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Post by simon darkshade on Jun 30, 2023 2:12:29 GMT
There have been some decent ones in the past decade and some ones that fall into the old tropes and traps that seem to plague a website that has been around long enough to breed its own (mixed) culture. As said, there were some good TLs and stories in the early to mid part of the 2010s and some very fair ones still going (a couple on Malaya, one on different WW1 British rifles and analytical engines and Broken Sickle come immediately to mind).
What makes a story good is being able to incorporate butterflies in the right way and right tone. A PoD is like a Saturn V taking off - very slow to begin, but gathering pace as it goes. In the first few years, there should be very, very few random butterflies without very good reasoning if it is a standard event/person based PoD. As it progresses, there is some scope for more, so that at 10 years out, things should be very much recognisable (yet jarring in the difference) and once we hit a generation and beyond (25 years), then their insertion is quite natural.
If it is a big PoD, such as WW1 fizzling in 1914 or, as in one story I’m commenting on over there, a time traveler rocks up in 1929 Britain and as a result, Hitler is killed in 1930, then there is a lot more scope for butterflies and changes.
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Post by Max Sinister on Jul 1, 2023 20:22:13 GMT
Hmm, which ones are you thinking of?
Well the one that most comes to mind was Decades of Darkness where the south not only wins independence but then becomes this massive military giant despite being a slavocracy. Kind of like a Draka TL not played tongue in cheek! Well, DoD is supposed to be "Draka in the US, but more realistic" (which isn't hard admittedly - please don't take this the wrong way, DoD is still very well done, with original characters like POTUSes Griffin and Mitchell, and much research into obscure topics like agronomy or naval tactics).
Also, regarding the Butterfly Effect it's still moderate. At the beginning, Jared / Kaiser Wilhelm III only fudges things a bit (Bismarck still being born - OK, the family might well have had another boy after 1808, but how high are the chances that he'll be another diplomatic genius? Especially since his Germany will also include the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the Austrian half of A-H?), but then we get Edmund Schulthess as pan-German chancellor in the 1930s.
I'm not sure though whether he is to blame here. DoD wasn't exclusively his work, but there were cooperators as well. Like that Swiss guy nicknamed "Good Habit" who seems to be responsible for things like the monarchies in Switzerland. - Butterflies or not, I can't see the Swiss giving up their centuries-old republican democracy and independence just like that.
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Post by Max Sinister on Jul 1, 2023 22:05:52 GMT
What makes a story good is being able to incorporate butterflies in the right way and right tone. A PoD is like a Saturn V taking off - very slow to begin, but gathering pace as it goes. In the first few years, there should be very, very few random butterflies without very good reasoning if it is a standard event/person based PoD. As it progresses, there is some scope for more, so that at 10 years out, things should be very much recognisable (yet jarring in the difference) and once we hit a generation and beyond (25 years), then their insertion is quite natural. Ah yeah. Well, there's still something to consider: Even if we usually understand what is a "big" or a "small" change regarding TLs, it's not that we can measure it exactly. And we especially shouldn't understand divergence as if it went linearly, or on a parable like a rocket even. The amount of change will rather make jumps - most will be small, but some will be bigger, and some will be very big. Maybe even bigger than the initial PoD.
There are diagrams which show what I mean. Even if you take the Logistic map (as long as you use a high r, > 3.5), which is a simple equation that fits into a short line, you can see it if you run it with two different values which difference is miniscule.
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Post by Max Sinister on Jul 8, 2023 21:04:17 GMT
Here's the mathematical proof. If you know how to program - even doing spreadsheets suffices - you can check it for yourself: 1. Use the formula 3.9*(last value)*(1 - [last value]) to create the next value in the row. Have your computer calculate 100 steps. 2. Do this twice - once starting with 0.50000000000001, once with 0,50000000000002. That's a difference at the 14th digit. 3. For each step, calculate the difference between the two rows. If you create a diagram from these results, it should look about like this. (The yellow line is the difference.) |
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miletus12
Squadron vice admiral
To get yourself lost, just follow the signs.
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Post by miletus12 on Jul 10, 2023 0:14:20 GMT
Here's the mathematical proof. If you know how to program - even doing spreadsheets suffices - you can check it for yourself: 1. Use the formula 3.9*(last value)*(1 - [last value]) to create the next value in the row. Have your computer calculate 100 steps. 2. Do this twice - once starting with 0.50000000000001, once with 0,50000000000002. That's a difference at the 14th digit. 3. For each step, calculate the difference between the two rows. If you create a diagram from these results, it should look about like this. (The yellow line is the difference.) Congratulations. You have just created "grass"; the "other snowflake". M. |
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