Dark Earth Timeline

That will keep them going for a year i presume.

A civil War, how is Argentinia looking at these events.

Neither of you are right. It will be a bit more like November 1975…

Look up Australia November 1975 and also think Juan Carlos in @. Bit of a combo.

Without giving away too much, there will be a circuit-breaker action that prevents a complete breakdown into civil war or any flavour of coup/revolution (right or left). South America is a bit of a different place full stop, but we are seeing a bit less of the succession of coups, caudillos, military dictatorships and more that wracked the poor place, not just in the 1960s and 70s. This isn’t to say that all will be sweetness and light or that everyone will be pleased with the outcome, but compared with the toll of suffering post September 1973, this one will be better and not feature any direct deaths to boot.

I deliberately invoked the spectres of The Dismissal in Australia 1975 and the 1981 Tejerazo in Spain to conjure a little of the ‘vibe’ of what is coming, even as it is different from either.

1971 Notes Part 2

April
- The washing of lions at the Tower Menagerie was one of the first recorded April Fool’s jokes
- Bob Hawke gets in as Australian Labour Party (note the spelling) leader much earlier in the absence of a certain other figure. Having him as a teetotaller is a little fun Easter Egg
- Conquistador is a completely fictional film, with the big stars joined by Emilio Delgado (Luis from Sesame Street in @). On Earth, the epoch of the classic Hollywood historical epic was fading in preference to the 1970s New Hollywood dross, which was far more inward looking. The historical epic, like its cousin the sword and sandal picture, really died out from the mid 1970s onwards (with the epic mini series having an Indian summer through the 1980s) and only really reemerged with Gladiator in 2000. Here, it is still in its pomp for some time to come, rather than the @ diet of mafiosi, oh so daring swearing, titilating nudity and the grim sense of post Watergate and Vietnam loss of innocence
- After a lot of (Defence and anti-Continental related) footdragging, a Channel Tunnel begins construction. It is a different one, with the ability to disable it from the surface
- Frances Phipps makes her historical flight to the North Pole, but it is quite the significant place…
- Plans for Irish defence are not driven by an overt internal or external threat, but rather a much more robust emphasis on defence by the British establishment. Ireland is the back door into the rest of the British Isles in their view. The whole business of Home Defence is treated more seriously, as the @ policy of "We're going to be atomised, so no use spending or trying anything" (very much simplified) is not in place. There are very serious experts looking very seriously towards the post-nuclear age of modern warfare, something that we have never had
- The Brazilian Vespa is similar to the Helwan HA-300 of @ in role and purpose
- The asteroid interception was a bit heavy duty. There have been @ studies were 330ft asteroids were completely destroyed by single 1 megaton warheads. This one was 600ft long but was hit by 16 missiles with 5 megaton warheads. Rather overkill, but it is early days in working out the kinks from the system
- Sir Denzil Carey is positioning himself for the fourth TV channel in 1974; something else will debut in 1972 to join the BBC and ITV (Imperial Television network). He is in a similar niche to Murdoch in @, but is as different as chalk and cheese. The general shape as I see it playing out is Channel 1 (BBC), Channel 2 (ITV), Channel 3 (One of the @ ITV Big 4/5), Channel 4 (Carey’s channel), Channel 5 (another developed a la Channel 3) and Channel 6 (something different…)
- 1914 wins Best Picture and George C. Scott wins for Patton; the latter is described as a hero of WW2 and Korea
- The ARPANET meeting of supercomputer AIs is fairly staid, limited to chess, japes and sports scores; think Holly in Red Dwarf
- McDonalds not only goes for an earlier breakfast menu, but has parallels to the McChicken and McRib quite a bit before @. The little added bit about their burgers being cooked medium rare provides a little bit of dissonance compared to their tasteless @ burgers
- Sierra Leone is moving at a slow pace towards Dominion status, which here doesn’t mean full independence, but rather something akin to Francafrique with teeth and plenty of strings attached. The matter has been debated for a number of years and comes up in A New Jerusalem when discussed by the Queen and Barton. Any complete independence like in @ (which often lead to many coups, Soviet influence or outright bases and general washing of hands) isn’t on the cards. Rather, the recently independent African Dominions (Uganda, Tanganyika, Nigeria, Ashante Federation, Cameroon and Sudan) are encouraged to take part in regional arrangements; get their lavish aid packages with plenty of conditions; have their militaries largely officered by seconded British officers; have quite powerful and influential Governors-General; can call upon British troops for aid and know that they will come; and have very clear red lines on what can’t be done, which usually only extends to no going Red, no alterations to constitutional arrangements without legitimate referendums, no costing up to the other blocs, no dictatorial carry on and no anti-Western/anti-British violence. This is combined with a Francafrique type approach which sees the Paras used in a similar role to the French Foreign Legion. It absolutely isn’t true independence, but is rather independence with trainer wheels on, which is inherently unfair. There is a fair bit of scope to move within that, though, and there is flexibility for arrangements like Senegambia
- The injured Vietnam veterans featured on NPR are William 'One Eye' Clinton, Bruce Springsteen, Donald Trump and Lt. Dan from Forrest Gump
- Ray guns/lasers are starting to make an appearance
- Judicial corporal punishment remains very much on the books in British law, even as it isn’t used quite as much as in previous decades
- Bruce Lee foils a robbery aided by Hong Kong Phooey and Paul Kersey from Death Wish
- The British census has a great deal of information about the different status of the country as compared to @
- The SR-71 flight over Laos saw nothing strange at all. These nice men in black were very persuasive
- A sixth airport for London
- The Anglo-Indian lutenist is Peter Sarstedt
- French Musketeers and Italian Legionaries are two groups very devoted to their images

May
- Oh my gosh, I enriched Kenny’s dad! And, most likely, ensured that he never dabbles in the Cult of Cthulhu; I may find some less nasty means of giving Kenny superpowers, as he is one of the best/nicest/good South Park characters along with Butters. Additionally, Cartman has a recognisable and quite normal father, which could influence his character development
- The Towering Inferno is resolved without deaths thanks to Steve McQueen, a fairly super man and a ‘spider man’
- The Torquay hotelier, call him ‘Basil’ was somewhat justified in his actions, according to him, as the Spanish waiter “knew nothing”
- Mary Rose comes up sooner and in one whole piece. Magic
- Empire Windrush is known not for any role in West Indian migration, but as a footnote to history involved in the Korean War and nuclear tests
- The Chilean mining is simmering towards a climax, with slightly different drivers present affecting the scope for nationalisation
- German/Austrian moves edging towards The Bomb are longer term in the former case, as well as being separate to provide some degree of plausible deniability
- The death of Cassius Clay is a tragic event, as I telegraphed a not too good end to the fight with him being knocked out of the very ring; boxing is an inherently dangerous sport. Clay has a reputation as a great boxer without quite making the jump to being a pop culture figure
- Discoveries in Gobekli Tepe point towards antediluvian civilisation, with the statue of a Golden Condor being something some might recognise…
- SLAM going off course rather dramatically on its first test flight is based on the Snark ending up in NE Brazil; the tractor beam facility indicates some very advanced technology
- Krav Maga Jewish warrior monks are a sign of some very different developments in medieval Judaism, as well as the classical era ones arising from the Sicarii and Maccabees
- The Paras get a bit of action in Sudan in just the type of manner described in April. The light 25pdrs are new weapons rather than retreads
- Affairs at the KAMAZ plant in the USSR show the CIA up to mischief to encourage Soviet paranoia
- The Solsbury Hill sequence is of course a reference to the Peter Gabriel song
- The tankero hunters Aimo’s Strange Journey are a bit of a twin yolked Finnish Easter Egg, which is a collection of words quite rarely used before. I do recommend looking up Aimo Koivunen for the sheer interest of his story
- French nuclear power begins to move down similar lines to @, albeit without the same immediate driver of the oil shock
- Stewart v Clark in the Grand Prix is a further example of the relative British dominance of Formula One
- The Soviet Tu-154 flight to NYC attracts a lot of attention for any tidbits that can be discovered or observed
- West Indian cricket is about to enter its real pomp with the debut of Viv Richards and Greenidge later in the year, allowing them to play alongside Sobers as well as the rest of their collection of stars; a further factor to be considered is the addition of Cuba as part of the WI, with many of its baseball players being available. South Africa is also not exiled from Test cricket and they have a very, very strong team at this point
- British shipbuilding tonnage spikes this year due to the completion of the big supertankers, along with oil rigs and the generally increasing size of all kinds of merchant ships. Japan and then South Korea were able to streak away from the West and the Rest with the combination of the size of ships and the death of competing industries, but there is a different paradigm here
- Orinoco Flow is a reference to the eponymous Enya song
- The English Electric Broadsword is intended to replace the Thunderbird and a large number of Bloodhounds and has a very hot performance and range comparable to the Patriot and SA-10; it has an anti-aircraft and anti-missile capacity
- Red Sun is a slightly different picture on account of Audie Murphy still being around
- The Liberty Line/DMZ is turning into the type of heavily fortified position that the comparison to the Maginot Line is not entirely hyperbole. It is in the interests of both Vietnams to have an airtight border

June
- The BR Class A25 Advanced High Speed Train is not our grandfather's steam engine, but a fully modernised one that as said can easily do the required 200mph; the larger ones go at 375mph. They are arcanely boosted with a few other developments, but the trains themselves are based on a combination of locomotive.fandom.com/wiki/ACE_3000 , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5AT_Advanced_Technology_Steam_Locomotive and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Class_A4_4468_Mallard . The locomotives in general are much bigger than the ones of @, reflecting the larger loading gauge and broad gauge standard; Brunel won out early on in the Age of Rail rather than being an anomaly. Steam was chosen for a number of reasons. First of all, there is sheer inertia as it has been the dominant locomotive source of power in Britain to this point, with diesel not really making a significant inroad and electrification mainly confined to the south; secondly, it makes broad socio-economic sense in that it employs British coal that is still dug up by a politically important industry, particularly with its sharp decline for power generation use due to the rise of nuclear power; thirdly, it doesn't require new infrastructure per se in the form of an electrified line for the smaller regional routes that it has been specified for here; and fourthly by circumstance, as there has been a lot more opportunity to work on enchanted/magically augmented versions of the steam engine over the ~160 years of its use on British railways
- The Russian Orthodox Church is a power that the CPSU has chosen to accomodate rather than liquidate, with the rather nasty experiences of the WW2 Eastern Front being a lasting lesson for many in the Soviet leadership bloc; the priests are handy to keep around and in doing so, the Soviet government keeps control of them. A complex and troubled relationship
- The B-47 sticks around for a while longer; on the flip side, we are likely to see the B-52 go earlier
- New South Pacific Islands are a consequence of some supernatural things, including the powers unleashed in WW2 and strange developments with re-emerging islands. Something is afoot
- Killings in Chile show the deteriorating situation
- The Argie naval exercises represent no threat, given the different scale of power between Argentina and the British Empire
- Black Thunder is an ADC counterpart to Red Flag
- Home Office restrictions on Commonwealth migration comes from a different position than @. There have already been some 'brakes' put on Commonwealth migration from certain areas to Britain in the form of some legislative measures, but chiefly through a lack of postwar labour shortages in Britain and much better economic conditions in the West Indies and India. Here, the growing 'worry' is that there are a lot of Southern Europeans coming in more rapidly than others, in a bit of a hearkening back to the 1890s concerns over Eastern European and Jewish migration
- Surviving nonuplets is an indication of better health care outcomes
- The Angel Report indicates not all that is mystical is bad
- Icelandic political reactions won’t be allowed to imperil it’s important role
- The USAF test pilot in Wyoming is a reference to Top Gun Maverick
- The Irish musician in Gib is a reference to Chris DeBurgh
- Soviet satellite accidents seem to have a malign cause
- Egypt has never had its coup and reflexive movement into the embrace of Moscow...well, apart from the few brief days in the 1956 'Six Day War' which bought the world to the brink of nuclear conflict and resulted in five years of very hard military occupation. The Soviets haven't had a lot of luck in penetrating the 'Third World', as the markets there were quite tightly shut until gradual independence and even afterwards, leaning Red wasn't seen as a good career move. We then need to factor in the reputation of Soviet tanks and aircraft, which took a battering in Korea and another somewhat lesser beating in Vietnam. I've been trying to think of a way whereby the Arabs and Egypt buy Soviet, but can't seem to figure one; their only success in the area was earlier in 1971 with the sale of Badgers to Ottoman Turkey
- The Beatles using the RN’s Yellow Submarine to rescue a whale. They have a role of something of an adventuring/do-good group like The Goodies, but will tend gradually towards some more musical elements in the process, as well as getting their own television and film series to boot
- With the Red Army across the Danube in Romania, it has a sterling impact in focusing both Bulgaria and Greece on the real threat, even if there is a bit of ancestral uneasiness in this latest embrace