CDZ Outside of my Circle of Competence

[william the wie]

OK, I set out to write an alternative history of the Civil War book based on the following premises:

That heavier than air manned kite flying was a thousand year old technology at the start of the Civil War. That it could also be stabilized for safer flight with off the shelf equipment that was available at the time was also well within the state of the art. Going further with a ramp launch was also obvious.

Gun cotton was known and stabilization could be achieved with prize money in the $1,000 range.

Bulk transport for the north went through three chokepoints that would require @83,600 specialty guns: coffee grinders and Gatling guns, to defend against low level air attack. But the south did not have such vulnerabilities and if the south gained gun cotton propellant and air power destroying enemy infrastructure would be relatively easy.

I heard from friends that I should make a game and not finish the book. I am in the process of doing so. hopefully I will have a lawyer soon to handle the rough spots at a reasonable price.

What tricks might I have missed?

 

[Picaro]

I think the bigger opportunities re Civil War alternate tech lines would be in the naval war; it would have shortened the war considerablely if the South could have offset their inferior naval numbers with a couple of breakthroughs in naval operations.It was their 'main chokepoint' and what crippled their capacities everywhere else. There are lot of maritime inventions that got 'forgotten' and could be revived with tech available in that era, most likely.

Bulk transport for the north went through three chokepoints that would require @83,600 specialty guns

Don't know what that means or what it's referring to.

 

[william the wie]

the Michigan-Illinois canal was the connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio barge network. without the canal nothing can ship in either direction, if canal defenses are adequate then either the Detroit or St. Clair rivers can be used to block shipments east from Chicago. as to ocean fighting long range naval air would be possible and possibly hovercraft but wind tunnels were invented about 40 years too late for the civil war. So, it would take a lot of expensive test modelling to create militarily useful sea planes or fast gun boats that would use wings as a spoiler.

 

[Picaro]

They had railroads then, and they can ship around Michigan on the Great Lakes, so blocking canals wouldn't stop shipping on the Great Lakes; canals froze over in winter time anyway. Even with WW I era planes they wouldn't be able to stop shipping, and the northern industrial capacity would have far out built them in any arms race; they would still also outgun them in numbers of troops. You would have to figure out how they would keep all this tech out of the hands of the northern states. With advanced submarines, the South could shut down the ports and the Union Navy, and free up their own ports. I don't see the South winning a land war, even in an alternate timeline.

 

[william the wie]

That all depends on value density, time sensitivity and substitutability. Since Chicago was where the food and futures markets were. Reducing supply and increasing costs to the main basic foods market in the western hemisphere will have very large knock on effects.

They had railroads then, and they can ship around Michigan on the Great Lakes, so blocking canals wouldn't stop shipping on the Great Lakes; canals froze over in winter time anyway. Even with WW I era planes they wouldn't be able to stop shipping, and the northern industrial capacity would have far out built them in any arms race; they would still also outgun them in numbers of troops. You would have to figure out how they would keep all this tech out of the hands of the northern states. With advanced submarines, the South could shut down the ports and the Union Navy, and free up their own ports. I don't see the South winning a land war, even in an alternate timeline.

Mines tend to be cheaper and more effective than subs. But who is proposing ground offensives except by proxy? Bombing canals, rail lines, bridges, ports, shipyards and other infrastructure destroys the armies they supply why kill when provoking mutiny and desertion is cheaper, simpler, and more effective. Training and equipping the Souix and Metis, provide them with air support and turn them loose as the Confederacy attempted to do in the actual Civil War is also effective.

 

[Picaro]

That all depends on value density, time sensitivity and substitutability. Since Chicago was where the food and futures markets were. Reducing supply and increasing costs to the main basic foods market in the western hemisphere will have very large knock on effects.

You might try to find the data on grain and food shipments being shipped through the St. Louis and Chicago markets, and compare that to Union exports to Europe and South America. You're going to find that almost all of it was exported, and not necessary for the Union to survive. This is only if you want to try and hew as close to probable in your book without going too far out. The Union was exporting more than just food; the brand new oil fields around Titusville, Penn, were also just then being drilled and producing relatively huge quantities of crude, and the foreign markets, especially England, were absorbing much of that, along with the usual quantities of the normal stuff. The war didn't put much of a dent in Union production and export revenues.Shutting off their merchant marine and Navy would have been the best Southern strategy, especially since a Navy force would have been able to work on the rivers as well.

Mines tend to be cheaper and more effective than subs. But who is proposing ground offensives except by proxy? Bombing canals, rail lines, bridges, ports, shipyards and other infrastructure destroys the armies they supply why kill when provoking mutiny and desertion is cheaper, simpler, and more effective. Training and equipping the Souix and Metis, provide them with air support and turn them loose as the Confederacy attempted to do in the actual Civil War is also effective.

According to the alternative tech lines you posted before, your air force wouldn't be able to that for any great distance behind the lines, and the South wouldn't have been able to produce that large an air force.

Just playing Devil's Advocate here. I'm a science fiction and alternative history fan myself.

 

[william the wie]

And thank you for being that. But other than fans like us who knows that Palmerston and Gladstone were dependent on the anti-slavery crusade and the corn laws and that is just one issue. That American Abolishionists received massive direct and indirect support from Britain and the union war effort got most of its net loan revenues from London. Getting that across in game form strikes me as difficult.

In book form I assumed the following:

That the creation of an aircraft hotspot in the Gulf prior to the 1860 election would create British attempts to assassinate the members and leaders of the hotspot and that this would lead to pre-election secession.

Sardinia and Prussia would recognize the new Confederation in order to get better weapons for their wars of unification and would aid the south with export revenues.

The border states preferring not to be the test bed for more deadly weapons join the Confederation.

The South's attempt to minimize boots on the ground would produce the usual refugee crisis and a British backed coup by Hamlin, Seward and Stanton. This will not prevent a worsening flight to safety.

However I don't know how to put that in game form.

 

[Moonglow]

Is that why England was chastised by the North for building iron ships for the south?

 

[Picaro]

Is that why England was chastised by the North for building iron ships for the south?

They didn't stop trade over it. England traded with both sides; it was their 'Free Trade' era.

 

[Moonglow]

Is that why England was chastised by the North for building iron ships for the south?

They didn't stop trade over it. England traded with both sides; it was their 'Free Trade' era.

They had to trade with anyone at that time, since they threw off the Corn Law and tried free trade,all it got them was a 20 year recession...But England never built another iron ship for the South...

 

[Picaro]

Is that why England was chastised by the North for building iron ships for the south?

They didn't stop trade over it. England traded with both sides; it was their 'Free Trade' era.

They had to trade with anyone at that time, since they threw off the Corn Law and tried free trade,all it got them was a 20 year recession...But England never built another iron ship for the South...

They didn't have the gold to pay for one, so no, they didn't. The 'Free Trade' laissez faire ideology left them easy prey from the protectionist countries for the next few decades, especially the U.S., who had the most comprehensive protectionist policies; such a policy was one of the primary reasons many northern manufacturing and banking interests were so enthusiastic about Lincoln and war with the South. English investors also had no problem with the war, as it was English money that financed a lot of the railroad and canal building in the U.S., and the corporate welfare state paradise Lincoln and the Republicans wanted meshed with their own interests.

 

[william the wie]

Picaro it looks like this will be a website game that I will be setting up. The people I will be using to set up the game website as an independent production will not be doing moderation, Beta testing and so on. I think it is time for me to check with the moderators here to see if I can set up an invitation only group here on USMB before I start spending the money. You will be one of the invitees if that is so.

 

[jwoodie]

I would like to see an alternative history of how the Civil War was avoided. Slavery in the rest of the Western Hemisphere had died out by the 1880s, and there is no reason to believe that it would have continued into the 20th Century even in an independent Confederacy. Could this war, which cost more than 500,000 lives*, have been avoided by different Presidential leadership? Would someone other than Buchanan have sat by while things spun out of control? Would someone other than Lincoln have demanded an invasion of the Southern States? Would the Union and the Confederacy have eventually reconciled without the need for Reconstruction?

* This is more than all of the lives lost in all of our other wars combined. In today's terms, this would have been the equivalent of more than four million lives lost. Was it worth it?

 

[Picaro]

Lincoln losing the election would have been more than enough; even his own Cabinet warned him to go to war, except for his Postmaster General, including Winfield Scott. Buchanan didn't have much to with in his own Party, which was split, mostly over the misery and poverty caused by mass immigration. He did the right thing by not going to war over Sumter though, making him a far better President than the corrupt sociopath Lincoln.

 

[Picaro]

Picaro it looks like this will be a website game that I will be setting up. The people I will be using to set up the game website as an independent production will not be doing moderation, Beta testing and so on. I think it is time for me to check with the moderators here to see if I can set up an invitation only group here on USMB before I start spending the money. You will be one of the invitees if that is so.

Just bump this thread and let me know; my inbox is usually just infraction notices over some whining troll sniveling about something or other and I never read those and generally ignore inbox alerts.

 

[usmbguest5318]

In this thread, another member replied to the OP question by answering "an audience." I posted that I was going to share the same idea, albeit in different terms. Both mine and the other member's posts were deleted from the thread.

Nevermind that the thread is, in essence, the OP asking for business advice specific to a venture s/he aims to undertake and that is not within the stated scope of what CDZ -- "The Clean Debate Zone is to be used for the clean debating of Government Policies, Candidates, Current News and Events." -- the fact remains that the member very clearly asks for "free business consulting" when s/he writes:

I heard from friends that I should make a game and not finish the book. I am in the process of doing so. hopefully I will have a lawyer soon to handle the rough spots at a reasonable price. What tricks might I have missed?

And the response, "an audience," regardless of how others answered, is an appropriate answer to the question, and it's good advice. While anyone is free to in the marketplace offer whatever they want, the reality is that a market analysis of the sales potential -- i.e., confirming, among other things, that there exists an audience (larger than the circle of one's own friends) for the item/service -- for the item/service is among the most important things, "tricks" if you will, a would-be producer/seller needs.

The thread OP makes absolutely no mention of estimated demand for the game s/he aims to create. Now, I wouldn't expect that they'd share all the details of a credible or cursory market study they'd (had) performed about the sales viability of the product, but mention of "something" indicating there is merit to pursuing the endeavor would at least indicate that the OP knows there is an "adequately" sized audience for the game/book s/he wants to create. That mention would have been sufficient to obviate the value of other members responding "an audience" to the question asked.


Now what is most amazing, perhaps disconcerting too, is that the OP-er asked seriously for input, got it, and then, someone -- I don't know if it was the OP or not -- apparently disliked and ill considered the nature of legit input received, and asked to have it deleted. I don't care that a post of mine was deleted. Why would I. It's deletion tells me that it probably was read by the intended primary recipient of the information it contained. Thus, as far as I'm concerned "mission accomplished," even though, beyond my control, at least one reader of that post didn't fully comprehend the post's relevance to the question asked, nature and implications.

 

[william the wie]

Twas not me. And would you check, I have one missing post and a show ignored content prompt that came up for me when I hit the button. but I also had an additional button that said seven other messages that did not come up when I clicked the button, does that accord with your recollection? I did not see any of those seven other messages any of the times that I returned to this thread so I'm puzzled.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Twas not me. And would you check, I have one missing post and a show ignored content prompt that came up for me when I hit the button. but I also had an additional button that said seven other messages that did not come up when I clicked the button, does that accord with your recollection? I did not see any of those seven other messages any of the times that I returned to this thread so I'm puzzled.

Oh, wow. It seems, then, that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark," something seemingly more insidious than a post or two being misconstrued and subsequently deleted therefore.

FWIW, I didn't receive a notification that my post had been deleted. I would have thought I would have as I have received notifications for other actions moderators have performed, such as moving a thread from one subforum to another.

 

[usmbguest5318]

would you check, I have one missing post...

I can't check that for you. You'll need to ask a moderator.

I merely wanted to express my thoughts alluding to the absurdity of deleting the other member's post more so than my own. They were the first person to express the idea that I too had.

Twas not me....

Yes. I have no idea of who may have requested the deletion, assuming anyone indeed did. That's why I was redundant in my not suggesting you had.

someone -- I don't know if it was the OP or not --

 

[william the wie]

we're cool would you like to be invited to the private group? By the way my target audience are Civil war reenactors who are underserviced by the gaming studios. How underserviced I do not know. the secondary market are steam punks.