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Dessert battle snake eyes art1/7/2024 ![]() You can often create a plausible T/L from an otherwise questionable start with enough well thought out early POD. The number of handwaves in the "implausible" T/L vastly outweighs those in the "plausible" Alternate History T/L. I haven't really managed to do so, the best I can come up with is unreal or illusion, but even those are unfair insofar that they imply "lesser", and the stories that do not meet the plausibility criteria are not, in any way, lesser, they simply are unsupportable without unending handwaves. I have been trying to find a term that would not seem overly harsh to describe the difference between what is plausible, even non-zero possible and not. Adding more an more layers of luck tips things into a different realm (and Forum). It can't simply be throw other that "well, they are just getting lucky" IOTL the Axis powers were so lucky that it almost defies belief. Luck is finite, al least if one wants to post something that can be reasonably discussed in this particular forum. Once things get going their needs to be a set of tethers to reality. That does not mean however, that the bar get sold for crap value. They were screwed BEFORE strapping on the United States )which remains one of the most egregious screw ups by a nation state in the last 1,000 years).Īll told ,to give and Axis victory T/L half a chance the plausibility bar has to be lowered, a lot. The Japanese committed the ultimate sin, the became fully involved in an Asian Land War. Too poorly led, too economically weak, and without anything beyond a vague fever dream of a strategy. The minute the Germans decided to attack the USSR before securing their Western Flank (which, simply put, was never going to happen via force of arms) they were done. The list can go on for pages of why the Axis was dead from the get-go. It lacked, almost totally, the one irreplaceable resource needed by any Industrial Era group, oil its enemies were swimming in the stuff. It had no sembelance of joint military strategy. That isn't an alliance except by exclusion, no one else wanted to play with them so they became "friends". Japan wanted to control ALL of Asia (and people say Khufu thought big). Mussolini's Italy wanted to recreate the Roman Empire, at least around the Med and into the Levant (part of this vision conflicted with the Reich's vision, Mussolini sort of missed that). The Reich wanted control of European Peninsula, to eliminate a laundry list of "untermensch", and to establish some bizarre agrarian region where the Aryan People could continue to evolve. It wasn't, in any useful sense, an alliance at all (a few U-Boats with samples does not a unified strategy make), rather three separate players all trying to get their own agenda. It's NCA level leadership was vastly less capable than the Allies (when Hitler is the Ace in the deck, y'all have issues). While, at the time the Axis seemed on the verge of ruling the world, the reality was that unless the Allies leadership "started eating lead paint" or simply ALL decided to cower in the face of the storm, the Axis was doomed. ![]() Frequently ALL of these, along with a couple others are needed to give the Axis any sort of chance. Hitler has to have a couple actual moments of clarity, Mussolini has to be willing to take thing one step at a time, Stalin has to have one of his famed temper tanturms at the wrong moment, aimed at the wrong people. ![]() The thing that tends to be missed, far too often is that "Axis Victory" T/L tend to get WAY more space than WAllied T/L. This was, from almost the very start, completely untethered to any sort of POD. Click to expand.Actually what i said was VALID complaints.
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