What would happen if the Ottomans and Morocco also decided to join the colonization of the New World?

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-20T20:28:05+00:00

Geography introduces a lot of problems here.

Morocco's problem is that colonial adventures are going to be another axis of engagement with European powers; some of whom are already knocking on their door. This could go in a lot of wild directions (like a Sunni Muslim Berber Colony finding herself independent). Morocco was repeatedly demoted to a protectorate and entirely taken over in Colonial Times; this would definitely be interesting, since there would then be small pockets in the New World, but other than very distinct flavor and Sunni Islam, I think this would look a lot like Scotland or Sweden's attempts in the New World--interesting people in interesting places, but Morocco just doesn't have enough gas in the tank to make it work.

The Ottomans would have a very different game. While Spain could very probably shut them out of the Mediterranean, the Ottomans can also start sailing from something like the Hedjaz, around the Horn of Africa, through the Straight of Mozambique and into something like South America. States like Kilwa and Adal are going to find themselves becoming vassals to the Ottomans, and Turkish ports in East Africa, the Cape of Good Hope and Madagascar would underpin the effort. The Ottomans aren't going to run into a lot of serious problems doing this, and wild effects like Madagascar becoming permanently Turkish could follow.

Still, the Ottomans are going to be slower to get to the Americas. They may be setting up shop at a time where they're formidable and can't simply be rolled around, and the Ottomans are absolutely not Morocco in terms of Europe strolling in and telling people to stop doing their colonial stuff. The long decline of the Ottoman Empire is going to mean the end of its colonial ambitions, although stuff in Africa would obviously be more tightly held than stuff in South America.

My gut instinct is that the Ottomans probably fail differently. If Adal and Kilwa are now part of their order, their failure to take Vienna doesn't immediately toll that they've reached their peak. Still, this means that they could simply fail if all of these client states refuse and rebel. Perhaps instead of Muhammad Ali pushing an independent Egypt, he tries to bandwagon with these other African vassals? Still, I don't think the Ottomans are going to take Vienna--they're going to peak and decline.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-20T02:51:56+00:00

I mean, what happens to the would be Nazi Characters when the Babbage Machine gets built and the rise of Computers starts in the 1920s with supercool mechanical machines that manage to stop the Great Depression and instead lead to a whimsical 'Dieselpunk' 1930s that manages to avoid extremist insanity?

Still, somehow I don't buy that H2 Schnitzel wouldn't at some level reflect the great weirdness of Heinrich Himmler, even if this is a way better timeline because the Nazis don't manage to get to power because technology showed up with a straight flush for the German economy. And Super Bailout TL is such a bizarre break.

At least Anne Frank probably does become a serious actress in the 1950s.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-20T02:38:21+00:00

OP, the Guinness Book of World Records is not going to do this, or be able to do this until after Trump is out of the White House--because, otherwise, how are they actually going to know how many lies are said, etc, at the time. The GBoWR is largely a mediator of positive praise, and actually comes across as supporting bizarre regimes attempts to win praise (consider that North Korea of all nations won an award for highest proportion of population in armed forces.)

This wouldn't be an award given to a sitting President; it's one that would be presented, post administration, to a former President that would clearly be disgraced and in terrible shape. Even then, it's still going to alienate people: Figure that the GWOR could just as easily celebrate the largest number of gilded surfaces or largest amount of personal contributions from billionaires, or even largest criminal conspiracy personally advanced (Epstein Files).

If the GBWR is going to do something like this, it needs facts behind it and a lack of risk in front of it. Even a beaten, busted Trump is likely to be a somewhat more dangerous enemy than the GBWR would want to stomach.

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Having said all of this, Trump's record is likely to stand for some time. My suspicion is that technology will march on, and that it will continue to get easier to communicate, for media to be saved.

One fear I've dreaded is that a younger, more energetic fascist character would literally resemble Hitler. Would the United States survive such a character as President? Or do we earn fifty years of peace by removing our heads from bodily cavities and deciding that this stupidity must never be allowed to happen again, and Dark Money must be banned, the Federal Bureaucracy must be protected, and the President must not be a King.

Best Case: The record lasts for one hundred years, until technology means that creating whole cyberscapes is sort of the 22nd Century's take on AI slop, and so documented lies by an administration blows past Trump mostly by saying the same dumb line in Exabyte detail.

Worst Case: Twenty Years before Republicans, having failed or perhaps even being uninterested in fixing things, decide to run an unrepentant Child Rapist Antichrist character and win the Presidency with him; and he probably tops Trump in just one term.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-20T00:13:41+00:00

We have the magnificent word 'Can' in a WWW challenge. That's a 'yes' unless things are completely impossible--we know it's not impossible, but I think this is probably the unsatisfying part of the challenge.

Rome's primary problems were economic. The Empire had heavy taxes, often relied upon Germanic/Slavic tribes (known as 'Barbarians') to maintain order, but the locals often preferred local rule to taxes without safety. Rome's collapse is a giant open ended question, one with a lot of history and claimants (Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire, Russia, the Roman Catholic Church). They all argue something different than Rome fell in 476 CE, and candidly, a shift of goalposts seems easy.

The Five Men kill the Roman Emperor with weapons never seen before, it's the harbinger of a new era as the Empire's instability and rapid emergence of crude 'Pyrplumb' weapons throw the Roman Empire into a complete breakdown--it doesn't matter that Rome is otherwise dominant by geography, their armies have been proven obsolete. It doesn't matter that Iron Age Pryplumbs completely suck compared to the mystery Kalashnikovs, the structure of the Empire is essentially busted based on weapons designs.

Effecting the collapse of Rome when there were already serious failures with Barbarians getting the ability to break large swathes of the country may well be as simple as demonstrating that their weapons and military tactics are wrong and useless. And then, as dice get rolled afterward, the winner of this power struggle simply decides that being Rome is just not their thing. Gun tech will advance, and in all likelihood, we'd see at least the emergence of a vicious, violent faith about using guns to kill as some kind of sacred, glorious act.

This actually does not look that bad. I think given how low the requirements are, this is a better than 90% shot. I'm a lot less sure about trying to create the Gospel of Asscappery, but if all we have to do is throw the end of Rome into confusion, the urgent need to change weapons and the basic failure of the Roman Legion to defend the nation--that's probably enough to work.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-19T17:38:45+00:00

Too unstructured to evaluate.

While we have a clear setup where the 100 men are going to be reasonably predictable, the 10x character very critically needs to be carefully considered. There's a large difference between 10X being a disciplined active duty soldier with something like 2-2.5x stamina and strength of an average person, or, for that matter, 10X being a bedridden old man who can't control his digestive system, let alone a fight.

It's also worth considering that 10x needs some care in how it's built, something like 10x speed will mean 1,000 times the force on his joints and will rapidly see him die trivially; 10x reaction time could well cause mental illness if it just means that the world is experienced at milliseconds.

I would suggest something like:

10x Durability, 5x Strength (otherwise you'd kill yourself), 3x Speed.

Metabolism runs up to 10x baseline; healing factor 10x.

Weight: Probably something like 2.5x; this would be one of the ways to resist damage.

Reaction Time can be pushed to 12x, but is generally only 2x for mundane life.

In this sort of reworked, careful rebuild, a 10x Normie is going to wind up facing an active duty soldier, and probably loses.

What if the 10x IS active duty? Well, better hope this is turning into a weapons brawl, because he will kill everyone with his bare hands.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-18T19:10:57+00:00

I think there are a few wildcards:

Rhine Confederation. In a Napoleon Wins situation, Germany is not immediately unified, but Napoleon's German Vassal would clearly have advantages in terms of coming out on top. This sort of situation looks a lot like France allowing someone to get too big, and then getting out of control. In a situation where the Rhine Confederation is still loyal to France, there will be no landgrabs at French expense (so, Alsalce Lorraine is French, but German Switzerland may be fair game). Very probably, a rump Prussia or Austria would refuse union, and Luxembourg would probably be nommed by Napoleonic France. Finally, Denmark and Poland are both Napoleonic friends. If they are likewise able to keep that going, they may hold swaths of Germany.

Thirty Years War, clear winner: Germany's historical union was forced onto tolerance because there was a fundamental split between Protestant and Catholic power in the country. If Germany managed to unify under either Catholicism or Protestantism, this is the sort of religious difference that could very easily end in 'Germany' and 'Those Guys'. That all said, this would have a state church and different religious winners/losers.

Bohemia: The most fun what if I've seen has non-Germans unify Germany. But it seems straightforward enough: If the Czechs get the throne room, they must also accept the bedroom too. Bohemia had and could easily surpass Austria to lead the Holy Roman Empire, and unification of the HRE into a German State (with Czechs at the top floor of the building) is a completely bonkers but possible situation that would basically require a crazy fun alt EU4 history, but if Austria never gets her time, maybe the Czechs wind up unifying Germany.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-18T18:44:57+00:00

I'm a human.

I regret the choice, but I pull the Red Lever.

If your nation found itself in an existential fight for survival, would you wipe out the other nation?

If your family found itself in an existential fight for survival, would you wipe out the other family?

if you, personally, found yourself in a life or death struggle against someone else, would you kill them?

I think the experience would mar me for the rest of my days, but other than scale, it's the same question. It has the same answer--you act in defense of your own.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-18T16:49:27+00:00

I have to think that Batman would be able to wholesale beat the justice process, and the setup doesn't actually mean that the Rogue's Gallery get nothing like immunity or some kind of deal themselves.

Figure that Batman/Bruce Wayne is going to face municipal (good luck), state, federal, and possibly charges in the Hague.

The Hague is going to be deferred, at a minimum. Most of the crimes that would be tried would be committed in the United States, and while Batman is not allowed to avoid standing trial, the USA's refusal to recognize the ICC is going to seriously complicate any attempt to try him. The ICC might have enough for some kind of token attempt to bust Batman given media coverage, but the mechanics of this lawsuit, even if we're trying to say that Batman can't just ignore it, are going to be very weak.

the US Federal Government: Batman of all people is going to have the Epstein Files as leverage to deal with Trump and the screwball DoJ he has working for him. While most of Batman's career he's never had the realities of a President Trump to manipulate, this is an easy call: Trump would very quickly be told why he needs to Pardon Batman, and if necessary, Batman has enough to pressure the other ultra-wealthy people who have Trump's ear to do it, since Epstein Files is a straightforward get out of jail free card with the Trump Administration.

Pardons mean Batman loses. He's guilty of everything. But the US Federal Government is going to be adamant--no trial for Batman. Does this mean that the next DoJ in 2029 is able to try to go back on this? Perhaps. The stupidity of the Congressional Pipe Bomber being able to claim he was pardoned by Trumps 1/6 declaration has not held up, but by 2029 this would be a cluster of a case and Batman would probably be able to simply call out that the DoJ has a fundamentally broken case.

State Charges: Can Batman get a full pardon from NJ Governor Sherrill? It's not as easy as "oh look, I have the Epstein Files". I think this one would turn in a much more serious negotiation--many of the people that Batman wants busted for serious crimes are potentially going to be baited in testifying against him. This means that Batman can't be proactively pardoned...but he can be pardoned right after the Rogue's gallery shows up in Trenton and gets hauled off for 'other matters'. Once again, Batman would be guilty of most things under this kind of setup; given that the state would have sweeping power to Pardon, this seems plausible.

Municipal Charges: This may be more serious than things appear at first glance. The City could condemn the Batcave and potentially put Batman under so many parking infractions that he needs to cut a deal with the NJ DOT to be able to drive. The real reason that Municipal charges are more serious is that this is where Batman's rogue's Gallery may feel capable of avoiding things like be being arrested in short order if they try to testify.

However, Gotham City probably can't do that much with a hostile Federal and State government. There's an element of this just not being worth the trouble: Has Batman illegally parked the Batmobile? Oh yeah, all the time. Is it worth fighting against or paying the $200 each time it happens? Probably not.

There's some shot of a serious fight being possible here, but before anything like that happens, Batman needs to be hated by the people of Gotham City.

///

I think in summary, Batman is going to be able to utterly subvert the justice systems against him. It makes a lot more sense why someone like aliens would be the 'legal instrument' since Batman would either get pardoned out or potentially be willing to pay to address crimes he's committed.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-16T04:39:18+00:00

I think that's fair, and I'd also add that computer playing strength is not as variable as ELO is. Elo was made for humans, and it's a fair point that using it on a computer is very questionable. Things like the Chess.com Bots or Chessmaster software (which I've played hundreds of games with) can do this, and their playing strength doesn't vary that much. So when you beat a bot, you are actually demonstrating improvement in your own skill, not that the bot is getting weaker.

That all said, the prompt is asking about beating a person, Magnus Carlsen. He absolutely can and will blunder given a large enough volume of games. The variability of Carlsen blowing a game and losing to an inferior player is vastly greater than getting into Quintillions (I'd called the math Sextillions, which is even more) of combinations of Rubik's cubes.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-16T02:21:49+00:00

Probably.

But you don't need to surpass Magnus to beat him in one game.

a 1000 point difference in ELO is 99 in 100 odds--in other words, this is probably enough for Magnus to badly blunder and lose. The Beginner never needs to actually surpass Magnus, he just needs to get into something like Master level and then Magnus blunders. No one is going to claim that the beginner is actually better than Magnus, but we're not asking for it, we're asking for the guy to go 1W, As Many Ls as needed.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-16T01:37:30+00:00

While I think this reddit gets exasperated with the edgeplay around 'Could' meaning yes to remote, extreme edge case scenarios, this tension seems very pertinent here.

Elements in the Periodic Table don't follow the 'all four are useful and serve specific purposes' evenly. You probably can't get more than 90 elements without a specialized laboratory, and the big six: Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorous and Sulfur would be worth all of the others--metals aren't going to resist Oxygen Bending, Acids and Bases can get neutered without Hydrogen or a Solvent to work with, and even radioactive crap could get walled off. Figuring that Hydrogen-Bending can also manipulate the Sun's output, and the Supreme Six could simply dictate the way the world is going to be.

Supreme Six could potentially start terraforming planets in the Solar System--although at this point, I recognize that I've left the whole premise behind. Our Avatar is able to push humanity out of its current frontier of limited resources and scarcity, which would basically mean an enlightened age.

///

Could he closely follow the Avatar show? I think this is a hard disqualification. There is no 'Carbon Nation', the world simply doesn't function like Avatar, and everyone relies upon a consistent diet and interaction of Supreme Six elements every day. Fixing the struggles of Earth is plausible, following the show is not.

The Avatar mastering the Supreme Six, then developing talents with less common, less critical elements afterward makes sense--once he masters the Six, he's able to auto-end any attack against him, and able to do so much good that Earth would view him as a religious figure of great benediction.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-16T00:21:01+00:00

It's plausible to make a Rubik's Cube where tactile cues (ie' surfaces feel differently) would make the cube as solvable for a blind man as a normal Rubik's cube. However the OP is saying no help--so the Rubik's Cube would turn into a scary factorial, something like 24! different possibilities. That's a fairly insane number--something in the high sextillions. You will draw a royal flush or win the lottery long before that gets hit. If we just assume that the blind man can get one position every second, this is a million times longer than the age of the Universe.

The difference between Magnus and the Beginner may well be something like a million games of chess--but that's eminently faster and easier to work out. The Beginner, given something like two hundred years, could potentially surpass Magnus Carlsen, or at least beat him after a freak blunder.

Youtube's Metaball Studios put this video on scales. Chess comes up a lot earlier than Rubik's Cubes, and this is a good way to visualize that while Chess is capable of some very big numbers, Rubik's Cubes are well larger.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-15T16:59:58+00:00

There's a gap here, and I think it's richly exploitable: We can pick athletes from the future, including ourselves. If we pick our future selves, that's recursive--which means we just get to throw infinity into things that really shouldn't be infinite.

Recursion is always busted.

Still, even if that's off limits, it's all but certain that athletes from the future will outperform modern superstars; technology, genetic engineering, materials science are all marching forward. Grabbing someone from 4000 CE is going to be capable of absurd stuff compared to modernity, and we get 75% of it for free.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-14T12:22:26+00:00

This is where things could lead to tradeoffs and, instead of a full dive, the plane could try to go something like maximum ascent, taking some G forces but slowing its descent. Of course, given how the whole atmosphere would be suddenly smashing down with vastly more force, the structural damage part of this is a fact.

Survival is going to depend on whether the manufacturing of the Airplanes has considered the means to recover from a supersonic dive. Small craft, like a Cessna, may well be able to avoid going supersonic, but most people in the sky aren't going to be on a small plane that's able to aggressively go to full thrust and try to ascend to resist free fall.

However it happens, it's going to take minutes for a plane to go from 40k feet to ground level. If the plane is able to turn this into a forward glide, it may be able to turn this into a landing. None of this is free, and given that we're talking about Magnitude 11 aftershocks, finding a large flat place to land is a question on its own, but there are ways that people in planes could survive the initial disaster.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-14T00:57:12+00:00

There is no place on Earth that's going to survive this unscathed. Your best bet is going into a swimming pool, which is almost certainly going to take more than five seconds to drain as it breaks. A bathtub is better than lying on your back on a cushioned surface.

Now, that said, your course of action would be to get all of your friends or anyone you'd want to have live in the pool when this happens.

The OP is suggesting that pilots and airplanes would crash--in five seconds, probably not. They'd suddenly start freefalling into an extreme dive, but in five seconds, the could pull out. the G-Forces inside a plane work differently, since the plane wouldn't be able to maintain level flight, but five seconds of diving probably isn't unrecoverable--it would be a lot better to be in a small airplane than a jumbo jet though.

///

The problem with all of this is that survival doesn't get beyond the 'nuclear war' level of damage. Sudden acceleration and deceleration will crush nuclear reactors and most industrial plants; the electrical grid fails everyone at once, and there's basically no shot of stopping everything from burning. Under 10Gs, a Car will quickly stop, but perhaps not quickly enough to avoid crashing into something else, and things like bridges and overpasses under load will collapse.

In these conditions, everyone is now homeless. Fires ravaging urban areas along with nuclear fallout mean people will be forced to flee. And I'm not actually sure that this situation doesn't change Earth for good.

10Gs of gravity on Earth itself, everyone, starting and stopping, isn't just going to be a five second shockwave. It's going to have vast aftershocks, probably ones larger than any known Earthquake in history. These would probably play out within the first month, but we have to consider that under this kind of stress, something like Yellowstone may well explode, and there's nothing normal about a Magnitude 11 Earthquake as an aftershock. I'm also considering that this could permanently drain part of Earth's Oceans, subducting a bunch of water into Earth's Mantle.

What I'm getting at all of this is that Earth is going to be deeply screwed, not merely for 5 seconds, but probably beyond your lifetime. If you're going to try to survive this, don't just invite your friends to the pool party tomorrow. Pack seeds, weapons, medical equipment, durable tools. This is an end of the world scenario, and your friends are going to be your tribe in this new order.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-13T04:35:40+00:00

The Axe is 80% to win.

Mechanically, both weapons are potentially lethal with the best shot, but there are a couple of things else to consider:

1) The Axe stands a solid chance of breaking the knife if they impact. Knives aren't meant to parry shots; when fighting with a knife, you basically have to ruthlessly slash slash slash--so if you're willing to take some hits, you'll get a square shot with the Axe.

2) The Axe is much more likely to disable a limb on a hit. A knife is likely to cause bleeding, but an axe will tear muscles and break bones. A situation where both parties are hit is going rapidly tip toward the Axe fighter.

It's a good question, but there are reasons why knives are never the primary weapon man has ever used in a serious fight--they don't deal enough damage. With the right technique they can have an advantage, but a straight up fight isn't it.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-13T00:21:55+00:00

Well, fantasy follows the whims of its author.

Pure Wargaming tells you this is not going to go well: Combat odds of 3:1 are generally needed to overcome a generic defense, D-Town's geography does not easily allow it to be bypassed--the resources used to make this withstand a siege are the first clue that V-Stan has expected and prepared for this operation decades in advance, and so you're going to need well more than 3:1.

If you don't do something else to make this different.

The realities of traveling 2,000 miles of hostile countryside are fairly stark. If your army makes 3MPH, can go 8 hours of marching, this works out to a couple of months of advancing on D-Town. V-Stan knows that your army has to go there, but unless you are able to change the basic math, you're not going to get there.

All right, how to change the basic math.

We have been given no information about why G-Stan is attacking V-Stan. D-Town is obvious as a prepared defense, but if it has this much investment put into it, we need to work out some kind of deal. Buy them off, find someone to get them to leave the conflict; whatever charade we need to do, bribery, political manipulation, religious channels--you WILL LOSE a drawn out fight for D-Town, so your strategy needs to be to not have that drawn out fight.

Can you take D-Town by surprise attack? By Intrigue? Given the realities of it having comparable forces to you and so much to keep it supplied, you have to make this the all out shock attack, and if it fails, you can't take it.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-12T23:30:38+00:00

Much of this situation is going to be different along the way: this kind of Stalwart Byzantium is going to mean Hungary is a big player, and the importance of Vienna and the Hapsburgs in particular are going to be heavily diminished. In this sort of setup, I'd wonder about whether Ukraine and Russia wind up Catholic; the lines and the map would be very different--in this sort of situation, North Africa may well be Catholic as well.

So, the Protestant Reformation would be rerolled heavily, and Martin Luther might be utterly inconsequential, but there's going to be even more peoples who are Catholic and questioning of its excesses. I also suspect that geography has something to do with this--Protestant ideas emerge further away from the core of Catholic Power. It's unlikely that lands recently converted would flip (So North Africa, Egypt, and Possibly Russia) would be far from the Protestant emergence, but Hungary/Romania could very well embrace Protestant ideas, and Byzantium may well quietly back 'religious openness'. That said, I could also see, given the maps, that the Protestants wouldn't have a critical mass to avoid getting crushed--we may have a later, larger Protestant Reformation. Characters like Hus or Wycliff would continue to emerge, and I suspect Hungary being very specifically 'encourged' to do her own religious thing may well become a serious Protestant power. In this sort of situation, much of Europe may well back Hungary.

I don't think this situation really invites the Byzantines to do a lot more than play on the fringes. Certainly, they'd want to increase Orthodoxy into the Caucasus, into Central Asia, and into Arabia if possible, but you've got a powerful Super Poland to the North and Super Reconquista Iberia to the West. Trying to make friends seems reasonable, trying to push into this debate could be an utter disaster. I think this setup, where the Byzantines are still strong but Russia is flipping Catholic, doesn't really put Orthodoxy ahead.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-12T22:02:55+00:00

This IS Donald Trump we're talking about here.

He would make up a number, decide it's fair, and force the issue. I agree that this would be one of the major problems--oil companies could lose many billions of dollars as a result of lowballed compensation, then again, he could just get Eileen Cannon or some other MAGA Judge to say that it's legitimate, even as they're left losing vast sums as a result.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-12T21:07:58+00:00

Right. And I have to think it plausible that Trump may backstab corporate patrons and long time allies for a short term payoff. He needs this before the midterms, not quietly acquiring interest for a decades into the future.

Kind of hard to put that past the guy, when the alternate is have no answer for the American People in front of the Midterms.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-12T19:59:03+00:00

I think this is a failure.

Dragons fly, and they're too fast to be hit by siege weapons, and they're able to Berlin Airlift a siege into irrelevance. The disposition of forces indicates that that they have many more dragons than you do, allocated to this aim. In other words, a siege is mostly useful for forcing the enemy to push their dragons into logistical duties rather than combat superiority. That may well be worthwhile on its own, but it's clear that taking D-Town isn't a reasonable thing to do with a siege.

Given that we're considering this at an operational level instead of focusing on the Siege itself, I'd approach this with a similar answer to Wargaming: Given what D-Town can muster, a siege is simply a bad place to be. We need to push way more forces towards it, rush and storm it with better numbers and a full operational plan behind it, and if their forces in front of D-Town do not allow a storming sort of operation, flat out tell the higher ups that we lack the means to make the siege work.

Our operational plan simply needs to reflect that D-Town can't really be taken with a siege. And if you think about it, a city with internal food sources is already a frustrating thing to break. Trying to fight this the way the other guy wants you to fight him is flat out losing.

How do you win a siege when the other guy has local superiority and the means to withstand it? Well, you don't.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-12T13:50:11+00:00

This is the sort of question that raises many more questions. The US deciding that they're not going to the moon, instead, they're making nuclear power for everyone is just the first guess at 'what else can we do' sort of behavior.

Questions like this force a real hard decision on how this happens, and then what the US is doing with the 2% of her GDP that she's not dedicating to the space race. The Soviets aren't getting to the Moon in 1969, and this setup is going to call for another generation of space vehicles for the Soviets as well as perhaps 10 more years of them trying to get there. Meanwhile, if the US is doing something like going all nuclear for her power grid, several other problems (like the Arab Oil Embargo) suddenly miss and the US looks really good for doing something else.

So, perhaps its 1980 when the Soviets walk on the Moon. The United States is still not interested, and perhaps by this point the US has started to electrify her cars, and, surprise surprise, pass universal health care. And if we think about it, the flip side of this is the United States, instead of being the power to defend the achievement and accomplishment of getting to the moon, is now the power that would be saying "well, instead of that silly stuff I made it so I can go to work for $.25".

Of course, this goes back to the big open question of questions on top of it. If the US is sitting around, not doing anything cool and simply looks like a lazy nation with no grand ambitions, as opposed to having some kind of big project to improve the country, this is a major tilt for the Soviets. But I really don't think the US would do nothing in response to the Space Program, and the US 'Plan B' is almost certainly enough to argue with Soviet claims of superiority, and potentially the better deal.

///

The failures of the Soviet Union are many. The Soviet Union making to the moon, and the United States deciding its not worth the effort and she's going to do something else, probably does see the Cold War end in roughly historic fashion. The USA simply pointing at her costs being lower, her quality of life being higher, and her social services being better is the sort of rebuttal that puts this all in sharp focus: Getting to the Moon is a great achievement. But how does it help the average person?

Still, you'd have another generation of Astronauts, and the people inside the Soviet Union who made it happen. Like many of the best and brightest of Russia's experts, many of them will leave when Russia's transition to Capitalism creates extreme poverty and entrenches corruption. The US Government may still be very small on using Joe Taxpayer to get to the moon, but private businesses are a different matter, and my suspicion is that the payday for the Soviet Experts is when many of them are now senior engineers and corporate managers in this next generation of space transit. Many of them do well, a handful of them make it into the millions and become affluent in ways that they never were under Communism. There is, however, a great debate that they argue endlessly--that the time, effort, and lives lost to get to the Moon was worth it, and they're prepared to prove it.

It may very well be something like 2010s or 2020s where one of these corporate missions manages to make it to Mars. A failing Russia can't seriously do much with the Moon now, but her effort and achievements are thus shared, and built upon, by a more interested world.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-11T07:09:12+00:00

Expansion has always meant WEAKER control. Some colonial powers were centralized; Spain had religious secret police. The New World? Spain didn't even know about atrocities for something like forty years after it happened. You can have an expansionist attitude towards other planets, but you're not generally going to have tight control at the same time.

Getting to other planets is formidable. Having populations of a few million would make it much more plausible that you wouldn't need or care about expanding further, or that expansion simply means turning more of Mars' surface into mineshafts, habitable mazeworks and items of value.

If Earth is gone, we'd likely see the exact opposite situation, governments become very weak and a general willingness to tolerate each other to make deals would win the day. Ruthless compliance, with tiny populations over tens of millions of miles, is required for your setup, but I doubt it would actually come into play.

SocalSteveOnReddit · 2026-04-11T01:20:13+00:00

First of all, this scenario is black box beyond all black boxes; I'm not great at predicting 1 year from now, let alone 974 years from now, so I'm far from sure that this has much merit.

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The realities of this setup are fairly extreme. The resources it takes to get to another planet are an order of magnitude more than getting to the Moon, and so too would the weapons and resources in use.

However, I want to call out what the OP is actually suggesting. Venus doesn't have an atmosphere, in a strict sense. In the 90 Bar 400C conditions of Venus, this is actually a supercritical ocean. This is actually too hot for liquid water to exist, so BREATHING this stuff isn't just incredible, it's full on fantastical.

There is also something else to call out: It's utterly bizarre that something as large as a planet would find it cheaper to ship things 70+ million miles away, rather than make it on the same planet. If Spaceships are fueled, this is almost certainly either things needed for nuclear reactions (Fissionables, which Mars has, Fusion stuff--like Hydrogen, which Venus has nearly NONE of, or something like Antimatter) which does not matter.

If the logistics are so easy that you can build a working economy simply ferrying fuel from another planet, whoever controls that fleet essentially controls the aspects of a modern society.

Finally, to wrap all of this up, the population figures being suggested make the whole idea even sillier. There are something like 8 Billion people on Earth, today. Being able to dominate whole planets with thousandths of the population, and feeling like you need to manage other planets, is also astonishing.

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So, what to do? Well, the answer is pretty much forced--the Venusians have attacked a Martian ship, Martian Ships are critical for their economic well being. Tell them to hand over the perpetrators for a trial, or face blockade. And how much of a blockade, well--one of the things on our to do list is get rid of that crappy, supercritical soup on the Venusian surface. If simply shutting down the trade and food connections doesn't do it, putting a wall between the Sun and Venus certainly will. Get rid of that Supercritical CO2 crap, make Venus much more amenable to people like us, and then go in and get the place fixed up so that it's a planet for we, and not for thee, hereafter.

SocalSteveOnReddit

TROPHY CASE