One, especially the early chapters are awful, two, re-posting 385 chapters is a lot of work, especially since I'd have to re-write half of them from scratch.
-
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Very nice chapter to read. Hopefully you won't have anymore software bugs/glitches.
Actually, the modern HMCS Vancouver in AAOverse circa-2017 would be the sixteenth and final Halifax-class frigate.
By the way, what class is HMS Mercury anyways?
Two questions:
1) Was the new IJN Nagato a Yamato-class battleship or a smaller design?
2) Aside from Fuso and Nagato, which other three Japanese dreadnoughts took part?
Indeed the early chapters are a mess.
You'd also have to switch to a more reliable image hosting site. I'd personally recommend imgur.
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So, Elizabeth is going to become queen earlier than IOTL?
Gosh, I missed this AAR a lot...
Gosh, I missed this AAR a lot...
In August 1942, Henry Ford had King George VI assassinated in an attempt to start a war between the Allies and the UAPR.
Knock on wood.
I'd like that upgraded to Destroyer, if possible, please.
Southampton-Class.
1) The new Nagato would be an updated Kii-Class, rush-built after 1941 and renamed when the original was lost. The Japanese not ditching the WNT after America goes kaput is one of the many things I would change if re-writing this from the start.
2) Present were Fuso, Nagato, Ise, Hyuga, Yamashiro.
I've long since switched to imgur.
That. She's formally taking the throne in June 1944, with a full-on coronation to happen after the war.
Hello again TK, long time no see. Still following this one, hope this is the start of you getting back on the regular update wagon.
On the update itself you did an excellent job of making what sounds a very one sided fight into a suitably epic battle, always wonderful to see Hood in amongst things and being a hero again, and I'm glad to see Warspite present at the last hurrah of the Dreadnoughts. Can we assume both of these ships make it to well deserved preservation as museum ships?
On the update itself you did an excellent job of making what sounds a very one sided fight into a suitably epic battle, always wonderful to see Hood in amongst things and being a hero again, and I'm glad to see Warspite present at the last hurrah of the Dreadnoughts. Can we assume both of these ships make it to well deserved preservation as museum ships?
Hood is a museum ship in Scapa Flow while Warspite is in the Thames where HMS Belfast is in OTL.
trekaddict
Good to see more of this and I'm definitely still reading. Great battle report and see that the Hood continued to play a gallent role while Warspite once again defies the odds.
One factual inaccuracy as I think we definitely lost 2DD, between Vancouver's self-sacrifice and the kamikaze attack on Musketeer. However given the forces the RN was facing those are still light losses.
Steve
PS Just seen El pip's message and your reply. Good to hear that the two old girls are well rewarded for their service.
Good to see more of this and I'm definitely still reading. Great battle report and see that the Hood continued to play a gallent role while Warspite once again defies the odds.
One factual inaccuracy as I think we definitely lost 2DD, between Vancouver's self-sacrifice and the kamikaze attack on Musketeer. However given the forces the RN was facing those are still light losses.
Steve
PS Just seen El pip's message and your reply. Good to hear that the two old girls are well rewarded for their service.
Incidentally, there's still time for you to save the SS Great Britain if you want. If I recall correctly, she's currently rusting away in the Falklands and has just been scuttled after years of misuse as a coal barge. What a wonderful thing it would be to restore her, eh? It was one of the biggest F.U.'s in history when that thing sailed into US waters with sails furled up and hull made of iron. Considering that the communists deserve a good PR slashing, maybe make this a joint project of restoring the ship and building Concorde (without the 'e' obviously).
I presume your talking about in the AAO TL as she was saved here and is in dry dock in Bristol? Which is possibly a good point for Hood and Warspite. In the longer term they will probably need to be in some sort of dry dock themselves for long term preservation.
Ironically just read the other day of a close escape in the 1830's. The First Sea Lord, appropriate enough a certain Thomas Hardy, reluctantly signed off on the scrapping of an elderly ship. Fortunately that evening on going home he told his 'boss' who went ballistic. She ordered him back to the office to reverse the order. But for that Portsmouth would have been without probably its most famous tourist attraction!
Indeed, but that was through the lucky intervention of several private individuals with more money than sense and perhaps even some soul to go with their gold. By the 70's the ship was gutted of anything identifiable when they found her. A shame for something so ahead of its time that if you go to save the ship now, the ships that will tow her back will have some similar components on them.
And even more cash. Although fortunately for them, when they are decommissioned they will still have most of their stuff intact. The next generation, that of aircraft carriers and eventually nuclear ones will have basically nothing on the outside to look at and in the case of the nuke one, nothing inside either. The question of whether to preserve the Enterprise for example is basically one side saying of course we should and the other side saying...um...what's the point?
And who says the Queen does nothing, eh?
If that last bit was referring to Amdiral Hardy's boss I'm afraid you misunderstood what I said. I mentioned he went home and got his new orders.
As you said for preserving the nations heritage it really needs people who both have plenty of money but don't measure themselves by their cash.
Or people who want an honour. Hence why direct cash for honours systems actually might hurt the country, because then it means they can literally just pay the government rather than finding something worthwhile to do with their money.
Warspite is still in the same place today, though as stated, a drydock was built around her hull in the 80s, financed part by a grant from the National Heritage Memorial fund and Empire-wide donations. Same for Hood, really.
Excellent news. Now I have to ask the same question again. How the hell do we get to the AAO universe!
(With all due apologies to IBM, RadioShack, Motorola, Sinclair and whoever else might be offended.)
01000011 01101000 01100001 01110000 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 00110011 00111000 00110110
A Colossus of men: Sir Alan Turing and the history of Computers, from Bletchley Park to the Interlink
James Edward Conroy, (University of British Columbia Press, 2008)
In the popular perception, modern computer history traces itself back to the likes of Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse, and with good reason. On opposite sides of the front, both these men did pioneer work and neither received the public recognition they deserved until decades after the war, though in the case of Sir Alan Turing, this may in part have been caused by his personal background. This chapter is by no means meant to provide a full history of Computers and how they shaped and continue to shape the world around us, but merely an introduction to their history.
In 1944, Sir Alan was the developers of the Colossus Mk.II, an improved version of the prototype that quintupled computation speed. Bletchley park had comissioned it's construction in 1943, to decipher both the Lorenz cipher used by what was left of the German Kriegsmarine, the German Army and Air Force. A slightly differing variant of this cipher was used for high-level/priority communications between Berlin and Moscow, and it was this variant that had prompted the Post Office Research Station to request the assistance of Britain's foremost expert on computation machines.
Even though limited in scope and in it's single unit was not a Turing-complete Computer as defined by Sir Alan in the 1950s. It was a machine for a set of narrow and very specific purposes, and all of them cryptography related. Yet the fourteen examples completed before the end of the war did splendid service in that field, even though all of them were destroyed and all documentation about them burnt after the end of the war.
The history of the Colossus-Group and what they created is the subject of Chapters 2-4 of this book.
In early 1945, as fighting still raged in eastern Poland and a number of Axis holdout in France were still resisting, Sir Alan and several others from GCHQ as well as Colossus-Group engineers journeyed across devastated western Europe to Berlin, in order to inspect something that a German Engineer had created and that was reportedly even more advanced than their own. When they met with Konrad Zuse he led them into a house along Methfesselstraße in Berlin-Kreuzberg. What the British engineers and scientists saw there was nothing but the beginning of modern computers.
The Z3.
Even though technically it was a development of another machine (retroactively dubbed the Z3 Type 1) and not fully electronic, unlike the Colossus machines in Britain, it was nevertheless fully programmable via 80 column punch cards, a technology that, as Zuse happily admitted, was stolen from International Business Machines, an obscure and long-defunct American company that had originally patented the idea in 1928. Developed for the Reichsluftfahrtministerium, it was originally to be used for aerodynamic calculations that were part of the Jet engine research efforts going on at the time. The war had ended for Berlin before that could happen.
Different or not, the Colossus-Group did not take long to realize what they had. At that time it lacked several features to make it a truly Turing-complete machine, but it was nevertheless confiscated and brought to Britain along with it's creator and his principle assistants. Kept as far away from Bletchley and the Colossus machines as was practicable, Zuse and the Z3 were tasked with assisting Turing in his next big project, a project that would eventually bring forth the Vulcan 'trilogy' of electronic computers.
Built between 1948 and 1950 at Camebridge on the behest of the Royal Corps of Signals and the Royal Artillery, the trio of computers were the first machines built from the start as Turing complete machines, fully electronic, digital and programmable in almost the modern sense. Over the next decades, digital computers slowly became a commercial product in their own right, and in 1954, the Government ceased official funding for further research, dissolving the Vulcan Group whose members each went their separate ways. Sir Alan took up a teaching position at his Alma Mater at King's College in Camebridge, founding the Centre for Computer Sciences in 1962 and continuing to work there until his retirement in 1987.
Zuse on the other hand returned to Germany. He continued research and work into Computers and Semiconducters before founding the Zuse Großrechnerbau KG in 1966, running the company up until he retired from active management in 1986. Today the Zuse Elektronik AG is known as the largest of globaly only three major CPU manufacturers, just barely beating out it's rivals at Toshiba in Japan and Sinclair Electronics in the British Empire.
Both remained friends for the remainder of their lives to the point that Sir Alan, to die soon after himself, travelled to Berlin to deliver the eulogy at Zuse's funeral in 1995.
Microcomputers were not invented by Zuse, the first one to have the term applied was a machine designed by a conglomerate of Royal Mail, British Imperial Airways and British Rail Engineers as a part of Ticket Reservation System 1980, meant to last all these institutions all through the decade, making it the first global and non-military computer network.
A familiar sight for travellers throughout the Empire and much of the Euroblock well into the 1990s.
As it was, Zuse was about to launch the biggest revolution in microcomputers until the advent of the Interlink, the Z78.
Developed over a three year time period with occasional input from Sir Alan (though how much input he had remains open to debate) and with limited backing by a number of German universities, the machine initially meant for educational and business use, something reflected in it's capabilities that were initially limited to monochrome and it's price, at the time 1910 D-Mark, roughly 1400 CAD at time of printing, so it was hardly accessible to the common customer.
Even so it was a breakout success, with the first machines appearing in British stores that same year and in January 1979 also in Canada. Imitators were quick to appear, but at first none of the so-called Zuse Compatible Machines (or ZCMs) quite reached the original in build quality and capabilities, especially when the 78-2 added colour graphics and a soundchip adapted from a Video-game console, built a built in harddisk controller (with a drive being an optional extra) as well as more user-friendly connectivity for printers and other external accessories such as the Z-010 tape deck.
The machine coined the term 'Personal Computer', oddly enough with the English abbreviation of the term winning out over it's German counterpart even in that country, and it was with a set of 78s with which the now massive Canadian gaming industry was started. All this allowed the machine to break into the home market, along with a price reduction and the explosively growing home gaming, The Z-78 and it's revisions remained in production until 1984, with the last example coming off the production line being preserved in the publicly accessible Zuse AG museum. Development had not halted, with the Z81 released in 1981, appropriately the first PC with a 20 MB harddrive as standard.
Computer technology outside Germany did not stand still, as ZCMs became a common thing across the Euroblock and the rest of the world, though they never quite managed to break into the German market. The only serious competitor to ever coming close to unseating Zuse during the 1980s rose to fame in the United Kingdom in 1980, with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum released that year, promptly to enter a lengthy legal battle about the Z prefix, with a German court eventually allowing Sinclair Electronics to keep using it.
Though not quite as fast as contemporary Zuse machines and sold as an all-in-one unit that one would connect to a TV or a third-party monitor, it nevertheless offered the ability to connect an external harddrive and a mouse/gaming controller as standard. This, together with it's low price point made it a choice for lower budget households, especially since the machine, affectionately called the Speccie, was extremely capable with games for a machine of this size and configuration.
Development of early forms of the Interlink began right around that time. Between the TRS-80 system still used by British Rail and it's sister companies all over the Empire, as well as the nascent NAVCOM and GPS systems and the networks and dial-to-connect bulletin boards springing up it was only a matter of time until someone would try to apply those technologies to a wider commercial market. Even though the exact details are still classified to this day, the Royal Navy had long desired a faster means of communication between the various naval stations spread across the world that wouldn't rely on the open airwaves or vulnerable telephone switches. NRC (Naval Relay Chat) was presented to assembled Naval Officers as well as the Prince of Wales in 1984.
Even though classified fairly high at the time, the concept itself soon leaked out to the various universities, with various colleges in Camebridge independently working on a clone of the system before their efforts were unified, and by 1988 most major Euroblock universities were connected via the 'Inter-University Link' shortened and contracted to 'Interlink' later that year. They had been connected since the early 1960s as stated above, though ironically the Data Transfer Code[1] was not invented until 1976, with the IUL adopting the DTC in 1977 and 'going global' in 1981 on the heels of the PC revolution.
A more detailed history can be found in Chapter fifteen and onwards of this volume.
Public availability began in 1986, though at first several Education boards pushed for 'educational use only'. However, due to both Sinclair and Zuse adopting DTC-compatible external modems as an optional extra, working together with the National Communications Board, a non-profit that governs Interlink address distribution to this day. By 1990 those had become internal and standard, with an increading number of subscribers and users. From a paltry figure of 0.4% of the global population having access that year this has grown to around 65% in 2007. Near 100% of households in the Eurobloc own at least one device capable of connecting to the Interlink via broad-band access.
However one stands on the issues of Net Neutrality, age appropriate content, Interlink addiction or any number of issues that have arisen in the two decades since that fateful Monday morning in 1986, it all started with Sir Alan Turing and a cryptographical computer. When asked to comment on the technology in an interview a few weeks before his death in spring 1996, Turing commented that in his opinion there had not been a greater enabler in communications and no greater equalizer of knowledge since the printing press.
When one of the minds behind the NRC system was asked in 2005 about how the Interlink had changed society, the answer was one that is today splashed across websites and shirts across the world:
“Lady, we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.”
tbc
This chapter had to be computer related. Anyhoo, now that the Battle of the South China Sea is done, the next big one is the Battle of the Fulda Gap and after that the final stages of Jaywick. Since the former needs a great deal of research (I'm not at all familiar with the area beyond it's relation to Cold War planning) a few world-building posts are coming up next. After this would you ladies and gents be interested in a discourse on (Video-) gaming?
[1]Effectively TCP-IP
01000011 01101000 01100001 01110000 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 00110011 00111000 00110110
A Colossus of men: Sir Alan Turing and the history of Computers, from Bletchley Park to the Interlink
James Edward Conroy, (University of British Columbia Press, 2008)
In the popular perception, modern computer history traces itself back to the likes of Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse, and with good reason. On opposite sides of the front, both these men did pioneer work and neither received the public recognition they deserved until decades after the war, though in the case of Sir Alan Turing, this may in part have been caused by his personal background. This chapter is by no means meant to provide a full history of Computers and how they shaped and continue to shape the world around us, but merely an introduction to their history.
In 1944, Sir Alan was the developers of the Colossus Mk.II, an improved version of the prototype that quintupled computation speed. Bletchley park had comissioned it's construction in 1943, to decipher both the Lorenz cipher used by what was left of the German Kriegsmarine, the German Army and Air Force. A slightly differing variant of this cipher was used for high-level/priority communications between Berlin and Moscow, and it was this variant that had prompted the Post Office Research Station to request the assistance of Britain's foremost expert on computation machines.
Even though limited in scope and in it's single unit was not a Turing-complete Computer as defined by Sir Alan in the 1950s. It was a machine for a set of narrow and very specific purposes, and all of them cryptography related. Yet the fourteen examples completed before the end of the war did splendid service in that field, even though all of them were destroyed and all documentation about them burnt after the end of the war.
The history of the Colossus-Group and what they created is the subject of Chapters 2-4 of this book.
In early 1945, as fighting still raged in eastern Poland and a number of Axis holdout in France were still resisting, Sir Alan and several others from GCHQ as well as Colossus-Group engineers journeyed across devastated western Europe to Berlin, in order to inspect something that a German Engineer had created and that was reportedly even more advanced than their own. When they met with Konrad Zuse he led them into a house along Methfesselstraße in Berlin-Kreuzberg. What the British engineers and scientists saw there was nothing but the beginning of modern computers.
The Z3.
Even though technically it was a development of another machine (retroactively dubbed the Z3 Type 1) and not fully electronic, unlike the Colossus machines in Britain, it was nevertheless fully programmable via 80 column punch cards, a technology that, as Zuse happily admitted, was stolen from International Business Machines, an obscure and long-defunct American company that had originally patented the idea in 1928. Developed for the Reichsluftfahrtministerium, it was originally to be used for aerodynamic calculations that were part of the Jet engine research efforts going on at the time. The war had ended for Berlin before that could happen.
Different or not, the Colossus-Group did not take long to realize what they had. At that time it lacked several features to make it a truly Turing-complete machine, but it was nevertheless confiscated and brought to Britain along with it's creator and his principle assistants. Kept as far away from Bletchley and the Colossus machines as was practicable, Zuse and the Z3 were tasked with assisting Turing in his next big project, a project that would eventually bring forth the Vulcan 'trilogy' of electronic computers.
Built between 1948 and 1950 at Camebridge on the behest of the Royal Corps of Signals and the Royal Artillery, the trio of computers were the first machines built from the start as Turing complete machines, fully electronic, digital and programmable in almost the modern sense. Over the next decades, digital computers slowly became a commercial product in their own right, and in 1954, the Government ceased official funding for further research, dissolving the Vulcan Group whose members each went their separate ways. Sir Alan took up a teaching position at his Alma Mater at King's College in Camebridge, founding the Centre for Computer Sciences in 1962 and continuing to work there until his retirement in 1987.
Zuse on the other hand returned to Germany. He continued research and work into Computers and Semiconducters before founding the Zuse Großrechnerbau KG in 1966, running the company up until he retired from active management in 1986. Today the Zuse Elektronik AG is known as the largest of globaly only three major CPU manufacturers, just barely beating out it's rivals at Toshiba in Japan and Sinclair Electronics in the British Empire.
Both remained friends for the remainder of their lives to the point that Sir Alan, to die soon after himself, travelled to Berlin to deliver the eulogy at Zuse's funeral in 1995.
Microcomputers were not invented by Zuse, the first one to have the term applied was a machine designed by a conglomerate of Royal Mail, British Imperial Airways and British Rail Engineers as a part of Ticket Reservation System 1980, meant to last all these institutions all through the decade, making it the first global and non-military computer network.
A familiar sight for travellers throughout the Empire and much of the Euroblock well into the 1990s.
As it was, Zuse was about to launch the biggest revolution in microcomputers until the advent of the Interlink, the Z78.
Developed over a three year time period with occasional input from Sir Alan (though how much input he had remains open to debate) and with limited backing by a number of German universities, the machine initially meant for educational and business use, something reflected in it's capabilities that were initially limited to monochrome and it's price, at the time 1910 D-Mark, roughly 1400 CAD at time of printing, so it was hardly accessible to the common customer.
Even so it was a breakout success, with the first machines appearing in British stores that same year and in January 1979 also in Canada. Imitators were quick to appear, but at first none of the so-called Zuse Compatible Machines (or ZCMs) quite reached the original in build quality and capabilities, especially when the 78-2 added colour graphics and a soundchip adapted from a Video-game console, built a built in harddisk controller (with a drive being an optional extra) as well as more user-friendly connectivity for printers and other external accessories such as the Z-010 tape deck.
The machine coined the term 'Personal Computer', oddly enough with the English abbreviation of the term winning out over it's German counterpart even in that country, and it was with a set of 78s with which the now massive Canadian gaming industry was started. All this allowed the machine to break into the home market, along with a price reduction and the explosively growing home gaming, The Z-78 and it's revisions remained in production until 1984, with the last example coming off the production line being preserved in the publicly accessible Zuse AG museum. Development had not halted, with the Z81 released in 1981, appropriately the first PC with a 20 MB harddrive as standard.
Computer technology outside Germany did not stand still, as ZCMs became a common thing across the Euroblock and the rest of the world, though they never quite managed to break into the German market. The only serious competitor to ever coming close to unseating Zuse during the 1980s rose to fame in the United Kingdom in 1980, with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum released that year, promptly to enter a lengthy legal battle about the Z prefix, with a German court eventually allowing Sinclair Electronics to keep using it.
Though not quite as fast as contemporary Zuse machines and sold as an all-in-one unit that one would connect to a TV or a third-party monitor, it nevertheless offered the ability to connect an external harddrive and a mouse/gaming controller as standard. This, together with it's low price point made it a choice for lower budget households, especially since the machine, affectionately called the Speccie, was extremely capable with games for a machine of this size and configuration.
Development of early forms of the Interlink began right around that time. Between the TRS-80 system still used by British Rail and it's sister companies all over the Empire, as well as the nascent NAVCOM and GPS systems and the networks and dial-to-connect bulletin boards springing up it was only a matter of time until someone would try to apply those technologies to a wider commercial market. Even though the exact details are still classified to this day, the Royal Navy had long desired a faster means of communication between the various naval stations spread across the world that wouldn't rely on the open airwaves or vulnerable telephone switches. NRC (Naval Relay Chat) was presented to assembled Naval Officers as well as the Prince of Wales in 1984.
Even though classified fairly high at the time, the concept itself soon leaked out to the various universities, with various colleges in Camebridge independently working on a clone of the system before their efforts were unified, and by 1988 most major Euroblock universities were connected via the 'Inter-University Link' shortened and contracted to 'Interlink' later that year. They had been connected since the early 1960s as stated above, though ironically the Data Transfer Code[1] was not invented until 1976, with the IUL adopting the DTC in 1977 and 'going global' in 1981 on the heels of the PC revolution.
A more detailed history can be found in Chapter fifteen and onwards of this volume.
Public availability began in 1986, though at first several Education boards pushed for 'educational use only'. However, due to both Sinclair and Zuse adopting DTC-compatible external modems as an optional extra, working together with the National Communications Board, a non-profit that governs Interlink address distribution to this day. By 1990 those had become internal and standard, with an increading number of subscribers and users. From a paltry figure of 0.4% of the global population having access that year this has grown to around 65% in 2007. Near 100% of households in the Eurobloc own at least one device capable of connecting to the Interlink via broad-band access.
However one stands on the issues of Net Neutrality, age appropriate content, Interlink addiction or any number of issues that have arisen in the two decades since that fateful Monday morning in 1986, it all started with Sir Alan Turing and a cryptographical computer. When asked to comment on the technology in an interview a few weeks before his death in spring 1996, Turing commented that in his opinion there had not been a greater enabler in communications and no greater equalizer of knowledge since the printing press.
When one of the minds behind the NRC system was asked in 2005 about how the Interlink had changed society, the answer was one that is today splashed across websites and shirts across the world:
“Lady, we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.”
tbc
This chapter had to be computer related. Anyhoo, now that the Battle of the South China Sea is done, the next big one is the Battle of the Fulda Gap and after that the final stages of Jaywick. Since the former needs a great deal of research (I'm not at all familiar with the area beyond it's relation to Cold War planning) a few world-building posts are coming up next. After this would you ladies and gents be interested in a discourse on (Video-) gaming?
[1]Effectively TCP-IP
I loved the chapter. Different, but not so much, from the usual topics, but lovely.
Poor old Tommy Flowers, even in alt-history he is overlooked and forgotten about.
I as an author didn't, really. He is among the 'others' I mentioned in the disclaimer. The book this is from would be a somewhat controversial Turing fanboyism expressed in print form.