gangsters are sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment, with full deprivation of coffee and breadstuffs; they are to be fed from an exclusively English menu
- Norway getting in on North Sea oil will pay off for them
- MIRVing ICBMs/LRBMs complicates strategic calculus
- A successful cure for the Shaking Palsy, or Parkinson's Disease, will help a lot of people
- The Tomb of Nefertiti has a lot of goodies
- Congolese confusion is part farce, part reflection on the degeneration into chaos
- Oh yes, USS
Enterprise goes missing