Dark Earth Timeline

Steve,

1.) The Chinese took off in January 1967 and made it to Jupiter in August 1969 (~32 months). Orion 4 set off from the orbit of Luna at the end of December 1965 and made it to Jupiter by the end of June 1967 (~18 months). The first thing I need to do is change the line about making it out there faster to make the point that they were working from a different position in the solar system relative to Jupiter so that the 32 months was faster even though it took a longer time. Secondly, my intent was that they needed to top up their tanks with supplies for life support - oxygen and water.

4.) Indeed. JFK's big domestic priority this term will be universal health care rather than a universal basic income.

7.) The Chinese are best off, the USA has been a bit lucky and the European countries that have had upheaval are in a bit of trouble.

8.) We can probably keep the Crusader Kings 2 references going all day on this one.

10.) There is a certain limit to how far out a hurricane can be detected; at some point, it is a tropical wave. I'll look into it a bit more.

13.) Absolutely; I just wanted to be a bit mysterious.

14.) Originally, there was going to be something like OTL, but on research, the whole basis of the war comes into question. As a rule, insurgencies need at least one friendly border to be truly successful.

15.) The funny thing is that I'm not a dramatic opponent of hamburgers or anything like that, but the mass produced fast food version is really garbage as well as being unhealthy, tasteless and bad for the environment. My Dark Earth American food vision has even the fast food versions being much better quality (along the lines of In and Out or Shake Shack) and there being more regional variations and restaurants, rather than international mega-chains, in addition to being not cooked to oblivion. One flow-on effect is that there certainly isn't any major degree of globalisation of food and 'Western cuisine' to this point. We can throw in the role of food science and food magic to give a result where there is a much better general quality of food, even 'fast food', and less need for huge loads of salt, sugar and fat.

As you can see and know from my long standing interest in food history, this is something I've put a bit of thought into. The era of the late 1960s and early 1970s is perhaps a last culinary golden time before getting corrupted by plummeting standards, mass production, battery farming and more. Thus, in England, there is traditional English food, including the various forms of pre-Americanised street food; in Germany, there is traditional German food and so on and so forth.

19.) In the DE 1961 Aussie orbat, the Army Reserve/CMF was 429,254 personnel, the RANR 65,822 and the RAAFR 56,837. in the 8 years since, the Indonesian situation has continued to escalate, leading to rises in the Army and RAN reserves as well as the regulars. The number of personnel involved in this exercise were a few thousand staff officers.

Steve,

1.) Indeed. The relative position of the planets can provide for a different proposal at different times; the launch windows for Voyager 1 and 2 are an example from @.

8.) It is a game that has some interesting features, but in its base form, very little happens. To compound that particular flaw for me, it is a very morally bankrupt/dark dark grey game. The engine is seemingly designed to turn out cruel, cynical, wrothful paranoid characters out of nowhere.

15.) A very important point. It is easy to load something down with half a dozen spices and sauces, but a bigger challenge to get a simple dish to sing its own flavours and create a nice marriage of its ingredients. With an Indian curry, the dish is all about the sauce and spice, which can be complex to master and taste great, but it overwhelms the natural taste of the meat and vegetables within it. A good English pie or roast joint is more pared back; if the ingredients are mass produced and low quality, even a loving and skilful hand will only go so far. Similarly, some mass market American barbecue is pretty one dimensional, acting as a carrying agent for an overwhelmingly sweet sauce; the best stuff doesn’t need a lot of sauce, as the meat has great flavour in itself accentuated by the smoke and rub. Simplicity has its place and attraction. I don’t believe that any cuisine is inherently bad, but that all can be done badly. With good quality ingredients, an understanding of seasoning, decent technique and enough time, anything can come off as terrific.

In Dark Earth, there are certain advantages in preserving the freshness and flavour of ingredients and an earlier equivalent to molecular gastronomy thanks to the halfling cook community. For example, the taste of blueberries can be accentuated with a bit of ground coriander. www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/blueberries-coriander-affinity-linalool-article/amp Here, they have had a few centuries of dabbling and development to come up with other combinations of herbs and spices and also working on accentuating the aroma of foods. In this process, they developed something akin to MSG in the early 18th century along with a concept of an “umami” taste, albeit with a different terminology; the DE list of basic tastes is sweet, salty, sour, bitter, savoury, pungency/heat, unctuousness/fat, piquant and astringent. Picture a 3ft tall Regency Heston Blumenthal being chased around by a similarly pint sized Marco Pierre White.

September
September 1: An attempted palace coup by nationalist officers in Tripoli plunges the Libyan capital into chaos, before loyalist Royal Guards gain the upper hand, supported by naval bombardment from the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Arethusa and air strikes by RAF Hawker-Siddeley Merlins. There are some garbled, unconfirmed reports of British special operations forces engaging in ground combat with rebel troops before all outgoing radio traffic around Tripoli is jammed. By nightfall, the main energy of the coup attempt seems to have dissipated and several thousand loyalist Bedouin troops are airlifted in from Tobruk to restore order; hundreds of rebels and suspected supporters are arrested in the crackdown on the orders of the vengeful Crown Prince.
September 2: Legendary retired detective Sir Sherlock Holmes is reported missing from his farm in Sussex by his housekeeper.
September 3: The Imperial Japanese Army introduces a new design of modern katanas.
September 4: Charles Elbrick, the US Ambassador to Brazil, is kidnapped by a gang of Marxist revolutionary guerrillas in Rio de Janeiro in broad daylight.
September 5: The Chicago Tribune carries an article criticising the sheer scale of expenditure on the United States starship program, sparking a wave of angry letters in response from public supporters of American space exploration.
September 6: Heavy air combat takes place over the DMZ and Laos between USAF and VPAF fighters, with 12 North Vietnamese planes shot down for the loss of 2 American aircraft. Eight enemy pilots are recovered by US ground forces, with four of them revealed to be Red Air Force personnel from the Soviet Union.
September 7: A GI on leave from Vietnam visiting his great aunt in the Upper West Side of New York City on a sunny day is rescued from being lost in the metropolis by a friendly giant yellow bird, who is able to show him how to get to his destination of Sesame Street.
September 8: Scottish zoologists report that they have completed domestication of the giant deer, the second deer species domesticated since the red deer in the 16th century.
September 9: Completion of a record-breaking round-the-world flight by a specially modified Vickers Swallow supersonic jet with its designer Barnes Wallis onboard for the historic event, among other celebrity guests.
September 10: The US Atomic Energy Commission conducts Project Rulison, a peaceful nuclear explosion in Colorado with the aim of facilitating access to an underground natural gas deposit.
September 11: A solar eclipse over much of South America leads to dozens of sightings of Count Dracula in La Paz.
September 12: A Philippines Airlines VC10 narrowly avoids crashing whilst landing at Manila International Airport thanks to a newly installed crash prevention enchantment.
September 13: Soviet bacteriologists working on an experimental bacteriophage designed to destroy yersinia pestis report that it has escaped their high security laboratory in Siberia after a mysterious fire.
September 14: The icebreaking supertanker SS Manhattan becomes the first mercantile vessel to pass through the Northwest Passage, over 120 years after the heroic Franklin Expedition became the first modern transit of the frozen northern seas.
September 15: A criticality accident in a Korean atomic research facility near Wonsan kills five scientists and injures several others; one scientist was exposed to a large dose of radiation, but the effects seem to be completely different to the other victims.
September 16: British Petroleum places orders for construction of a new class of thirty supertankers with five British shipyards in the largest order of its type in recent years.
September 17: Los Angeles Police Department Lieutenant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon apprehend a renegade mad scientist just before he successfully dumps a truckload of a hallucinogenic chemical substance into the Los Angeles Aqueduct
September 18: A mysterious quartet of armoured knights clad in white satin rescue a hamlet in Rutland from the grips of an insane necromancer.
September 19: Jack Smith becomes the first man to swim across the English Channel in under 6 hours.
September 20: Several schoolboys are apparently chased down a New York street by a white furred flying draconic canine-faced creature ridden by another child, but NYPD investigators and US Army air defense radars report no known aerial incursions over the metropolis. The frightened children are rescued from their hiding place in a dumpster by passing Daily Planet journalist Clark Kent, former Secretary of the Air Force Bruce Wayne (who was being interviewed by Kent on sanitation developments) and an unnamed grouch.
September 21: The British Army successfully concludes Project Knight, the secret operational testing of powered battle armour suits and associated weapons systems in the Kalahari Desert by MD1. The Board of Ordnance authorises the production of an initial set of 250 suits for the next stage of field testing with the 1st Infantry Division in Germany.
September 22: Vickers unveils a mock up of an experimental hypersonic ‘super jumbo jet’ in Birmingham.
September 23: Food scientists in California announce the development of a new large bean with double the nutritional value and calorific benefit than the lima bean, the first in a promising series of experimental crops derived from Amazonian plant species.
September 24: Japanese daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun begins transmission of electronic editions directly to subscribers via a facsimile receiving machine, offering a full sized page in just 30 seconds.
September 25: A rogue griffon is subdued by Canadian Governor-General and former Prime Minister Sir William Richardson after it disrupts a ceremony in Montreal; his successful efforts require little more than stern words and a few chastening whacks with his enchanted walking cane.
September 26: Debut on ABC of The Brady Bunch, a charming family situation comedy about a blended family, a concept regarded as quite daring in some parts of the United States.
September 27: Fitzroy defeats Geelong to win the 1969 VFL Grand Final 154-147 in a thrilling game in front of 144,239 spectators at the MCG, winning their first premiership for 25 years.
September 28: The British Army begins experimental deployment of the L132 36pdr super velocity antitank gun.
September 28: Australia defeat India by 297 runs in Bombay in the First Test, with debutant Greg Chappell making a stylish 125 in his first innings.
September 29: 27 people are killed in an earthquake in the Western Cape town of Tulbagh in the Union of South Africa.
September 30: The Foreign Ministry of Imperial China gives notice that it will be withdrawing from the Limited Test Ban Treaty.

They were operating from Wheelus, so a bit closer.

A sprightly 115, based on the generally accepted birthdate of 6th January 1854.