In @ there were plans for a sequel to the film which would be set in San Francisco. The survivors of the LA quake would have moved to SF, just in time to be really unlucky. IMVHO, like the proposed sequel to The Long Good Friday, it's probably for the best it didn't go ahead.*November 15: Release of the Hollywood blockbuster disaster epic Earthquake, telling the story of a calamitous 9.9 earthquake striking Los Angeles and San Francisco
Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
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Bernard Woolley
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Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
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Simon Darkshade
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Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
Interesting.
My rationalisation was that anything that big would likely have a large area of effect, and even with that being 600 miles in DE distances, it would allow for the beloved 70s and 80s trope of multiple storylines/perspectives intersecting.
My rationalisation was that anything that big would likely have a large area of effect, and even with that being 600 miles in DE distances, it would allow for the beloved 70s and 80s trope of multiple storylines/perspectives intersecting.
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
Let me guess, the movie name would be Tsunami.Bernard Woolley wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 3:04 pm
In @ there were plans for a sequel to the film which would be set in San Francisco. The survivors of the LA quake would have moved to SF, just in time to be really unlucky. IMVHO, like the proposed sequel to The Long Good Friday, it's probably for the best it didn't go ahead.
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Simon Darkshade
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Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
Wrong. It was to be..."Earthquake II".
At the time, the Japanese term was relatively unknown in Western parlance, with such events known as 'tidal waves'.
At the time, the Japanese term was relatively unknown in Western parlance, with such events known as 'tidal waves'.
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Simon Darkshade
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Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
November 1974
November 1: The USA is awarded the right to host the FIFA Soccer World Cup in 1986, following on from Spain in 1978 and Argentina in 1982; the major challenge for American soccer officials is to try and raise the profile of and public interest in the sport over the intervening 12 years. The news of the decision makes Page 4 of the The New York Times, at the bottom right, under an account of a caped superhero rescuing a cat stuck up a tree, and an update on the US Army’s new machine gun.
November 2: Concerned Polish foresters investigating the ancient Białowieża Forest on the wild border with the Soviet Union after a recent destructive storm discover to their relief that the renowned 235ft tall Jagiello Oak still stands, with a number of signs and items in her vicinity indicating some sort of faerie activity, something which has not been seen in Poland for many decades.
November 3: The final boat of the second batch of the Royal Navy's Trafalgar class nuclear attack submarines, Talisman, is launched at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead; the next eight boats are still under construction at Vickers in Barrow, Cammell Laird, Armstrong-Whitworth at High Walker and Thames Ironworks at Tilbury, allowing the current production rate of two attack submarines per year to be maintained, whilst saving space in the Royal Naval Dockyards for the first of the planned new cruise missile submarines ordered for 1975.
November 4: Maiden flight of the AstroFlight Sunrise I solar powered aircraft over the Mojave Desert in Nevada, after taking off from Fort Irwin in California. The battery powered aeroplane, unmanned at this stage but with capacity for a pilot, displays impressive endurance capacity, and interesting aerodynamic characteristics, partially due to its innovative design, modelled on the shape of a golden condor, after suggestions from one of the silent financial backers of the development project.
November 5: In the US midterm elections, the Republicans seize control of the House and Senate on the back of the so-called ‘Reagan wave’, with the President’s sustained high popularity bolstering the fortunes of the party. In Arkansas, young attorney, Rhodes Scholar and Vietnam veteran William 'One-Eye' Clinton defies the general Republican success of the election to win the 6th congressional district by 1498 votes.
November 6: The Empire leads with a major feature on the resurgent success of the booming Canadian economy, with record low unemployment and consistently mounting industrial growth building upon the foundations of immense mineral wealth, the tremendous bounty of the Dominion’s farms and forests, ever-expanding oil production (particularly in Alberta and Alaska) and burgeoning electricity exports to the United States. Recent expansion in arms manufacturing for both Canada and her Imperial partners and in automotive production offer further paths forward for sustained success, particularly if the mooted Canadian-U.S. Automotive Agreement can be secured.
November 7: Bolivian loyalist troops, supported by the King's dragon and RBAF Sabres, bloodily suppress rebel Army forces around the cities of Santa Cruz and Montero, reestablishing government control and quashing at least this particular source of unrest. Rebel commander Don Gustavo de Santiago y Velasquez seemingly escapes in the chaos, with further efforts to locate him, both by Government forces and revolutionary commandos of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional , coming to naught.
November 8: Completion of the arcane renovation of London's traditional markets at Covent Garden, Borough Market, Billingsgate, Leadenhall, Smithfield, Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Finchley and the Royal Market at Farringdon, with use of the 'onion' effect of spatial sorcery to vastly expand floorspace within existing faciliities, with the Royal Market being the most spectacular exemplar of this advance in magical technology, featuring 24 floors, over 9000 shops, all 16 major national department stores, a 50 screen cinema complex and a central indoor pleasure garden and fountain, replete with internal monorail and a children's roller coaster on a site externally covering just four floors and 2.5 acres.
November 9: Two oil tankers, one Japanese and one Taiwanese, collide in Tokyo Bay, causing an immense conflagration and killing over 100 sailors on both doomed vessels. IJN destroyers on anti-monster patrol rush to provide succour and fire fighting, but are unable to approach the terrible blaze.
November 10: Commissioning of the new USN super cruiser USS Los Angeles (CGN-219), maiden ship of her class and the first of three of the sixteen under construction due to join the fleet in 1974 alone. The Los Angeles class features a number of new weapons and radar systems, including the expansive Aegis combat system, successor of the Typhon; the new Standard surface-to-air missile and the supersonic Tomahawk sea launched cruise missile; the twin 240mm Advanced Gun System, with the longest range of any cruiser gun in the world; and new laser heat rays. Additionally, Los Angeles represents a merger of cruiser nomenclature, which had persisted since the 1920s.
November 11: An American scientist working at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama presents a research paper on the theory of a potential future spacecraft propulsion method that creates a 'warp bubble' of compressed spacetime in front of it and expanded spacetime behind it, possibly through the utilisation of exotic matter with a negative mass, a drive that he dubs a super gravimetric displacement engine. The presentation arouses some interest amongst the assembled astrophysicists, particularly a visiting delegation from Britain's Ministry of Space.
November 12: Over 240,000 American coal miners walk out on strike, after negotiations with employers break down. President Reagan calls the union leaders and formally invokes a Taft-Hartley Act injunction to force the wildcat strike to end and additionally offered to draft the leadership into the Army, explaining that the right to strike was absolutely permitted, but this kind of illegal action without notice would absolutely not stand, particularly for an industry vital to the national defence of the United States.
November 13: A strange series of horrific hauntings around the Massachusetts village of Dunwich comes to an end after an obscene and wicked grimoire is destroyed in cleansing fire by a local wizard and an occult studies professor from Miskatonic University.
November 14: An Indonesian Navy Foxtrot class submarine goes missing in the Celebes Sea, with the last transmissions reporting some sort of anomalous underwater contact. The Indonesian Foreign Ministry claims that the boat may have been the victim of 'imperialist perfidy', a charge that British and American officials in the region do no deem to dignify with a reply at this time.
November 15: Release of the Hollywood blockbuster disaster epic Earthquake, telling the story of a calamitous 9.9 earthquake striking Los Angeles and San Francisco, starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, James Dean, Walter Matthau, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Bela Lugosi, Robert Driscoll, Bruce Lee and Jack Hawkins, and directed by Mark Robson. It is later described as starting the ‘disaster film craze’ of the mid 1970s by notable film critics Statler and Waldorf.
November 16: An interstellar radio message is sent out by the Arecibo Observatory towards a number of different constellations and star systems, including Hercules and Sagittarius, containing binary data on numbers, the atomic numbers of elements, the structure of Earth's solar system, and information about humans. Even this limited signal is seen as unnecessarily dangerous by some scientists within the broader SETI Program, whilst others view the measure as the least possible action in response to the interstellar signal of 1966.
November 17: The War Office confirms a new raft of pat increases for the British Army, with recruits to be paid a base weekly rate of £20, privates £25, corporals to begin at £30 and sergeants at £35, whilst a second lieutenant would have a base rate of £36, a captain £60, a major £75 and a Lieutenant-colonel £90; base wages are in addition to food and lodging (which are to remain free despite some calls to the contrary), additional pay based on length of service, special allowances based on proficiencies, the ‘additional factor payment’ of 10% paid monthly, combat service pay of £50 per month and the ‘Queen’s Shilling’ payment accrued daily. Pay for young men conscripted under universal National Service will also be increased to £12, along with other accrued benefits. It is anticipated that increased pay regime will in turn increase the total personnel budget of the Army, but the measure is seen as necessary in line with natural wage growth in the civilian sector and the value of the British serviceman.
November 18: A young zoologist from New York City addressing a conference of naturalists in South Africa becomes stranded in the Kalahari Desert after taking an ultralight aircraft joy flight with roughly charming zoologist, before being rescued and returned to civilisation thanks to the intervention of a mysterious Bushman.
November 19: Well known do-gooders, adventurers and family television stars The Beatles release a comedic record of songs performed on their television programme, which unexpectedly becomes an immediate best seller, defying EMI projections of it being a mildly successful novelty record, along the lines of previous experience. One executive quips after dinner that the 'Friendly Four' may have missed their calling, before being hushed by his children who were intently trying to watch the 'John'll Fix It' segment at the end of their variety programme.
November 20: A Lufthansa Boeing 747 crashes shortly after takeoff from Queen Elizabeth Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 56 of the 259 people on board. Initial indications are that the crash may have been due to a combination of mechanical and systems error, leading Lufthansa to ground their fleet of twenty 747s for safety checks whilst a motion in the Parliament of the East African Federation calls for an extension of the successful anti-crash enchantments rolled out across the world over the last decade for aircraft coming in to land to encompass those which have just taken off.
November 21: Beginning of Exercise Zulu Dawn, a joint exercse by the British Commonwealth Far East Command and the Imperial Japanese Navy, with the Commonwealth group based around the carriers HMS Victorious, HMAS Perth, HMNZS Endeavour, HMSAS Natal, HMIS Viraat and HMCS Rainbow and the super battleships St. George, Nelson, HMIS Hindustan and HMAS Australia defending against the IJN force of Shinyo, Akagi and Kaiyo supported by the battleships Yamato, Satsuma and Mikasa in a series of simulated battles in the Philippine Sea.
November 22: Nelee et Myrthis, an opera written by Jean-Philippe Rameau in May 1751, is performed for the first time ever, by the Victoria State Opera in Melbourne. An elderly opera lover sniffs that it isn't really the same as it would have been, which is responded to by a half-elf sitting in front of him, who queries as to whether his knowledge of 1750s fashions and trends is merely second hand.
November 23: Soviet and American negotiators attempting to reach an agreement on strategic nuclear delivery vehicles finally agree on a definition of sea launched ballistic missiles (where the US currently deploys 2548 and the USSR 1682) and land based long range ballistic missiles, sometimes known as intercontinental ballistic missiles in the parlance of the US Army, which also have a current US lead of 4746 (3200 Minutemen, 432 Titans, 384 Rangers and 250 Peacemakers of the USAF and 480 US Army Jupiters) to 2978 Soviet missiles. Discussions regarding a freeze on SLBM numbers and some sort of acceptable ratio of land based missiles have been stymied by the questions of the British and French strategic missile arsenals (consisting of 960 Blue Streak LRBMs and 40 Golden Arrows and 1254 Green Knights; and 392 S3/4/5s and 870 M2 and M3s respectively), their putative inclusion in any ratios, and acceptable means of ensuring compliance.
November 24: American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson discovers the remains of an Australopithecus skeleton at the bottom of a small gully near the town of Hadar in Ethiopia, which will later be dated as over 3 million years old. Some excitable observers immediately label the discovery as the latest 'missing link' in the tree of hominid life.
November 25: Famed surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard successfully conducts the first double heart transplant in a marathon operation at the Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town, utilising new microsurgical devices and arcane augmentation techniques. It is hoped that the procedure can be further refined to maximise the survival of the patient and improve their life expectancy outcomes.
November 26: German commandos of the newly formed GSG 9 engage in a shootout with revolutionary communist terrorists after raiding a meeting of the Rote Armee Fraktion, Revolutionärer Kampf and the Revolutionäre Zellen in Hamburg, killing all five of their targets, Brigitte Kuhlmann, Joseph Fischer, Helga Bösefrau, Rolf Wagner and Siegfried Hausner.
November 27: New Romanian Premier and General Secretary Sorin Constantinescu announces an expansive plan for the modernisation and rebuilding of Bucharest, to be paid for with strong oil revenues, for the development of socialism with a Romanian face and for preservation of her unique character. Some observers have noted that Constantinescu has only been publicly spotted during the day, with one French intelligence source reporting that he spends his nights on hallowed ground within the Stavropoleos Monastery.
November 28: Three prisoners (a genius master thief, a mysterious Scottish former commando imprisoned for bank robbery and a contortionist martial artist and conman) break out from the formidable prison island of Alcatraz, tunneling out of their cells, escaping across the grounds, over the multiple bladewire fences and out into San Francisco Bay in makeshift rafts. No apparent sign is found of their survival, save for a strange nirnroot flower on a beach near Fort Baker and the scattered remnants of a rubber raft and torn fake identification documents; despite the dismissiveness of Alcatraz's Warden, the FBI continues the search into the dense ape-ridden redwoods of the Muir Forest.
November 29: A bill outlining new rights and protections for animals and their welfare, both of the speaking and non-speaking variety, is introduced into the House of Lords by Sir Rufus Wuffles, with the proposed legislation significantly increasing maximum penalties for animal cruelty, outlining phased guidelines for the improvement of standards for the treatment of pet animals and including veterinary costs under the National Health Service. The measure is greeted warmly, with much wagging of tails, by the other non-human members of the Lords.
November 30: Sir Winston Churchill, the Duke of London, celebrates his 100th birthday with a quiet family dinner for twenty four at his home in Chartwell, receiving telegrams of congratulations from around the world, from public figures and rulers ranging from the Pope and the King of France to Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, and personal telephone calls from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, President Reagan and Prime Minister Stanley Barton.
November 1: The USA is awarded the right to host the FIFA Soccer World Cup in 1986, following on from Spain in 1978 and Argentina in 1982; the major challenge for American soccer officials is to try and raise the profile of and public interest in the sport over the intervening 12 years. The news of the decision makes Page 4 of the The New York Times, at the bottom right, under an account of a caped superhero rescuing a cat stuck up a tree, and an update on the US Army’s new machine gun.
November 2: Concerned Polish foresters investigating the ancient Białowieża Forest on the wild border with the Soviet Union after a recent destructive storm discover to their relief that the renowned 235ft tall Jagiello Oak still stands, with a number of signs and items in her vicinity indicating some sort of faerie activity, something which has not been seen in Poland for many decades.
November 3: The final boat of the second batch of the Royal Navy's Trafalgar class nuclear attack submarines, Talisman, is launched at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead; the next eight boats are still under construction at Vickers in Barrow, Cammell Laird, Armstrong-Whitworth at High Walker and Thames Ironworks at Tilbury, allowing the current production rate of two attack submarines per year to be maintained, whilst saving space in the Royal Naval Dockyards for the first of the planned new cruise missile submarines ordered for 1975.
November 4: Maiden flight of the AstroFlight Sunrise I solar powered aircraft over the Mojave Desert in Nevada, after taking off from Fort Irwin in California. The battery powered aeroplane, unmanned at this stage but with capacity for a pilot, displays impressive endurance capacity, and interesting aerodynamic characteristics, partially due to its innovative design, modelled on the shape of a golden condor, after suggestions from one of the silent financial backers of the development project.
November 5: In the US midterm elections, the Republicans seize control of the House and Senate on the back of the so-called ‘Reagan wave’, with the President’s sustained high popularity bolstering the fortunes of the party. In Arkansas, young attorney, Rhodes Scholar and Vietnam veteran William 'One-Eye' Clinton defies the general Republican success of the election to win the 6th congressional district by 1498 votes.
November 6: The Empire leads with a major feature on the resurgent success of the booming Canadian economy, with record low unemployment and consistently mounting industrial growth building upon the foundations of immense mineral wealth, the tremendous bounty of the Dominion’s farms and forests, ever-expanding oil production (particularly in Alberta and Alaska) and burgeoning electricity exports to the United States. Recent expansion in arms manufacturing for both Canada and her Imperial partners and in automotive production offer further paths forward for sustained success, particularly if the mooted Canadian-U.S. Automotive Agreement can be secured.
November 7: Bolivian loyalist troops, supported by the King's dragon and RBAF Sabres, bloodily suppress rebel Army forces around the cities of Santa Cruz and Montero, reestablishing government control and quashing at least this particular source of unrest. Rebel commander Don Gustavo de Santiago y Velasquez seemingly escapes in the chaos, with further efforts to locate him, both by Government forces and revolutionary commandos of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional , coming to naught.
November 8: Completion of the arcane renovation of London's traditional markets at Covent Garden, Borough Market, Billingsgate, Leadenhall, Smithfield, Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Finchley and the Royal Market at Farringdon, with use of the 'onion' effect of spatial sorcery to vastly expand floorspace within existing faciliities, with the Royal Market being the most spectacular exemplar of this advance in magical technology, featuring 24 floors, over 9000 shops, all 16 major national department stores, a 50 screen cinema complex and a central indoor pleasure garden and fountain, replete with internal monorail and a children's roller coaster on a site externally covering just four floors and 2.5 acres.
November 9: Two oil tankers, one Japanese and one Taiwanese, collide in Tokyo Bay, causing an immense conflagration and killing over 100 sailors on both doomed vessels. IJN destroyers on anti-monster patrol rush to provide succour and fire fighting, but are unable to approach the terrible blaze.
November 10: Commissioning of the new USN super cruiser USS Los Angeles (CGN-219), maiden ship of her class and the first of three of the sixteen under construction due to join the fleet in 1974 alone. The Los Angeles class features a number of new weapons and radar systems, including the expansive Aegis combat system, successor of the Typhon; the new Standard surface-to-air missile and the supersonic Tomahawk sea launched cruise missile; the twin 240mm Advanced Gun System, with the longest range of any cruiser gun in the world; and new laser heat rays. Additionally, Los Angeles represents a merger of cruiser nomenclature, which had persisted since the 1920s.
November 11: An American scientist working at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama presents a research paper on the theory of a potential future spacecraft propulsion method that creates a 'warp bubble' of compressed spacetime in front of it and expanded spacetime behind it, possibly through the utilisation of exotic matter with a negative mass, a drive that he dubs a super gravimetric displacement engine. The presentation arouses some interest amongst the assembled astrophysicists, particularly a visiting delegation from Britain's Ministry of Space.
November 12: Over 240,000 American coal miners walk out on strike, after negotiations with employers break down. President Reagan calls the union leaders and formally invokes a Taft-Hartley Act injunction to force the wildcat strike to end and additionally offered to draft the leadership into the Army, explaining that the right to strike was absolutely permitted, but this kind of illegal action without notice would absolutely not stand, particularly for an industry vital to the national defence of the United States.
November 13: A strange series of horrific hauntings around the Massachusetts village of Dunwich comes to an end after an obscene and wicked grimoire is destroyed in cleansing fire by a local wizard and an occult studies professor from Miskatonic University.
November 14: An Indonesian Navy Foxtrot class submarine goes missing in the Celebes Sea, with the last transmissions reporting some sort of anomalous underwater contact. The Indonesian Foreign Ministry claims that the boat may have been the victim of 'imperialist perfidy', a charge that British and American officials in the region do no deem to dignify with a reply at this time.
November 15: Release of the Hollywood blockbuster disaster epic Earthquake, telling the story of a calamitous 9.9 earthquake striking Los Angeles and San Francisco, starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, James Dean, Walter Matthau, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Bela Lugosi, Robert Driscoll, Bruce Lee and Jack Hawkins, and directed by Mark Robson. It is later described as starting the ‘disaster film craze’ of the mid 1970s by notable film critics Statler and Waldorf.
November 16: An interstellar radio message is sent out by the Arecibo Observatory towards a number of different constellations and star systems, including Hercules and Sagittarius, containing binary data on numbers, the atomic numbers of elements, the structure of Earth's solar system, and information about humans. Even this limited signal is seen as unnecessarily dangerous by some scientists within the broader SETI Program, whilst others view the measure as the least possible action in response to the interstellar signal of 1966.
November 17: The War Office confirms a new raft of pat increases for the British Army, with recruits to be paid a base weekly rate of £20, privates £25, corporals to begin at £30 and sergeants at £35, whilst a second lieutenant would have a base rate of £36, a captain £60, a major £75 and a Lieutenant-colonel £90; base wages are in addition to food and lodging (which are to remain free despite some calls to the contrary), additional pay based on length of service, special allowances based on proficiencies, the ‘additional factor payment’ of 10% paid monthly, combat service pay of £50 per month and the ‘Queen’s Shilling’ payment accrued daily. Pay for young men conscripted under universal National Service will also be increased to £12, along with other accrued benefits. It is anticipated that increased pay regime will in turn increase the total personnel budget of the Army, but the measure is seen as necessary in line with natural wage growth in the civilian sector and the value of the British serviceman.
November 18: A young zoologist from New York City addressing a conference of naturalists in South Africa becomes stranded in the Kalahari Desert after taking an ultralight aircraft joy flight with roughly charming zoologist, before being rescued and returned to civilisation thanks to the intervention of a mysterious Bushman.
November 19: Well known do-gooders, adventurers and family television stars The Beatles release a comedic record of songs performed on their television programme, which unexpectedly becomes an immediate best seller, defying EMI projections of it being a mildly successful novelty record, along the lines of previous experience. One executive quips after dinner that the 'Friendly Four' may have missed their calling, before being hushed by his children who were intently trying to watch the 'John'll Fix It' segment at the end of their variety programme.
November 20: A Lufthansa Boeing 747 crashes shortly after takeoff from Queen Elizabeth Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 56 of the 259 people on board. Initial indications are that the crash may have been due to a combination of mechanical and systems error, leading Lufthansa to ground their fleet of twenty 747s for safety checks whilst a motion in the Parliament of the East African Federation calls for an extension of the successful anti-crash enchantments rolled out across the world over the last decade for aircraft coming in to land to encompass those which have just taken off.
November 21: Beginning of Exercise Zulu Dawn, a joint exercse by the British Commonwealth Far East Command and the Imperial Japanese Navy, with the Commonwealth group based around the carriers HMS Victorious, HMAS Perth, HMNZS Endeavour, HMSAS Natal, HMIS Viraat and HMCS Rainbow and the super battleships St. George, Nelson, HMIS Hindustan and HMAS Australia defending against the IJN force of Shinyo, Akagi and Kaiyo supported by the battleships Yamato, Satsuma and Mikasa in a series of simulated battles in the Philippine Sea.
November 22: Nelee et Myrthis, an opera written by Jean-Philippe Rameau in May 1751, is performed for the first time ever, by the Victoria State Opera in Melbourne. An elderly opera lover sniffs that it isn't really the same as it would have been, which is responded to by a half-elf sitting in front of him, who queries as to whether his knowledge of 1750s fashions and trends is merely second hand.
November 23: Soviet and American negotiators attempting to reach an agreement on strategic nuclear delivery vehicles finally agree on a definition of sea launched ballistic missiles (where the US currently deploys 2548 and the USSR 1682) and land based long range ballistic missiles, sometimes known as intercontinental ballistic missiles in the parlance of the US Army, which also have a current US lead of 4746 (3200 Minutemen, 432 Titans, 384 Rangers and 250 Peacemakers of the USAF and 480 US Army Jupiters) to 2978 Soviet missiles. Discussions regarding a freeze on SLBM numbers and some sort of acceptable ratio of land based missiles have been stymied by the questions of the British and French strategic missile arsenals (consisting of 960 Blue Streak LRBMs and 40 Golden Arrows and 1254 Green Knights; and 392 S3/4/5s and 870 M2 and M3s respectively), their putative inclusion in any ratios, and acceptable means of ensuring compliance.
November 24: American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson discovers the remains of an Australopithecus skeleton at the bottom of a small gully near the town of Hadar in Ethiopia, which will later be dated as over 3 million years old. Some excitable observers immediately label the discovery as the latest 'missing link' in the tree of hominid life.
November 25: Famed surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard successfully conducts the first double heart transplant in a marathon operation at the Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town, utilising new microsurgical devices and arcane augmentation techniques. It is hoped that the procedure can be further refined to maximise the survival of the patient and improve their life expectancy outcomes.
November 26: German commandos of the newly formed GSG 9 engage in a shootout with revolutionary communist terrorists after raiding a meeting of the Rote Armee Fraktion, Revolutionärer Kampf and the Revolutionäre Zellen in Hamburg, killing all five of their targets, Brigitte Kuhlmann, Joseph Fischer, Helga Bösefrau, Rolf Wagner and Siegfried Hausner.
November 27: New Romanian Premier and General Secretary Sorin Constantinescu announces an expansive plan for the modernisation and rebuilding of Bucharest, to be paid for with strong oil revenues, for the development of socialism with a Romanian face and for preservation of her unique character. Some observers have noted that Constantinescu has only been publicly spotted during the day, with one French intelligence source reporting that he spends his nights on hallowed ground within the Stavropoleos Monastery.
November 28: Three prisoners (a genius master thief, a mysterious Scottish former commando imprisoned for bank robbery and a contortionist martial artist and conman) break out from the formidable prison island of Alcatraz, tunneling out of their cells, escaping across the grounds, over the multiple bladewire fences and out into San Francisco Bay in makeshift rafts. No apparent sign is found of their survival, save for a strange nirnroot flower on a beach near Fort Baker and the scattered remnants of a rubber raft and torn fake identification documents; despite the dismissiveness of Alcatraz's Warden, the FBI continues the search into the dense ape-ridden redwoods of the Muir Forest.
November 29: A bill outlining new rights and protections for animals and their welfare, both of the speaking and non-speaking variety, is introduced into the House of Lords by Sir Rufus Wuffles, with the proposed legislation significantly increasing maximum penalties for animal cruelty, outlining phased guidelines for the improvement of standards for the treatment of pet animals and including veterinary costs under the National Health Service. The measure is greeted warmly, with much wagging of tails, by the other non-human members of the Lords.
November 30: Sir Winston Churchill, the Duke of London, celebrates his 100th birthday with a quiet family dinner for twenty four at his home in Chartwell, receiving telegrams of congratulations from around the world, from public figures and rulers ranging from the Pope and the King of France to Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, and personal telephone calls from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, President Reagan and Prime Minister Stanley Barton.
Last edited by Simon Darkshade on Mon Apr 07, 2025 1:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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jemhouston
- Posts: 5005
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Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
If someone from Miskatonic University did a spell that didn't backfire in some way is a miracle.
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Simon Darkshade
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
There isn’t any mention of the action being a spell, nor it not backfiring, nor not having negative consequences. 
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
Is the November 18 event a nod to "The gods must be crazy"?
One of the Alcatrazh eshcapeesh musht be John Patrick Mashon, I guesh...who are zhe ozher two?
One of the Alcatrazh eshcapeesh musht be John Patrick Mashon, I guesh...who are zhe ozher two?
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Simon Darkshade
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- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
The Gods Must Be Crazy II, to be precise. A fairly rare example of a sequel that was just as amusing as the original picture.
The other two escapees along with the Scottish commando (who bears quite a resemblance to Marko Ramius) was a 1970s version of Snake Plissken and Hercule Flambeau. Exactly why they were all in Alcatraz and what is going on is a little kernel for a future story.
The other two escapees along with the Scottish commando (who bears quite a resemblance to Marko Ramius) was a 1970s version of Snake Plissken and Hercule Flambeau. Exactly why they were all in Alcatraz and what is going on is a little kernel for a future story.
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Simon Darkshade
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
November 1974 Notes
- The US gets the 1986 World Cup, as previously signposted, as part of a gambit to raise the profile of soccer outside of Europe and South America
- The US Army is also quietly fielding a replacement for the M60
- The Jagiello Oak still stands
- RN SSN construction is going on at 4 yards rather than 1, in addition to the capacity at Chatham, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Rosyth, where there are large dockhalls; note also the continuing existence of Thames Ironworks, albeit downriver at Tilbury
- Solar powered aircraft seem to be having more success, based on some very old design ideas; the Sunrise I was modelled on a golden condor
- The Republicans encounter general midterm success on the back of Reagan’s popularity, with the micro exception of Clinton’s win; his experiences have changed him a fair bit
- Canadian economic development continues at a very rapid pace, without some of the constraining factors of 1974-1980 in @, with the additional tidbit of there not being an equivalent to the 1965 Auto Agreement with the Yanks yet
- The Bolivian rebel commander will flee abroad, perhaps to Mexico. He’s a dab hand at cooking chicken
- London’s markets remain in their traditional locations, partially due to the use of arcane means for a building to be larger on the inside. The completely original Royal Market has a lot of different features common to later mega malls, along with its own indoor funfair and rollercoaster, which is based on a historical attraction
- The Tokyo Bay collision is a bit worse; the Japanese take anti-monster patrol very seriously
- The Los Angeles class are larger than the CSGN, but bear some resemblance to certain features. It has multiple VLS along with ABLs and other launchers; stats will be forthcoming in due course with the USN 1975 update
- Scientists getting ideas about warp drives…what will they think of next?
- The coal mine strike gets trodden on, not for striking, but for the wild cat nature being illegal
- The Dunwich Horror is a future story hook
- Something seems to have taken a liking to the Indonesian sub…
- Earthquake has quite the interesting cast
- Active SETI might not be the best idea, all things considered
- British Army pay increases reflect swelling civilian wages and the need to stay competitive; even with National Service, the Regular Army remains mostly professional. Note that food and lodging are still provided for free, unlike @, where soldiers had to pay for them out of their pay packet. The Queen’s Shilling works out to £18 a year and change, which is often taken as an end of year extra
- Goings on in the Kalahari indicate that the Gods must be crazy
- The Beatles have an ongoing different career and different lives. Note the mini feature at the end of their show
- Further improvements to air crash prevention will be forthcoming
- Zulu Dawn is an interesting exercise showing the Japanese stretching out south, and the British looking for (new old) friends
- There are a lot of obstacles preventing any sort of arms limitation agreements
- Consider who GSG 9 ended up shooting
- The Romanian leader seems a bit nervous about the night for some reason
- Something very strange was going on at Alcatraz
- Animal rights are moving ahead at a steady clip
- More secrets await in the depths of Africa
- The US gets the 1986 World Cup, as previously signposted, as part of a gambit to raise the profile of soccer outside of Europe and South America
- The US Army is also quietly fielding a replacement for the M60
- The Jagiello Oak still stands
- RN SSN construction is going on at 4 yards rather than 1, in addition to the capacity at Chatham, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Rosyth, where there are large dockhalls; note also the continuing existence of Thames Ironworks, albeit downriver at Tilbury
- Solar powered aircraft seem to be having more success, based on some very old design ideas; the Sunrise I was modelled on a golden condor
- The Republicans encounter general midterm success on the back of Reagan’s popularity, with the micro exception of Clinton’s win; his experiences have changed him a fair bit
- Canadian economic development continues at a very rapid pace, without some of the constraining factors of 1974-1980 in @, with the additional tidbit of there not being an equivalent to the 1965 Auto Agreement with the Yanks yet
- The Bolivian rebel commander will flee abroad, perhaps to Mexico. He’s a dab hand at cooking chicken
- London’s markets remain in their traditional locations, partially due to the use of arcane means for a building to be larger on the inside. The completely original Royal Market has a lot of different features common to later mega malls, along with its own indoor funfair and rollercoaster, which is based on a historical attraction
- The Tokyo Bay collision is a bit worse; the Japanese take anti-monster patrol very seriously
- The Los Angeles class are larger than the CSGN, but bear some resemblance to certain features. It has multiple VLS along with ABLs and other launchers; stats will be forthcoming in due course with the USN 1975 update
- Scientists getting ideas about warp drives…what will they think of next?
- The coal mine strike gets trodden on, not for striking, but for the wild cat nature being illegal
- The Dunwich Horror is a future story hook
- Something seems to have taken a liking to the Indonesian sub…
- Earthquake has quite the interesting cast
- Active SETI might not be the best idea, all things considered
- British Army pay increases reflect swelling civilian wages and the need to stay competitive; even with National Service, the Regular Army remains mostly professional. Note that food and lodging are still provided for free, unlike @, where soldiers had to pay for them out of their pay packet. The Queen’s Shilling works out to £18 a year and change, which is often taken as an end of year extra
- Goings on in the Kalahari indicate that the Gods must be crazy
- The Beatles have an ongoing different career and different lives. Note the mini feature at the end of their show
- Further improvements to air crash prevention will be forthcoming
- Zulu Dawn is an interesting exercise showing the Japanese stretching out south, and the British looking for (new old) friends
- There are a lot of obstacles preventing any sort of arms limitation agreements
- Consider who GSG 9 ended up shooting
- The Romanian leader seems a bit nervous about the night for some reason
- Something very strange was going on at Alcatraz
- Animal rights are moving ahead at a steady clip
- More secrets await in the depths of Africa
-
jemhouston
- Posts: 5005
- Joined: Fri Nov 18, 2022 12:38 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
For obscure TV series for $50
The premise was
In 1963, all the prisoners and guards mysteriously disappear from Alcatraz. In the present day, they resurface and a secret agency is tasked with re-capturing them.
What is Alcatraz?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1728102/?r ... q_Alcatraz
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/Alcatraz
One of the better thirteen weeks series I liked.
The premise was
In 1963, all the prisoners and guards mysteriously disappear from Alcatraz. In the present day, they resurface and a secret agency is tasked with re-capturing them.
What is Alcatraz?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1728102/?r ... q_Alcatraz
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/Alcatraz
One of the better thirteen weeks series I liked.
-
Simon Darkshade
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
A novel premise, that's for sure. My thinking here is that one of the three was imprisoned on the Rock legitimately, but was needed for a particular skills set for a deniable mission for a secret branch of OGA, so that another man was framed and sent there to engineer an escape, and the third chap came along for the ride, as the particular exigencies of their plan needed three men.
They are meant to escape, but look like they died in SF Bay, but left a few too many clues along the way, as in the process, they found out a rather deep secret about Alcatraz.
Like a few events, I plant the seeds for future stories that I'd eventually like to get around to writing, but don't have the time or the clear story list.
They are meant to escape, but look like they died in SF Bay, but left a few too many clues along the way, as in the process, they found out a rather deep secret about Alcatraz.
Like a few events, I plant the seeds for future stories that I'd eventually like to get around to writing, but don't have the time or the clear story list.
-
Simon Darkshade
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
The Streets of London
Were you to take a wrong turn and end up in Dark Earth London c. 1974 from our 2025, the first thing you would notice is the difference in the air, with it being crisp, clean and bracing, and the sky seeming a bit bluer and brighter; even in such a large metropolis, the cumulative advances in environmental technologies, the curtailing of the use of household coal, certain enchantments and associated policies make for a difference. Rather than a grey, grimy city with dreary tower blocks and older buildings in varying degrees of decrepitude, there is more of a fresher, colourful feel to the streetscape, and the men and women involved in the various cleaning industries will be noticeable.
It is a greener capital, with rather more parks and forests, and seemingly more trees along streets in the suburbs and inner city alike. Grass is noticeably present in various locations, and lovingly cared for, whilst people's lawns, gardens and hedges are well tended, however small. The skyscape of the city of London is different, with but a few of what we'd describe as tall buildings arrayed in a planned fashion, and all having a very distinct Victorian Gothic style to them. Tower blocks are noticeably absent, with modern terraced houses and low rise flats taking their place; the traditional landmarks of London still predominate, with St. Paul's, the Tower of London, the Palace of Westminster and various cathedrals being quite distinct. You will be rather surprised by the sight of the Statue of Britannia at Greenwich (which is only painted gold, rather than being solid) and the Great Tower of London in Wembley, along with some of the medieval castles seeming to be still present.
There will be a seeming multitude of red telephone boxes and pillar boxes, along with blue police boxes, all but one of which will be disappointingly mundane. Black cabs will be a familiar sight, but the hansom cabs having not quite disappeared will distinctly not be, as they have recovered from their 1940s nadir through the tourist trade, nostalgic eccentrics and those who avoid automobiles for religious or arcane reasons. Depending on where you were, you might be surprised by the absence of heavy traffic, by the smaller size of lorries and vans, and by the well-known red buses being accompanied by quite modern trams in a striking blue livery. The streets themselves will seem a little wider on an individual scale, whilst having an absence of some of the larger inner-city motorway types; this is a city on a human scale.
There would be a distinct lack of graffiti, chewing gum, dog droppings and rubbish on streets, and even in sidestreets; some of the alleyways of the East End, should you venture there, hold more unsavoury surprises than just rubbish. The clothing worn by the various people walking about would be quite old fashioned to our 2025 eyes, seeming to be a mixture of 1920s through 1950s styles, with a few possible jarring exceptions; virtually no one you see would be wearing jeans, and trainers and t-shirts would be completely absent. You would still see a fair few people smoking, albeit substantially fewer than in footage you might have seen of the 1940s, and an absence of public swearing and carry on. There is a considerable variety of accents, rather than the flatter Estuary English, including quite a lot of genuine Cockney and RP, depending on the class and origin of the speaker. You would not see anyone jogging, at least on the streets, with such exercise taken in the various parks.
Many of those you might see will be children, as Britain is a rather 'younger' society still experiencing what we would regard as a baby boom, even though that has ended by DE definitions; a lot of mothers pushing perambulators will be seen. Depending on the day of the week, most of them would be in school uniforms, which would seems dreadfully old-fashioned to our eyes. If you spare more than a second glance to a passerby, you'd likely observe that there seem to be more lighter shades of hair colour and eye colour than what you may be used to from Earthly history. Younger men's hairstyles will largely be shorter than the cutting edge of 1970s fashion, whilst those who we'd classify as teenagers and younger boys wear their hair a bit longer, along Victorian lines, prior to the big haircut that comes to all lads at 18. Overwhelmingly, the people that you see would be of British origin, although, depending on the area, you could well pass by someone of Indian or West Indian origin, or hear someone talking in one of the European languages. DE London is less of a melting pot as a vast plate of stew that absorbs all manner of different ingredients into the whole; very much an English city, rather than an international one.
You might be struck by the different street foods available and the stalls and barrows that serve them, particularly if you are walking through the West End or the East End, and the plethora of little markets hither and thither. There won't be the provender you may be accustomed to in 2025, coming from 'general Western cuisine' (such as hamburgers and the like) or various ethnic foodstuffs, but more traditionally English offerings, such as meat pies, baked potatoes, pasties, sausage rolls, jellied eels, sausages, sandwiches, soups, roasted meats and birds, grilled chops and steaks, and of course fish and chips. Pizza, or pitza in the local argot, is still extremely rare and not very well known, whilst various American fast food restaurants are still regarded as curiosities; the hamburger is yet to really make the jump into mainstream English cuisine. There are plenty of ice cream stalls and shops, most of which have been established or re-established over the last decade or so. Indian food is still a relative rarity, with there being perhaps 250 of Britain's 500 Indian restaurants across the capital, whilst there are just under 100 Chinese restaurants, mainly concentrated around the East End and West End. More common still is the British Restaurant, that vestige of the Second World War and the Ministry of Food, which still provide decent, cheap meals at a set price, and are oft frequented by workers. If you are of the vegetarian persuasion, it will be difficult to find establishments that cater to such diets, but they can be found in the north and west of London.
There would be quite a substantive presence of traditionally attired bobbies on the streets, although the pistols on their belts might be a tad incongruous to their 'Dixon of Dock Green' feel, and they will be largely on foot, quite tall and overwhelmingly male. Some will be on horseback, for various events and crowd circumstances, which will seem familiar, but nothing will really prepare you for the sight of police lions walking along beside the Met's finest, unleashed to boot. If your wanderings take you onto the Underground, you will be quite safe, with there being plenty of guards, ticket inspectors and attendants at stations and on trains. Should you venture out at night, there will still be a police presence, and the streets will be quite well lit; the old London peasoupers are mostly a thing of the past with changes in air quality legislation, although there are proposals to replicate their cosmetic effect (without any of the deleterious health costs) in some areas for promotion of tourism.
Venturing into shops, it might take a bit of adjustment to get used to the imperial measures and non-decimal currency, but the shopkeepers and their assistants seem to manage fine enough without the aid of modern computerised tills. The cost of goods will be less what it was for those who can remember the Earthly 1970s, and there is far less packaging and plastic involved. Supermarkets are relatively few and far between and there is a greater variety of shops, many of which offer home delivery of various goods and groceries. You might be struck how there seems to be a disparity between males and females working, above the level of shop assistant, cleaner, secretary or receptionist, but should you go into various businesses, you might be able to observe things starting to change, depending on the industry. This is a London of manufacturing as well as services, and some factories and workshops run around the clock, making for a parallel nocturnal world for shift workers as they are catered to by various services and establishments, yet by the same token, large parts of the city tend to die off after pubs close and cinemas have their last screening.
There will be some things that you might notice by their absence, be they garish 1970s Earthly fashions, various permutations of rock and pop music, or the same extent of sexualisation and rampant sexism evident in advertising and the press. Should you encounter a busker in the West End, he will likely be warbling some version of an English folk song rather than a paen to his baby. He will also most likely not be between the ages of 18 and 21, in the vast majority of cases, as young men of that age are almost always undertaking their period of universal National Service conscription. You will not see any beggars or visual evidence of homeless people, as later increases in vagrancy have not yet occurred (nor are they likely to), similar to the situation on Earth. Far, far fewer young people, and people in general, will be unemployed, as, should a person be willing and physically capable, there are a plethora of jobs available; should they not be willing, then they had best have an independent source of income, as the dole, whilst functional, does not provide for the same type of comfortable life as wages or a salary.
On the flip side of that, there will also be different features that will strike you. The number of men and women in uniform will be quite a lot larger, with a bit over 2.3% of the population in the regular Armed Forces at any one time, compared to 0.6% at the same time on Earth and the 1.75% of modern Israel. Goods which did not emerge until a decade or more later in our world are being advertised and sold, such as the first home computers, mobile telephones, video recorders and more, whilst other areas are well and truly more advanced, such as the use of industrial robots and computer systems in large corporations. Magic still operates around the fringes of society, as well as its unseen underpinnings, but is starting to steadily ebb into everyday life in the form of 'magitech' a bit more as each year goes by. Unlike our 1975 London, you will see different intelligent races/species going about their lives, ranging from the diligent dwarven engineers to gnomish bankers, from halfling chefs to the disdained orcish day labourers, and from Martians, Lunarians and Venusians to mysterious elves; you might even see a dragon overhead, soaring above the flying taxis in their rather closer sky lanes.
As you walk through these streets of London, you may well see this, and much more.
Were you to take a wrong turn and end up in Dark Earth London c. 1974 from our 2025, the first thing you would notice is the difference in the air, with it being crisp, clean and bracing, and the sky seeming a bit bluer and brighter; even in such a large metropolis, the cumulative advances in environmental technologies, the curtailing of the use of household coal, certain enchantments and associated policies make for a difference. Rather than a grey, grimy city with dreary tower blocks and older buildings in varying degrees of decrepitude, there is more of a fresher, colourful feel to the streetscape, and the men and women involved in the various cleaning industries will be noticeable.
It is a greener capital, with rather more parks and forests, and seemingly more trees along streets in the suburbs and inner city alike. Grass is noticeably present in various locations, and lovingly cared for, whilst people's lawns, gardens and hedges are well tended, however small. The skyscape of the city of London is different, with but a few of what we'd describe as tall buildings arrayed in a planned fashion, and all having a very distinct Victorian Gothic style to them. Tower blocks are noticeably absent, with modern terraced houses and low rise flats taking their place; the traditional landmarks of London still predominate, with St. Paul's, the Tower of London, the Palace of Westminster and various cathedrals being quite distinct. You will be rather surprised by the sight of the Statue of Britannia at Greenwich (which is only painted gold, rather than being solid) and the Great Tower of London in Wembley, along with some of the medieval castles seeming to be still present.
There will be a seeming multitude of red telephone boxes and pillar boxes, along with blue police boxes, all but one of which will be disappointingly mundane. Black cabs will be a familiar sight, but the hansom cabs having not quite disappeared will distinctly not be, as they have recovered from their 1940s nadir through the tourist trade, nostalgic eccentrics and those who avoid automobiles for religious or arcane reasons. Depending on where you were, you might be surprised by the absence of heavy traffic, by the smaller size of lorries and vans, and by the well-known red buses being accompanied by quite modern trams in a striking blue livery. The streets themselves will seem a little wider on an individual scale, whilst having an absence of some of the larger inner-city motorway types; this is a city on a human scale.
There would be a distinct lack of graffiti, chewing gum, dog droppings and rubbish on streets, and even in sidestreets; some of the alleyways of the East End, should you venture there, hold more unsavoury surprises than just rubbish. The clothing worn by the various people walking about would be quite old fashioned to our 2025 eyes, seeming to be a mixture of 1920s through 1950s styles, with a few possible jarring exceptions; virtually no one you see would be wearing jeans, and trainers and t-shirts would be completely absent. You would still see a fair few people smoking, albeit substantially fewer than in footage you might have seen of the 1940s, and an absence of public swearing and carry on. There is a considerable variety of accents, rather than the flatter Estuary English, including quite a lot of genuine Cockney and RP, depending on the class and origin of the speaker. You would not see anyone jogging, at least on the streets, with such exercise taken in the various parks.
Many of those you might see will be children, as Britain is a rather 'younger' society still experiencing what we would regard as a baby boom, even though that has ended by DE definitions; a lot of mothers pushing perambulators will be seen. Depending on the day of the week, most of them would be in school uniforms, which would seems dreadfully old-fashioned to our eyes. If you spare more than a second glance to a passerby, you'd likely observe that there seem to be more lighter shades of hair colour and eye colour than what you may be used to from Earthly history. Younger men's hairstyles will largely be shorter than the cutting edge of 1970s fashion, whilst those who we'd classify as teenagers and younger boys wear their hair a bit longer, along Victorian lines, prior to the big haircut that comes to all lads at 18. Overwhelmingly, the people that you see would be of British origin, although, depending on the area, you could well pass by someone of Indian or West Indian origin, or hear someone talking in one of the European languages. DE London is less of a melting pot as a vast plate of stew that absorbs all manner of different ingredients into the whole; very much an English city, rather than an international one.
You might be struck by the different street foods available and the stalls and barrows that serve them, particularly if you are walking through the West End or the East End, and the plethora of little markets hither and thither. There won't be the provender you may be accustomed to in 2025, coming from 'general Western cuisine' (such as hamburgers and the like) or various ethnic foodstuffs, but more traditionally English offerings, such as meat pies, baked potatoes, pasties, sausage rolls, jellied eels, sausages, sandwiches, soups, roasted meats and birds, grilled chops and steaks, and of course fish and chips. Pizza, or pitza in the local argot, is still extremely rare and not very well known, whilst various American fast food restaurants are still regarded as curiosities; the hamburger is yet to really make the jump into mainstream English cuisine. There are plenty of ice cream stalls and shops, most of which have been established or re-established over the last decade or so. Indian food is still a relative rarity, with there being perhaps 250 of Britain's 500 Indian restaurants across the capital, whilst there are just under 100 Chinese restaurants, mainly concentrated around the East End and West End. More common still is the British Restaurant, that vestige of the Second World War and the Ministry of Food, which still provide decent, cheap meals at a set price, and are oft frequented by workers. If you are of the vegetarian persuasion, it will be difficult to find establishments that cater to such diets, but they can be found in the north and west of London.
There would be quite a substantive presence of traditionally attired bobbies on the streets, although the pistols on their belts might be a tad incongruous to their 'Dixon of Dock Green' feel, and they will be largely on foot, quite tall and overwhelmingly male. Some will be on horseback, for various events and crowd circumstances, which will seem familiar, but nothing will really prepare you for the sight of police lions walking along beside the Met's finest, unleashed to boot. If your wanderings take you onto the Underground, you will be quite safe, with there being plenty of guards, ticket inspectors and attendants at stations and on trains. Should you venture out at night, there will still be a police presence, and the streets will be quite well lit; the old London peasoupers are mostly a thing of the past with changes in air quality legislation, although there are proposals to replicate their cosmetic effect (without any of the deleterious health costs) in some areas for promotion of tourism.
Venturing into shops, it might take a bit of adjustment to get used to the imperial measures and non-decimal currency, but the shopkeepers and their assistants seem to manage fine enough without the aid of modern computerised tills. The cost of goods will be less what it was for those who can remember the Earthly 1970s, and there is far less packaging and plastic involved. Supermarkets are relatively few and far between and there is a greater variety of shops, many of which offer home delivery of various goods and groceries. You might be struck how there seems to be a disparity between males and females working, above the level of shop assistant, cleaner, secretary or receptionist, but should you go into various businesses, you might be able to observe things starting to change, depending on the industry. This is a London of manufacturing as well as services, and some factories and workshops run around the clock, making for a parallel nocturnal world for shift workers as they are catered to by various services and establishments, yet by the same token, large parts of the city tend to die off after pubs close and cinemas have their last screening.
There will be some things that you might notice by their absence, be they garish 1970s Earthly fashions, various permutations of rock and pop music, or the same extent of sexualisation and rampant sexism evident in advertising and the press. Should you encounter a busker in the West End, he will likely be warbling some version of an English folk song rather than a paen to his baby. He will also most likely not be between the ages of 18 and 21, in the vast majority of cases, as young men of that age are almost always undertaking their period of universal National Service conscription. You will not see any beggars or visual evidence of homeless people, as later increases in vagrancy have not yet occurred (nor are they likely to), similar to the situation on Earth. Far, far fewer young people, and people in general, will be unemployed, as, should a person be willing and physically capable, there are a plethora of jobs available; should they not be willing, then they had best have an independent source of income, as the dole, whilst functional, does not provide for the same type of comfortable life as wages or a salary.
On the flip side of that, there will also be different features that will strike you. The number of men and women in uniform will be quite a lot larger, with a bit over 2.3% of the population in the regular Armed Forces at any one time, compared to 0.6% at the same time on Earth and the 1.75% of modern Israel. Goods which did not emerge until a decade or more later in our world are being advertised and sold, such as the first home computers, mobile telephones, video recorders and more, whilst other areas are well and truly more advanced, such as the use of industrial robots and computer systems in large corporations. Magic still operates around the fringes of society, as well as its unseen underpinnings, but is starting to steadily ebb into everyday life in the form of 'magitech' a bit more as each year goes by. Unlike our 1975 London, you will see different intelligent races/species going about their lives, ranging from the diligent dwarven engineers to gnomish bankers, from halfling chefs to the disdained orcish day labourers, and from Martians, Lunarians and Venusians to mysterious elves; you might even see a dragon overhead, soaring above the flying taxis in their rather closer sky lanes.
As you walk through these streets of London, you may well see this, and much more.
-
Simon Darkshade
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
December Teasers:
December 1: A Canadian joint venture (made up of Avro Canada, Canadair, Imperial Oil, Dominion Engineering, Victoria Shipbuilding and Canadian Steel) is awarded an £1800 million contract for the development and construction of the first stage of the habitation module of the Commonwealth starship project, in one of the first major components to be awarded, after the engineering module in Scotland to the group of Beardmores, Rolls Royce, John Brown, United Steel and RSCM, and the storage/supply module in the English Midlands to a group of Hawker-Siddeley, Vickers, English Electric and ICI.
December 2: A number of potential Democratic candidates for the party’s 1976 nomination for President who have emerged over 1974 form exploratory committees for their prospective presidential campaigns, including Senators Robert F. Kennedy, Lloyd Bentsen Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, and Bill McKay, Representative Raymond Shaw, Californian Governor Jerry Brown and Georgian Governor James Carter.
December 3: The Mexican government declares tequila to be its own intellectual property, making it compulsory for a beverage to be manufactured and aged in certain regions of the Empire of Mexico in order to be classified as tequila, and claiming to make it illegal for other states to make their own version of the fiery spirit and name it as such. The action will precipitate a series of unfortunate events culminating in a very long running international legal dispute and subsequent momentous developments.
December 23: Unveiling of the Saunders-Roe Leviathan, a nuclear powered ‘super flying boat’ designed for Pacific and Indian Ocean special cargo operations, with Admiralty funding contributing a significant portion of the eye watering development cost.
December 1: A Canadian joint venture (made up of Avro Canada, Canadair, Imperial Oil, Dominion Engineering, Victoria Shipbuilding and Canadian Steel) is awarded an £1800 million contract for the development and construction of the first stage of the habitation module of the Commonwealth starship project, in one of the first major components to be awarded, after the engineering module in Scotland to the group of Beardmores, Rolls Royce, John Brown, United Steel and RSCM, and the storage/supply module in the English Midlands to a group of Hawker-Siddeley, Vickers, English Electric and ICI.
December 2: A number of potential Democratic candidates for the party’s 1976 nomination for President who have emerged over 1974 form exploratory committees for their prospective presidential campaigns, including Senators Robert F. Kennedy, Lloyd Bentsen Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, and Bill McKay, Representative Raymond Shaw, Californian Governor Jerry Brown and Georgian Governor James Carter.
December 3: The Mexican government declares tequila to be its own intellectual property, making it compulsory for a beverage to be manufactured and aged in certain regions of the Empire of Mexico in order to be classified as tequila, and claiming to make it illegal for other states to make their own version of the fiery spirit and name it as such. The action will precipitate a series of unfortunate events culminating in a very long running international legal dispute and subsequent momentous developments.
December 23: Unveiling of the Saunders-Roe Leviathan, a nuclear powered ‘super flying boat’ designed for Pacific and Indian Ocean special cargo operations, with Admiralty funding contributing a significant portion of the eye watering development cost.
-
Simon Darkshade
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
December 1974
December 1: A Canadian joint venture (made up of Avro Canada, Canadair, Imperial Oil, Dominion Engineering, Victoria Shipbuilding and Canadian Steel) is awarded an £1800 million contract for the development and construction of the first stage of the habitation module of the Commonwealth starship project, in one of the first major components to be awarded, after the engineering module in Scotland to the group of Beardmores, Rolls Royce, John Brown, United Steel and RSCM, and the storage/supply module in the English Midlands to a group of Hawker-Siddeley, Vickers, English Electric and ICI.
December 2: A number of potential Democratic candidates for the party’s 1976 nomination for President who have emerged over 1974 form exploratory committees for their prospective presidential campaigns, including Senators Robert F. Kennedy, Lloyd Bentsen Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, and Bill McKay, Representative Raymond Shaw, Californian Governor Jerry Brown and Georgian Governor James Carter.
December 3: The Mexican government declares tequila to be its own intellectual property, making it compulsory for a beverage to be manufactured and aged in certain regions of the Empire of Mexico in order to be classified as tequila, and claiming to make it illegal for other states to make their own version of the fiery spirit and name it as such. The action will precipitate a series of unfortunate events culminating in a very long running international legal dispute and subsequent developments.
December 4: An Aeroflot An-2 taking off from Irkutsk collides in midair with an An-12 coming into land, resulting in the death of all 15 passengers and crew onboard the smaller plane. The duty air traffic controllers are arrested by the KGB and sent to the Gulag, pending investigations.
December 5: A snow-laden roof comes near to collapse at Teheran Airport, before a blue, red and gold blur is seen streaking in to stabilise it long enough for those underneath it to escape. The Daily Planet's Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Clark Kent, in the Persian capital for a conference on Shah Kamar's modernisation programme, reports that the strange sight could have been anything.
December 6: Commissioning of the first of the Soviet Navy’s Project 236 guided missile destroyers, known to Western intelligence as the Sovremenny class. At over 10,000 tons standard displacement, the Sovremennys represent the closest equivalents to the British Type 42 and American Spruance class DLGs, featuring a very heavy gun armament of three quad 130mm mounts, six quad 52mm mounts, four twin 37mm AK-630 CWS and eight quad 25mm light general purpose gun mounts; 8 SS-N-19 Shipwreck and 24 SS-N-22 Sunburn anti-ship missiles; 2 SA-N-6 medium range surface to air missile launchers and 4 SA-N-4 short range SAM launchers; twin RBU-6000 launchers and eight SS-N-15 Starfish ASW missiles; and two helicopters. A further 27 ships are currently under construction, with a minimum of 36 further vessels on order or projected as part of new Soviet Navy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s extremely ambitious Global Fleet Construction Plan for 250 destroyers and frigates, 80 cruisers and 20 battlecruisers, 15 battleships, 12 nuclear supercarriers and 150 submarines between 1972 and 1990.
December 7: After two month of observation, testing, photography, probing and scanning of Nereid, the newly discovered Proteus and other small moons of Neptune, astronauts from Orion 6 land on the surface of Triton. They observe abundant frozen nitrogen across the icy surface and evidence of recent eruptions by cryovolanoes. Observation of certain features previously dubbed the 'cantaloupe terrain' supports the hypothesis that they had been caused by cryovolcanic flooding, and a number of samples are taken from the surface, including some particularly curious and seemingly out of place rocks.
December 8: Breakdown of South American arms limitations talks at a conference in Quinua to mark the sesquicentenary of the Battle of Ayacucho, with irreconcilable differences between Argentina, Brazil and Chile on the extent of naval and missile restrictions leading to the collapse, which sparks fears of a new looking South American arms race.
December 9: The Ministry of Education receives a white paper on single sex education in secondary state schools, with researchers suggesting that it be further extended to a de facto universal level across Britain based on the balance of the academic, social, moral and psychological benefits.
December 10: A panic starts in Mexico City, with thousands of parents rushing schools and removing their children after a false rumour starts that vaccination drives are being used to sterilise the young en masse. Emperor Maximilian deploys the Imperial Guard into the streets to suppress the unrest, publicly being vaccinated himself on live television and giving a resounding speech condemning public madness and urging his people to think.
December 11: The Rhodesian Ministry of Defence begins shifting of forces to peacetime stations in the north of the country, in one of the practical signs of the end of the ‘Bush War’ against Soviet backed guerrillas. Remaining insurgent groups are largely being dealt with by the paramilitary British South African Police.
December 12: US Chemical Corps research chemists isolate and identify a new series of powerful binary malodorant lachrymatory chemical weapons capable of partially penetrating modern protective clothing and MBCR suits, along with a new strain of 'super lysergic acid diethylamide', capable of stabilised airborne deployment.
December 13: American physicians and medical researchers develop a design for 'artificial skin' for the treatment of burns victims, with skin cells from the victim being taken, cultured and then applied in a spray to provide for rapid replacement of the damaged dermis.
December 14: A Japanese holdout, Private Teruo Nakamura, on Morotai in the Dutch Moluccas, emerges from the jungle and surrenders to local police, over 29 years since the end of the Second World War, becoming the final combatant from the war to surrender.
December 15: Imperial Chinese Air Force jet fighter-interceptors attempt to engage a UFO over Shensi and Szechuan in a series of attacks through the night that culminate in the object, purportedly saucer shaped, crashing in the rugged forested highlands in the far west of Szechuan. The pilots, radar operators and command staff involved are summoned to Peking to receive the personal gratitude of the Emperor, with investigations and recovery operations to be managed by a special detachment of eunuchs of the Jinyiwei or Imperial Court Secret Service handselected by Imperial Chancellor Fu Manchu.
December 16: Forces from Mali cross the border of the Upper Volta in response to the deterioration of a long running dispute regarding water rights to the Beli River, currently five miles within the Upper Volta, leading to an unofficial low level armed conflict that will feature regular half-hearted skirmishes but no large scale engagements, in accordance with a general direction from Paris.
December 17: An Anglo-American expedition deep into the heart of Africa claims to have potentially found the lost city of Opar in particularly rugged terrain in the far north of the Congo, having taken photographs of overgrown ruined buildings and pyramid shaped structures deep in the virgin rainforest close to the border with Ubangi-Shari.
December 18: British industrial scientists produce an experimental prototype of a computer-assisted automatic polymetric fabricator, a device which constructs a three dimensional object according to a design fed into a computer through a programme on cassette or floppy disk through the application of deposits of plastic or polymer filaments or potentially powdered metals.
December 19: Arkansas Nuclear One, a four unit nuclear fusion plant on Lake Dardanelle at Russellville, begins commercial operations; at over 12500 MWe, it is the largest nuclear power station of any kind in the United States, overtaking the expansive Springfield Nuclear Fusion Power Station in Indiana.
December 20: A cruel series of avalanches in Iceland kill a dozen people near the fishing village of Neskaupstaður on the east coast, wrecking two farms on the slopes above the settlement. The tragedy leads to calls for the installation of protective barriers and dweomers to prevent a repetition of the disaster; rescuers also uncover a number of recently abandoned campsites in the vicinity of the settlement along with artifacts of a foreign military nature.
December 21: Royal Argentinian Navy amphibious warship Cándido de Lasala is stricken by an accidental boiler room explosion in the English Channel whilst on a visit to Britain, and has to be towed into Portland Royal Navy Dockyard for emergency repairs. Negotiations between Argentine and British officials regarding acquisition of a new series of guided missile destroyers continue throughout the incident, with the leader of the Argentine delegation in London, Vice-Admiral Carlos Büsser, approvingly noting the speed of the response to the accident.
December 22: A tropical cyclone that had formed two days previously over the Arafura Sea and been identified by British and American weather satellites is dispelled through use of advanced meteorological enchantments, which rapidly cool the ocean below it, dissipating the storm. It had been considered an outside possibility that it could change course and make landfall in the vicinity of Darwin, necessitating the costly but decisive action.
December 23: Unveiling of the Saunders-Roe Leviathan, a nuclear powered ‘super flying boat’ designed for Pacific and Indian Ocean special cargo operations, with Admiralty funding contributing a significant portion of the eye watering development cost.
December 24: Pope Paul VI inaugurates the Jubilee of 1975 in a special Christmas Eve ceremony at the Vatican which is televised to over fifty countries around the world, with the 77 year old Pontiff seeming heartier after his recent bout of early winter illness.
December 25: Queen Elizabeth II's Christmas message to Britain, the Empire and Commonwealth is one of encouragement and hope, with Her Majesty describing the many advances in science and international peace and goodwill and general social renewal as Christmas stars and lights of hope, in their own way. The day is improved for all active British servicemen in the Armed Forces, who receive an unexpected additional Christmas bonus of £25 from the Crown, which, along with the new special Christmas ration packs and lavish dinners provided in the messes for those abroad or on duty, go a very small way towards ameliorating this aspect of their duty.
December 26: Initial data on popular children's Christmas presents across the Western world, assembled through sales records and some consultation with spokeselves for Father Christmas, indicates that whilst traditional toys such as dolls, action figures, puzzles, costumes, weapons and various vehicles remain the most popular options, there is an increasing move, particularly in Britain, the United States and Canada, towards new electronic gadgets, with the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari Video Computer System and the Sinclair Arcadivision proving increasingly popular among young boys.
December 27: Researchers working in the catacombs of the Great Library of Alexandria uncover an ancient map which features startling accurate depictions of far flung landmasses and a number of islands not present in the modern world.
December 28: The KGB receives strange reports of an apparent 'moving forest' deep in the Eastern Siberian taiga near Tunguska, leading to a joint emergency expedition to the remote region with the SVK. This is to lead to recommendations for the establishment of the first 'zapovednik', or permanent secure nature reserve, in the Soviet Union.
December 29: Commandos of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional assault a mansion in Managua, kidnapping the former head of the National Bank of Nicaragua, his family and several dinner guests and holding them for ransom. President Somoza vows that the captives will be freed and 'the communists bought to justice.'
December 30: President Reagan authorises a plan for substantively increased US foreign aid to South America, Africa, the Orient and Europe to counteract Soviet diplomatic efforts and covert subversion of allied and neutral states, along with a renewed Mutual Defence Assistance Program to provide for the purchase and supply of military equipment as the Cold War takes a further twist in the aftermath of the Free World's victory in South Vietnam.
December 31: United States Navy Flight 19 lands, some 29 years after it took off from NAS Fort Lauderdale, on the sands of the Giza Plateau near the Great Pyramid.
December 1: A Canadian joint venture (made up of Avro Canada, Canadair, Imperial Oil, Dominion Engineering, Victoria Shipbuilding and Canadian Steel) is awarded an £1800 million contract for the development and construction of the first stage of the habitation module of the Commonwealth starship project, in one of the first major components to be awarded, after the engineering module in Scotland to the group of Beardmores, Rolls Royce, John Brown, United Steel and RSCM, and the storage/supply module in the English Midlands to a group of Hawker-Siddeley, Vickers, English Electric and ICI.
December 2: A number of potential Democratic candidates for the party’s 1976 nomination for President who have emerged over 1974 form exploratory committees for their prospective presidential campaigns, including Senators Robert F. Kennedy, Lloyd Bentsen Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, and Bill McKay, Representative Raymond Shaw, Californian Governor Jerry Brown and Georgian Governor James Carter.
December 3: The Mexican government declares tequila to be its own intellectual property, making it compulsory for a beverage to be manufactured and aged in certain regions of the Empire of Mexico in order to be classified as tequila, and claiming to make it illegal for other states to make their own version of the fiery spirit and name it as such. The action will precipitate a series of unfortunate events culminating in a very long running international legal dispute and subsequent developments.
December 4: An Aeroflot An-2 taking off from Irkutsk collides in midair with an An-12 coming into land, resulting in the death of all 15 passengers and crew onboard the smaller plane. The duty air traffic controllers are arrested by the KGB and sent to the Gulag, pending investigations.
December 5: A snow-laden roof comes near to collapse at Teheran Airport, before a blue, red and gold blur is seen streaking in to stabilise it long enough for those underneath it to escape. The Daily Planet's Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Clark Kent, in the Persian capital for a conference on Shah Kamar's modernisation programme, reports that the strange sight could have been anything.
December 6: Commissioning of the first of the Soviet Navy’s Project 236 guided missile destroyers, known to Western intelligence as the Sovremenny class. At over 10,000 tons standard displacement, the Sovremennys represent the closest equivalents to the British Type 42 and American Spruance class DLGs, featuring a very heavy gun armament of three quad 130mm mounts, six quad 52mm mounts, four twin 37mm AK-630 CWS and eight quad 25mm light general purpose gun mounts; 8 SS-N-19 Shipwreck and 24 SS-N-22 Sunburn anti-ship missiles; 2 SA-N-6 medium range surface to air missile launchers and 4 SA-N-4 short range SAM launchers; twin RBU-6000 launchers and eight SS-N-15 Starfish ASW missiles; and two helicopters. A further 27 ships are currently under construction, with a minimum of 36 further vessels on order or projected as part of new Soviet Navy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s extremely ambitious Global Fleet Construction Plan for 250 destroyers and frigates, 80 cruisers and 20 battlecruisers, 15 battleships, 12 nuclear supercarriers and 150 submarines between 1972 and 1990.
December 7: After two month of observation, testing, photography, probing and scanning of Nereid, the newly discovered Proteus and other small moons of Neptune, astronauts from Orion 6 land on the surface of Triton. They observe abundant frozen nitrogen across the icy surface and evidence of recent eruptions by cryovolanoes. Observation of certain features previously dubbed the 'cantaloupe terrain' supports the hypothesis that they had been caused by cryovolcanic flooding, and a number of samples are taken from the surface, including some particularly curious and seemingly out of place rocks.
December 8: Breakdown of South American arms limitations talks at a conference in Quinua to mark the sesquicentenary of the Battle of Ayacucho, with irreconcilable differences between Argentina, Brazil and Chile on the extent of naval and missile restrictions leading to the collapse, which sparks fears of a new looking South American arms race.
December 9: The Ministry of Education receives a white paper on single sex education in secondary state schools, with researchers suggesting that it be further extended to a de facto universal level across Britain based on the balance of the academic, social, moral and psychological benefits.
December 10: A panic starts in Mexico City, with thousands of parents rushing schools and removing their children after a false rumour starts that vaccination drives are being used to sterilise the young en masse. Emperor Maximilian deploys the Imperial Guard into the streets to suppress the unrest, publicly being vaccinated himself on live television and giving a resounding speech condemning public madness and urging his people to think.
December 11: The Rhodesian Ministry of Defence begins shifting of forces to peacetime stations in the north of the country, in one of the practical signs of the end of the ‘Bush War’ against Soviet backed guerrillas. Remaining insurgent groups are largely being dealt with by the paramilitary British South African Police.
December 12: US Chemical Corps research chemists isolate and identify a new series of powerful binary malodorant lachrymatory chemical weapons capable of partially penetrating modern protective clothing and MBCR suits, along with a new strain of 'super lysergic acid diethylamide', capable of stabilised airborne deployment.
December 13: American physicians and medical researchers develop a design for 'artificial skin' for the treatment of burns victims, with skin cells from the victim being taken, cultured and then applied in a spray to provide for rapid replacement of the damaged dermis.
December 14: A Japanese holdout, Private Teruo Nakamura, on Morotai in the Dutch Moluccas, emerges from the jungle and surrenders to local police, over 29 years since the end of the Second World War, becoming the final combatant from the war to surrender.
December 15: Imperial Chinese Air Force jet fighter-interceptors attempt to engage a UFO over Shensi and Szechuan in a series of attacks through the night that culminate in the object, purportedly saucer shaped, crashing in the rugged forested highlands in the far west of Szechuan. The pilots, radar operators and command staff involved are summoned to Peking to receive the personal gratitude of the Emperor, with investigations and recovery operations to be managed by a special detachment of eunuchs of the Jinyiwei or Imperial Court Secret Service handselected by Imperial Chancellor Fu Manchu.
December 16: Forces from Mali cross the border of the Upper Volta in response to the deterioration of a long running dispute regarding water rights to the Beli River, currently five miles within the Upper Volta, leading to an unofficial low level armed conflict that will feature regular half-hearted skirmishes but no large scale engagements, in accordance with a general direction from Paris.
December 17: An Anglo-American expedition deep into the heart of Africa claims to have potentially found the lost city of Opar in particularly rugged terrain in the far north of the Congo, having taken photographs of overgrown ruined buildings and pyramid shaped structures deep in the virgin rainforest close to the border with Ubangi-Shari.
December 18: British industrial scientists produce an experimental prototype of a computer-assisted automatic polymetric fabricator, a device which constructs a three dimensional object according to a design fed into a computer through a programme on cassette or floppy disk through the application of deposits of plastic or polymer filaments or potentially powdered metals.
December 19: Arkansas Nuclear One, a four unit nuclear fusion plant on Lake Dardanelle at Russellville, begins commercial operations; at over 12500 MWe, it is the largest nuclear power station of any kind in the United States, overtaking the expansive Springfield Nuclear Fusion Power Station in Indiana.
December 20: A cruel series of avalanches in Iceland kill a dozen people near the fishing village of Neskaupstaður on the east coast, wrecking two farms on the slopes above the settlement. The tragedy leads to calls for the installation of protective barriers and dweomers to prevent a repetition of the disaster; rescuers also uncover a number of recently abandoned campsites in the vicinity of the settlement along with artifacts of a foreign military nature.
December 21: Royal Argentinian Navy amphibious warship Cándido de Lasala is stricken by an accidental boiler room explosion in the English Channel whilst on a visit to Britain, and has to be towed into Portland Royal Navy Dockyard for emergency repairs. Negotiations between Argentine and British officials regarding acquisition of a new series of guided missile destroyers continue throughout the incident, with the leader of the Argentine delegation in London, Vice-Admiral Carlos Büsser, approvingly noting the speed of the response to the accident.
December 22: A tropical cyclone that had formed two days previously over the Arafura Sea and been identified by British and American weather satellites is dispelled through use of advanced meteorological enchantments, which rapidly cool the ocean below it, dissipating the storm. It had been considered an outside possibility that it could change course and make landfall in the vicinity of Darwin, necessitating the costly but decisive action.
December 23: Unveiling of the Saunders-Roe Leviathan, a nuclear powered ‘super flying boat’ designed for Pacific and Indian Ocean special cargo operations, with Admiralty funding contributing a significant portion of the eye watering development cost.
December 24: Pope Paul VI inaugurates the Jubilee of 1975 in a special Christmas Eve ceremony at the Vatican which is televised to over fifty countries around the world, with the 77 year old Pontiff seeming heartier after his recent bout of early winter illness.
December 25: Queen Elizabeth II's Christmas message to Britain, the Empire and Commonwealth is one of encouragement and hope, with Her Majesty describing the many advances in science and international peace and goodwill and general social renewal as Christmas stars and lights of hope, in their own way. The day is improved for all active British servicemen in the Armed Forces, who receive an unexpected additional Christmas bonus of £25 from the Crown, which, along with the new special Christmas ration packs and lavish dinners provided in the messes for those abroad or on duty, go a very small way towards ameliorating this aspect of their duty.
December 26: Initial data on popular children's Christmas presents across the Western world, assembled through sales records and some consultation with spokeselves for Father Christmas, indicates that whilst traditional toys such as dolls, action figures, puzzles, costumes, weapons and various vehicles remain the most popular options, there is an increasing move, particularly in Britain, the United States and Canada, towards new electronic gadgets, with the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari Video Computer System and the Sinclair Arcadivision proving increasingly popular among young boys.
December 27: Researchers working in the catacombs of the Great Library of Alexandria uncover an ancient map which features startling accurate depictions of far flung landmasses and a number of islands not present in the modern world.
December 28: The KGB receives strange reports of an apparent 'moving forest' deep in the Eastern Siberian taiga near Tunguska, leading to a joint emergency expedition to the remote region with the SVK. This is to lead to recommendations for the establishment of the first 'zapovednik', or permanent secure nature reserve, in the Soviet Union.
December 29: Commandos of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional assault a mansion in Managua, kidnapping the former head of the National Bank of Nicaragua, his family and several dinner guests and holding them for ransom. President Somoza vows that the captives will be freed and 'the communists bought to justice.'
December 30: President Reagan authorises a plan for substantively increased US foreign aid to South America, Africa, the Orient and Europe to counteract Soviet diplomatic efforts and covert subversion of allied and neutral states, along with a renewed Mutual Defence Assistance Program to provide for the purchase and supply of military equipment as the Cold War takes a further twist in the aftermath of the Free World's victory in South Vietnam.
December 31: United States Navy Flight 19 lands, some 29 years after it took off from NAS Fort Lauderdale, on the sands of the Giza Plateau near the Great Pyramid.
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jemhouston
- Posts: 5005
- Joined: Fri Nov 18, 2022 12:38 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
These two events highlighted what I dislike about DE and like most.
The fact chemical weapons are being upgraded I dislike, but new skin is good.December 12: US Chemical Corps research chemists isolate and identify a new series of powerful binary malodorant lachrymatory chemical weapons capable of partially penetrating modern protective clothing and MBCR suits, along with a new strain of 'super lysergic acid diethylamide', capable of stabilised airborne deployment.
December 13: American physicians and medical researchers develop a design for 'artificial skin' for the treatment of burns victims, with skin cells from the victim being taken, cultured and then applied in a spray to provide for rapid replacement of the damaged dermis.
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Simon Darkshade
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
Chemical weapons are one of those things that are needed if the other side has them, just in case; the airborne LSD is a potential story hook.
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Belushi TD
- Posts: 1284
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 11:20 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
HA!!!! LOVE the fact that Flight 19 finally gets somewhere. I presume the pilots are the same age they left, with the exception of aging the same length of time as their proposed flight?
Belushi TD
Belushi TD
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Simon Darkshade
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
They don’t seem to have aged at all, and are rather confused as to how they are landing in a different continent and hemisphere; the last thing they saw was a flash like a gigantic camera going off.
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Simon Darkshade
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:55 am
Re: Dark Earth Timeline Discussion
December 1974 Notes
- The Commonwealth starship contracts are being spread around both Britain and the more industrialised Dominions and are useful employers as well as generating a very long term product; there will also be various spin off inventions and technologies put to earthly use
- The list of potential Democratic candidates for 1976 includes some familiar names, plus Bill McKay (Robert Redford's character in The Candidate) and Raymond Shaw...from The Manchurian Candidate
- Mexican action regarding tequila is historical, but there is a hint that there will be some unexpected consequences
- The Aeroflot accident was just that - an accident - but the treatment of those involved and the mention of the Gulags hints at some nastier stuff behind the veneer of the modern USSR
- Clark Kent managed to just miss the rescue/accident prevention, again
- The Sovremennys are closer to an amalgam of the @ class and the Slavas, and are sized to be competitive with the Western DLGs. The mention of Gorshkov being relatively newly in charge is a result of Kuznetsov lasting through to 1972 in the absence of Khruschev
- Something weird was found on Triton
- South America remains a steadily arming powder keg of sorts
- Single sex education, at least at a secondary level, was quite common even at this stage in @ Britain, and there are a number of arguments in its favour, just as there are those against it, which don't just dwell on tradition or social conservatism, but encompass relative academic performance, social and psychological development and allowing for concentration on studies. Its ubiquity is perhaps more pronounced by the different tripartite British secondary school structure, with Grammars/Secondary/Technical each having their own needs and areas of focus; note the complete absence of comprehensives
- The Mexican school panic is a historical event, but the Emperor's intervention quashes it a bit faster and more decisively
- Rhodesia will now shift its focus and certain aspects of development will follow
- Secret developmnent of airborne Super LSD is absolutely not going to cause any sort of trouble, no sirree!
- Artificial skin did start development in the 1970s, but the spray on version was an early 2000s manifestation in @, being used for victims of the 2002 Bali bombings
- There is a hint that the Chinese have downed something, and are covering their tracks, with the 'personal gratitude of the Emperor' being rather euphemistic
- Mali and Upper Volta come to blows, with the French indicating that it will be permitted so long as it doesn't get out of control and stays on a localised level. That type of patronising domination is going to be another thing that grates...
- Opar was shifted here to allow for Churchill's 100th on November 30
- Development of even an experimental prototype of what amounts to a 3D printer has some interesting longer term consequences and flow on industrial effects
- Arkansas Nuclear One won't be the only 'the Wonder State's' only such plant; note that Springfield now has an operational fusion plant, which will change things a bit if and when Homer J. Simpson get's his promised job there
- There is the suggestion that Spetsnaz have been snooping around Iceland, scouting out wartime operating locations
- Leader of the Argentine naval mission to Britain is Carlos Busser, who commanded that 1982 invasion of the Falklands Islands in @. On an interesting note, there are currently more RN ships in Portsmouth on this day in DE 1974 than in the entire task force deployed for Operation Corporate, as well as being rather stronger in firepower and capacity both individually and collectively
- Cyclone Tracy never makes it to Darwin (with apologies to The Hoodoo Gurus), which has a rather big impact on Northern Australia and even Australia in general
- The Saro Leviathan is a very big bugger, designed for ultra-long range patrol and support operations in the event of hot war
- His Holiness the Pope is getting on a bit
- Christmas bonuses to every member of HM Armed Forces costs a bit, but is a nice gesture. The details of the Christmas special ration packs and festive menus are of course available if chaps are interested; I might even do a Dark Earth version on a ration 'unpacking' by a cross-universe equivalent to Steve1989MREInfo from YouTube as a bit of fun, should the time and interest arise, as he is one of the good guys of the YouTube MRE community
- Video gaming devices seem to be rising in popularity a bit earlier, as projected
- More tantalising bits and pieces emerge from the Great Library
- Something strange is going on around Tunguska, which might not be what it seems
- Nicaragua rumbles
- Another consequence of victory in Vietnam is a different strategy for the next stage of the Cold War
- As is traditional, the year ends on a mysterious note with the landing of Flight 19
- The Commonwealth starship contracts are being spread around both Britain and the more industrialised Dominions and are useful employers as well as generating a very long term product; there will also be various spin off inventions and technologies put to earthly use
- The list of potential Democratic candidates for 1976 includes some familiar names, plus Bill McKay (Robert Redford's character in The Candidate) and Raymond Shaw...from The Manchurian Candidate
- Mexican action regarding tequila is historical, but there is a hint that there will be some unexpected consequences
- The Aeroflot accident was just that - an accident - but the treatment of those involved and the mention of the Gulags hints at some nastier stuff behind the veneer of the modern USSR
- Clark Kent managed to just miss the rescue/accident prevention, again
- The Sovremennys are closer to an amalgam of the @ class and the Slavas, and are sized to be competitive with the Western DLGs. The mention of Gorshkov being relatively newly in charge is a result of Kuznetsov lasting through to 1972 in the absence of Khruschev
- Something weird was found on Triton
- South America remains a steadily arming powder keg of sorts
- Single sex education, at least at a secondary level, was quite common even at this stage in @ Britain, and there are a number of arguments in its favour, just as there are those against it, which don't just dwell on tradition or social conservatism, but encompass relative academic performance, social and psychological development and allowing for concentration on studies. Its ubiquity is perhaps more pronounced by the different tripartite British secondary school structure, with Grammars/Secondary/Technical each having their own needs and areas of focus; note the complete absence of comprehensives
- The Mexican school panic is a historical event, but the Emperor's intervention quashes it a bit faster and more decisively
- Rhodesia will now shift its focus and certain aspects of development will follow
- Secret developmnent of airborne Super LSD is absolutely not going to cause any sort of trouble, no sirree!
- Artificial skin did start development in the 1970s, but the spray on version was an early 2000s manifestation in @, being used for victims of the 2002 Bali bombings
- There is a hint that the Chinese have downed something, and are covering their tracks, with the 'personal gratitude of the Emperor' being rather euphemistic
- Mali and Upper Volta come to blows, with the French indicating that it will be permitted so long as it doesn't get out of control and stays on a localised level. That type of patronising domination is going to be another thing that grates...
- Opar was shifted here to allow for Churchill's 100th on November 30
- Development of even an experimental prototype of what amounts to a 3D printer has some interesting longer term consequences and flow on industrial effects
- Arkansas Nuclear One won't be the only 'the Wonder State's' only such plant; note that Springfield now has an operational fusion plant, which will change things a bit if and when Homer J. Simpson get's his promised job there
- There is the suggestion that Spetsnaz have been snooping around Iceland, scouting out wartime operating locations
- Leader of the Argentine naval mission to Britain is Carlos Busser, who commanded that 1982 invasion of the Falklands Islands in @. On an interesting note, there are currently more RN ships in Portsmouth on this day in DE 1974 than in the entire task force deployed for Operation Corporate, as well as being rather stronger in firepower and capacity both individually and collectively
- Cyclone Tracy never makes it to Darwin (with apologies to The Hoodoo Gurus), which has a rather big impact on Northern Australia and even Australia in general
- The Saro Leviathan is a very big bugger, designed for ultra-long range patrol and support operations in the event of hot war
- His Holiness the Pope is getting on a bit
- Christmas bonuses to every member of HM Armed Forces costs a bit, but is a nice gesture. The details of the Christmas special ration packs and festive menus are of course available if chaps are interested; I might even do a Dark Earth version on a ration 'unpacking' by a cross-universe equivalent to Steve1989MREInfo from YouTube as a bit of fun, should the time and interest arise, as he is one of the good guys of the YouTube MRE community
- Video gaming devices seem to be rising in popularity a bit earlier, as projected
- More tantalising bits and pieces emerge from the Great Library
- Something strange is going on around Tunguska, which might not be what it seems
- Nicaragua rumbles
- Another consequence of victory in Vietnam is a different strategy for the next stage of the Cold War
- As is traditional, the year ends on a mysterious note with the landing of Flight 19