Dark Earth Timeline

The entirety. Canada has its own smaller airliner industry and there are smaller subsidiary groups in Australia, South Africa and India, but civilian aircraft manufacturing has yet to be distributed quite in the manner of military planes.

February
- The planned city in Wyoming isn’t just a fit of centralist madness, but reflects some future construction projects that need to be in the heart of the country
- The Silkworm attacks on Montana were just what it’s modern defences were built to counter; the missiles took out 4 of them and long range 5” guns destroyed the last
- The Y-Files Group will have many, many strange cases to deal with…
- Star Trek is notably different in small ways with British, French and German characters as well as Chekov, but the general character is familiar
- The Boeing child of the 747 and 2707 is a very big, powerful plane
- The flying old lady has more bottle than United Dairies
- The Mexican village sees some strange effects from the meteor, similar in some ways with the Midwich Event
- New green trams in London join the red buses, black cabs and blue Underground trains
- Donald Campbell is not only still alive, but is setting new records
- French PM Jean-Louis Beaucourt, the Marquis d’Ambreville is a mixture of Napoleon I, de Gaulle, Conde and Massu
- Canada is really coming along in leaps and bounds, on a profoundly different path than @, but with great power comes increasing introspection on its role
- SEALAB is not abandoned, but expanded. The Sea Race is on
- This is a very different 1960s generation, without the ‘generation gap’, counterculture, significant anti war movement, rock and roll and with universal military service in both Britain and the USA
- The Hong Kong incident begins with a historical accident, but the presence of large British forces that are looking to be assertive makes it blow up
- The librarian could have potentially caused an extension to the Vietnam War if she had kicked out the diplomats for talking too loudly
- African tigers are interesting enough, but Kit Walker getting involved raises the phantom of even more strange happenings
- Indian termination continues, which is a very unfortunate course of action
- The new Soviet MBT is a more powerful T-72
- Cambodia being invaded is not nearly as controversial as @, but opens up the end game
- The early marriage of the Prince of Wales begins to develop
- The US does not end biological warfare research and development
- Golda Meyerson has the Anglicised surname as an indicator of relative influence
- India continues to dabble in greater independence of action

April
- The wizardly pranks of April Fools Day are harmless fun, but show the capacity of powerful people
- Kipling still going at the sprightly old age of 103
- The Free Polish Armed Forces have probably not been actually deployable for a decade and this retirement finally acknowledges this. It was very much a political entity for the last decade or so, representing the legitimacy of Free Poland. It was made up of the aging wartime veterans as the officer and NCO corps, with the rank and file provided by the children of the exile community and the Polish diaspora from the USA, British Empire and France; even then, it was more of a symbolic hollow force than a useful or deployable element. In terms of units, they almost entirely marched on paper and formed a bit of a social club, with the exception of the ceremonial Royal Polish Guards battalion and Winged Hussars regiment. First to go was the Royal Polish Navy, which was laid up by the mid 1950s after being perpetuated as part of the RN
- A slightly different Supreme Court comes down on the other side of the obscenity question in Stanley v Georgia. As of 1969, rather than Warren CJ, Black, Fortas, Douglas, Stewart, Marshall, Harlan, White and Brennan, it is Nixon CJ (1960), Black, Douglas, Alan Parker (1959), Potter Stewart (1958), Byron White (1962), Warren Burger (1956), Thurgood Marshall (1969) and Herbert Brownell (1954). Historically, there was a big shift between Roth in 1957 (6-3) and Stanley in 1969 (0-9) on the question of the protection of pornography. A very large part of this came down to the shifting social standards of the Sexual Revolution rather than a really dramatic shift in the alignment of the Supreme Court, although the Warren Court was very much a liberal one given to broad and creative interpretation. Here, the US Supreme Court is rather more conservative, reflecting a more socially conservative society and new Chief Justice Nixon is absolutely no Earl Warren. Some cases will not change, given logic and legal arguments, but where the change was driven by more than a decade of social changes absent on Dark Earth, we won't see them. I'm half wearing my legal hat for the cases out of general interest in exploring how and why very different decisions could eventuate, rather than conservatism for its own sake.
- The French use the Maginot Line ouvrages as they did in @
- Kondo Simba is absolutely a nom de guerre and the ALF is playing a long game
- John Wyndham has a longer life and career. He is already kicking on further than @ and will do so for many years to come. In a way, he will be part of a British 'triumvirate' of science fiction authors (akin to the international one of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke) along with John Christopher/Sam Youd and Nicholas Fisk, or at least a bit of younger readers/older children's sci-fi. That is one of the few flourishes of personal preference I'm allowing to creep in, having discovered their works in the late 1980s as a boy through the Thames TV adaption of Wyndham's Chocky and then developed a taste for the written works of all three in 1990-1992. Fisk's Trillions of 1972 is an extremely British science fiction story that I was introduced to on audio cassette tape, followed by discovering John Christopher's The Sword of the Spirits trilogy and Wyndham's Day of the Triffids; The Tripods came years later, but appealed to me as an interesting example of British children's science fiction television and an interesting little written work to boot. Christopher and Fisk wrote their best stuff in the late 1960s and early 1970s (as distinct from Wyndham's 1950s pomp) which was and is an era of literature of that genre that I enjoy and appreciate.
- The CIA agent in the GDR discovered some sort of production or copying facility before meeting a most terrible demise
- Aquanautical exploration continues to grow
- Square Eye Syndrome has only one, very horrific cure - cessation of television privileges for the afflicted boys for a year and a day
- The SRAM entering service here has the range of the @ SRAM II with a much higher speed. It will be followed by a long range ALCM and a medium range weapon. These, in addition to Skybolt, give SAC a fair bit of flexibility going forward
- There simply isn't the political support for lowering the voting age in Britain and the rest of the Western world is sticking to 21 for the moment; indeed, historically, the youngest in @ 1969 was Czechoslovakia with 20. The cultural normality of school, then national service, then work or study has been drilled in for multiple generations, rather than being a fairly recent phenomenon and, whilst the postwar generation is large, it isn't truly culturally distinct in the manner of @. As of 1969, the year group turning 18 are 1951 drops. Their early childhood was one of war in Korea, followed by a big war in the Middle East. By the time they entered secondary school in 1962/63, they'd lived through another war scare in 1960 and then have seen Vietnam progress through their 'teenage' years (the very word not being widely used). Their parents are either WW2 veterans or lived through both it and the Depression. They've had a lot of affluence, but not the same rebellion in dress, movies and music.
- The international supervillain who escapes his Swiss mountain lair is exactly who it would seem to be - Blofeld, complete with white cat
- Mobile heat rays have been under development since the War of the Worlds, but the problem of power supply has held them up until now. . Those captured by the British in the 1890s were reverse engineered and tinkered with for over 30 years until they could utilised effectively, initially on skyships and airships, but they never really found an ideal niche. On land, in tactical combat, it offers some advantages, but these continue to be tested and refined into two major streams. The first is a directed energy weapon/laser cannon a la Warhammer 40k, whilst the second is a more genuine heat ray for anti-personnel use: something like the Area Denial System, which can cause pain on its lowest setting all the way up to a beam of superheated energy that can set groups of enemy personnel on fire without vaporising/disintegrating them like some of the film versions of the Heat Ray.
- The news about the success of Rumble is one salient feature, with the other being that journalists have been kept out of the combat zone until the fighting has come to an end. This is one aspect of keeping the news and information war under close control
- JFK has a lot of political capital, but Universal Healthcare will use up all of it
- 250,000 year old large humanoid bones in Colorado poses a lot of questions
- The Northern Irish meteor isn't anything nasty, but the general procedure at this point is to treat everything as an act of the enemy or a dangerous alien object
- General Barrientos had an older, louder helicopter. That ended up making him lunch
- Ping? Pong!
- The RN presence mission in the Shatt al Arab is a reminder to Iraq and Persia to play nicely. Britain controls Abadan, having annexed it decades ago and has a general interest in local peace and quiet

Only they, what about China.

So how are Chief Justice Nixon views on some matters.

He is a judge, so his views are not entirely material. He has a conservative general alignment on law and order cases and adopts a strict constructionist and originality approach. He is very far from a Warren or even a Burger.

As matters stand, the 1970 Supreme Court has a nominal 5-4 conservative-liberal split, but these are blessedly the days before such ideologically driven splits. The Harlan Court was not a Warren Court in cases or style.