Scenario Seeds - Alternate Technology

A note for peoplee encountering my 'Scenario Seeds' for the first time: They are basically brainstorming sessions where I take some aspect of history and try to figure out what else could have happened as a result of it.  The object is to come up with ideas that can be developed into settings for stories.  If you see something here that you think can be developed into a great novel go for it.  Ideas for stories can't be copyrighted.  Just put a line in the front of your book acknowledging where you got the idea and I'll be happy.

The exact timing of various inventions was not entirely set in stone.  Most technologies could probably have happened a few years before or after they did.  As a brainstorming exercise, let’s try looking at the impact if some technologies had happened say up to ten years before or ten years after they did historically.

1.      Radar:  Delay the development by two or three years, maybe just in Britain, or more likely world-wide.

a.      How would the Battle of Britain go with no British radar?

b.      How would the Battle of France have gone if the French have a functional radar system (They actually had a few British sets, plus a somewhat less functional home-grown system near Paris, but no ability to filter and analyze the data effectively).

c.       How would Pearl Harbor have gone if the US had fully functional radar there and a system for using it, rather than experimental sets and an ad hoc reporting system?

d.      How would the early naval battles in the Mediterranean have gone if the Italians had deployed the radar systems that they developed but didn’t deploy?

2.      Tanks.  Accelerate the development by maybe a year or a little more during the first part of World War I.

a.      The Allies have operational tanks in 1915, and do the first mass tank attack in 1916.  How does that change the course of the war?  Do tanks advance enough by the end of the war to establish themselves as the kind of decisive weapon they became in World War II?  Do the Germans respond to the Allied tanks early enough to build a significant tank fleet before the end of World War I?

b.      Accelerate Italian tank development by about a year throughout the war.  That has a surprisingly large impact on the fighting in North Africa.  Italian tanks really tended to come out around a year and a half later than they needed to.  For example, the M13/40 would have been respectable, though not great if it had gone into production in early 1939 and several hundred to a thousand had been available by mid-1940.  Instead, they only became available in limited quantities toward the end of 1940, and by the time the Italian army got them in significant quantities they had only a short time before they became obsolete.

c.       Do the same thing with British or French or US tank development.  Sherman tanks in late 1941?  Comets in mid-1943?

d.      Slow down Soviet or German developments.  The Panther delayed 6 months to a year?  The T34 delayed by a year?

e.       Accelerate Japanese tank development so that they have decent tanks to counter the Soviets at Nomanham.       

3.      Nuclear power: Speed it up by ten years, so that countries are making tentative steps toward it by the late 20’s, and every power worthy of the name is racing to get the bomb by the mid-1930s.  Boy, that’s a nightmare scenario.  I’m guessing that the Germans or the Soviets would win that race, given their willingness to cut corners and pour resources into that kind of a race.  That in turn is the stuff of nightmares.  Of course slowing down US development by even a year has nasty consequences in terms of a US invasion of the Japanese home islands.

4.      Jet aircraft: Speed development up by 2 to 4 years—maybe worldwide or possibly in just one country.  Britain had jets by late 1944.  Could they have had them by 1940?  That would have been interesting.  British jets versus Me109s in the Battle of Britain.  Of course it could go the other way.  German jets versus Spitfires in the Battle of Britain.  Now that would be an interesting scenario, and probably not impossible given the right application of money in the right places.

5.      Synthetic rubber:  Delay the basic technology by a couple of years, so that the US can’t simply build a synthetic rubber industry when the supply of natural rubber is cut off by the Japanese conquest of Malaysia.  That puts production of pretty much everything necessary for modern warfare in jeopardy for all of the Allies, especially the Soviet Union.  Tanks? Trucks?  Planes?  Ships? Got to have rubber or a substitute if you want the vehicle to run for any length of time.  If the delay in developing the technology extends to Germany, they would get hit even harder than most of the Allies.

6.      Rocketry: Accelerate V2 development by a year, so it is operational in the fall of 1943 and available in large quantities in 1944.  Von Braun and company move on to the next level and have more advanced designs ready by the end of the war.  The Germans would almost certainly still lose, but the impact on the postwar rocket race could be interesting.  We could also go the other way on this: V2 production is delayed and there aren’t large quantities left over at the end of the war for the victorious Allies to play with.

7.      DDT:  The US doesn’t discover this pesticide in the late 1930s.  That actually would have had a large impact on World War II.  First, historically the Germans noticed that publicly available research on those compounds had suddenly dried up, which convinced them that the US had discovered nerve gases.  That was part of the reason the Germans didn’t use them in World War II.  Also, DDT kept Typhus down among the Allies during the War, and allowed them to have bases in mosquito-ridden areas where they normally would not have been able to put them.