Dark Earth Timeline

Militarily or industrially? No. They don’t have any secret advantage that would allow them to catch up an 1800 missile gap overnight or even within 4-5 years. Their hope is to get a cap in place politically and build up to it; good luck getting the French and British missiles under it.

What they do have is pragmatic, energetic and intelligent leadership and an economy far less moribund than historically. That is worth its weight in gold.

Steve,

1.) A rather long way indeed.
2.) Absolutely innocent and non-provocative. Standard Cold War playbook answer.
3.) He still had to fetch his cloth.
4.) More a case of the Spanish cleaning house to avoid a French style escalation and using every single charge on the statute book to do so. They are scared and when governments get scared, a reaction occurs.
5.) Absolutely. It is needed as rail remains the main way of shipping heavy ordnance about and there is a lot to ship, both with commitments in Europe and the very large force in Vietnam. The logistical requirements of ammunition and vehicle shipping alone requires 3 sailings from Long Beach and other West Coast ports a week, which in turn pushes the rail system connecting the West Coast with the Midwest ammunition/war production plants heavily.
6.) It is not The Ring, but simply a strange looking one with some interesting enchantments. The pouch does not refill, unfortunately. His gifts represent a typical D&D treasure hoard, which will impact the development of Dungeons and Dragons by Gygax.
7.) Certainly. They are costly, but these proto CIWS are faster to track and fire than older AA gun systems. In general, there hasn't been the gap in gun development that occurred in the 1960s, but even with the advanced Dark Earth systems, the CWS is welcome.
8.) Some are nuclear, some are SAMs.
9.) He is still about, although coming to the end of an illustrious career. In general, some careers go on longer due to the extended average lifespan, so that Biggles remains in service in his early 70s.
10.) Unfortunately, an OTL event.
11.) Cleaning house after unrest and a coup is never pleasant; here, the 1958 military action and the 1961 Algiers coup is somewhat transposed to the different time and place.
12.) It happened on his day off - it is Christopher Lee, after all.
13.) There are three new designs (the interceptor, new heavy bomber and LAX), with the FX and LFX having been going since the early 60s, the YB-72 being the testing prototype result of the BX programme going on for a similar time and the AX is an older, progressing design.
14.) It is intended for JFK, given the ongoing war and the paucity of follow-on candidates. By choosing a somewhat less than high profile VP and focusing on the President, there wasn't a real succession plan in place.

Steve,

Excuse the late response, but Property Law exams…are like being on holiday in 1920s Yakutsk. With a group of Belgians.

3.) I think Arkwright tried to charge both, up until the point when a Gladstone bag of sovereigns was placed on his counter as thanks.
4.) It is a different sort of religious intolerance, coming from a basis where unbelief is a mistrusted sign of anarchism and Bolshevism, particularly in very conservative Southern Europe; ‘tis a world not just of magic and dragons, but miracles, a completely accepted Father Christmas, evidence of demons and of angels. I do wish the brutality was anything more than historical.
6.) Yes, I can see how that impression could be derived, but the joke needs it.
11.) If isn’t a case of extremists taking power, but opportunists and a military that does not want even a scintilla of a repetition of 1940’s split and de facto civil war. Nor is it murder, but expedited executions following drumhead court martials, all with a lot more due process than Ceaucescu in 89, for example. The trial, sentence, appeal and confirmation took almost 1.5 months, so it isn’t necessarily a kangaroo court; it isn’t hugely different to the French execution schedule in @, whereby the last chap guillotined in public was sentenced on April 1 and executed on June 17, 2.5 months later and Ranucci in 1976 was 3.5 months. Incidentally, witnessing the 1939 last public execution in @ was…
12.) Christopher Lee. He really needs a bit of a short story or news article.

Steve,

I’ve been careful not to delve too deeply into theology so far, but there hasn’t been any mention of multiple gods, per se. On the second point, it is a fantastical
universe in terms of both its laws of nature and the things which clearly break them. For example, try as I might, one cannot wangle a natural evolution for the centaur. It seems evidence of something strange. Cosmic laws don’t seem to make sense. However, people’s mentality and world view has advanced from the Dark Ages; it simply comes to different conclusions based on the evidence at hand - when there is physical evidence of an ark, the crossing of the Red Sea, St George and the Dragon and more, the reaction of most is not cynicism or disbelief. One of my influences is David Gemmell and his Chronicles of the Jerusalem Man and it’s interplay of faith, horror, a multiverse and the fantastical.

The crimes they were tried for were treason, insurrection, conspiracy to overthrow the state, riot, murder and more. The parallel I’d draw is the Spartacist Uprising of 1919, but without the same paroxysm of extrajudicial killings after the suppression and the 1916 Easter Rising. The French are keen to appear to do things by the book, but it is a very short book. Those held aren’t just detained political protestors, but some hard core elements; they are being sorted through in an expedited fashion. There will be those who got caught up in protests that will find themselves imprisoned/sent to Devil’s Island, but they are being sorted through.

The big picture is not that radically inclined students and would be revolutionaries got caught up in a crackdown, but that they and indeed the hardcore radical leadership got provoked/engineered into providing a crisis for the French Army to step in, clean house and carry out a coup under the guise of a defensive counter-coup.

No, just ordinary ones of a variety of political outlooks.

No, French dragoon regiments are armoured. Dragons are under a separate command and not part of the Armee de Terre, Marine Royale or Royale Service Aeronautique.