alternate history

Germany was experimenting with various VTOL aircraft during the cold war in the end they didn't go for any of them. in this alternate scenario.. what if Germany did order some into production? 1. Which design would be the most likely to lead to operation? they had the VAK 191, DO 31 (this...

The thread about the V Force has shown how brilliant some of the researchers here are at providing us with material unique to this site. So as we are still a bit limited in where and what we can do this Summer, I am adding the subject which has cropped up in many other threads: RAF Fighter...

I am delighted that others are already making good use of the Alt 60s US Navy thread. It probably needs a balancing thread to cover the Soviet Navy, which for both the USN and the RN was "the enemy fleet in being". After the fifties scare surrounding the Swerdlow class cruisers, the nuclear...

Vought took General Dynamics design and offered the V-1600, 1601 and 1602 McDonnel Douglas took Northrops design and transformed the YF-17 to what would become the F-18 and won However in this scenario, lets say one of Vought's design won. At that time Sec Def, Schlesinger was heavily pushing...

What if the northern, industrialized part of Italy remained under communist control after World War 2? What if Italian trade unionists developed a unique, ITALIAN form of communism? ... more like Yugoslavia? ... with few Moscow trained communists?

The Triang company produced a range of waterline model ships in 1/200 scale in the early 1960s and briefly again in the 1970s. Star of the Royal Navy models in the range was HMS Vanguard. Rather like Vanguard there were also models of the other recently scrapped big ships, the cruisers HMS...

I don't usually post what-if scenarios but we've had a few what-ifs for smaller nations like Italy etc. So I was thinking the other day, what if Japan had been able to constitutionally export weapons in the post-war period? General Hackett in his The Third World War has Japan by the 1970s...

In 1918, German Empire actually considered the possibility of zeppelin's raid against United States. Technically, it was possible. The L-59 (LZ-104) )Africa expedition demonstrated the impressive endurance of big airships; zeppelin stayed in air for 95 hours, traveling about 6800 km, and after...

So we know some time in the early 80s, France split with the UK, West Germany, Italy and Spain, and developed the ACX into the Rafale, and the others made the Typhoon. the disagreement stemmed from a carrier variant. What if in this scenario, France never left and somehow the five of them...

Back in the 1960s it was feared that by the 1970s up to 30 States would acquire nuclear weapons. The 1968 Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons is rightly regarded as having helped avoid this happening. Britain and...

In the 70s, India worked hard to acquire the Viggen, which was ultimately blocked by the US, due to distrust of India's relations with the USSR. In the end India went with the UK-French SPACECAT Jaguar. Lets say in this alternative history, the US did not block the sale, and it went through...

In this scenario the Vietnam War follows the same path as the Korean war, and after years of intense fighting the two sides agree to a long term cease fire (but no peace deal, like the Koreas). splitting the two countries along the 17th parallel How would this change - the aircraft composition...

So in the same vein as others....what if Sweden turned more of it's projects into reality and which would they be? The big one has to be a Swedish Nuclear Weapons program... Presumably with A36 Strike Aircraft. Would this have a ballistic missile companion? Such Nuclear production could make...

One of the designs for the Tomcat replaced the swing wings with a fixed wing. Such as the 303F What if, in this alternate history.. Grumman decided to go with a fixed wing instead of a swing wing. Then the question becomes How would its performance characteristics be like with a fixed wing...

West Germany in our timeline has since 1951 been a constant pillar in the Western Alliance and a key partner or customer for modern weapons and other secret projects. What if things had been different and other forms had occured. German unification along Austrian or Finnish lines as a member...

I am looking for some "professional" advice on an alternate history scenario that has been running around my mind for years: Given the political will to do something immediately about Hitler's 1 Sept 1939 invasion of Poland, did the British and French military have the resources and the assets...

As the Tartar-derived Standard family continues to thrive https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/standard-missile-projects.7671/unread I am going to re-visit another Hobbyhorse of mine. The Dutch took close look at CF299/Seadart and dropped it in favour of Tartar/Standard for its two Tromp...

The subject which perhaps has been kicked around on this website more than any other is whether the UK could have designed and built a two seater fighter-bomber in the 1960s to replace RAF Lightnings and RN Sea Vixens and replace RAF Hunters (The RN already had Buccaneer). The Hawker P1154 was...

As said in the tin. When you think about it, it would avoid an immense amount of suffering and money waste. Kind of - screw the Tigers - screw CVA-01 - screw Spey Phantoms do we agree all three above were expensive boondoggles ? so good riddance (sorry, that's the radical in me... !) Also...

the Falklands war occurred in 82 Ark Royal (or another ship of the same class?) was decommissioned in 79 What if they had opted to delay the decommissioning by a few years but then the Falkland war occurred anyways Would the Ark Royal have been sent? would it have contributed differently than...