First off, El Pip Voting Opportunity
The next update is likely to contain explicit aero-engineering and scenes of extreme civil service politics some readers may find disturbing. As part of this I will be banding around phrases such as "Air cooled X-24", "Twin-row radial" and "Ethylene glycol cooled V12". It did occur to me that the meaning of these may not be immediately apparent so I should stick in some words explaining this. However I then considered that if you had got this far without understanding such things, then you may not be that fussed. To settle this debate please vote for one of the following options;
1. Please include some overly-detailed explanation on 1930s aero-engine types and how they were cooled, it will be informing and edifying
2. I am already aware of all I need to know on this subject, so you can just get on with the actual point of the next chapter.
Deadline for voting is the end of Sunday 14th. Tennessee election rules this time, so you can only vote once and should you attempt to vote twice your first vote will be declared null and void.
HOI4 stuff has been read and nodded at sagely. It still appears to be a game I can live without.
The problem will be the rest of the Monarchist coalition, Franco may be dead but the "Rebuild a purer, unified Spain" ideas didn't come from him and so won't die with him. The Falange hated separatists and that is not going to change, as they are both numerous and the route for German arms and advice they cannot be ignored.
France does need to work out what it's overall policy is. The preferred option, of the British forgetting about the whole Abyssinian War non-joining incident and signing a new Entente, is not happening. The current plan of strengthening the Little Entente is all well and good, but no-one really thinks a collection of Eastern European states is a real replacement for the British Empire. Just assuming Germany will be good from now on may well work in London but no-one in Paris is buying it, so there does need to be a plan, but what?
The next update is likely to contain explicit aero-engineering and scenes of extreme civil service politics some readers may find disturbing. As part of this I will be banding around phrases such as "Air cooled X-24", "Twin-row radial" and "Ethylene glycol cooled V12". It did occur to me that the meaning of these may not be immediately apparent so I should stick in some words explaining this. However I then considered that if you had got this far without understanding such things, then you may not be that fussed. To settle this debate please vote for one of the following options;
1. Please include some overly-detailed explanation on 1930s aero-engine types and how they were cooled, it will be informing and edifying
2. I am already aware of all I need to know on this subject, so you can just get on with the actual point of the next chapter.
Deadline for voting is the end of Sunday 14th. Tennessee election rules this time, so you can only vote once and should you attempt to vote twice your first vote will be declared null and void.
Well, the medium stuff will arrive in '38. Don't want to come on too strong, too soon and get a slap around the face.The hard stuff to be sent in 1938!?Ooh, Matron!
HOI4 stuff has been read and nodded at sagely. It still appears to be a game I can live without.
Heathen. Any tank-destroyer that has a fixed rear-pointing gun has a certain charm about it. While I am forced to concede the world would be a more functional and better place if the Archer never existed, it would be a less eccentrically interesting place.
It appears HOI4 has at least modelled that bit correctly; there was no real advantage for Italy in getting involved in the OTL Spanish Civil War either.
My understanding had been that the military leadership that briefed the cabinet was very carefully selected by the civil service, with the implicit agreement of first Baldwin and then Chamberlain, to achieve precisely this.
An excellent summary of all the ways the Basque are in trouble. The Entente is pretty much dead at this point, but not to the point France feels threatened by Britain, just a realisation that they cannot count on Britain automatically backing France in any future conflict. (Naturally this is all the fault of Perfidious Albion and nothing at all to do with Paris declining to get involved in the Abyssinian War.) So the French backing independent Catalans and Basque is not as unlikely as 0.1%, but it's still very much a long shot.
They also have the problem that they insist on wanting to claim bits of all the surrounding countries. The Kurds want bits of Iran and Turkey, who are the two regional powers most likely to back any separatists for their own strategic reasons, but neither will want to support them because they know that would just store up future problems. That said the Kurdish autonomus region on Iraq seems to be doing well (by the low standards of Iraq) so maybe there is some hope. All the Basque need to do is find some oil and things may start looking up for them.
Small states are nice and easy to herd and control. Maybe a bit more stable as well, if you draw the boundaries correctly. Or of course you go full Yes Minister and deliberately draw bad boundaries, hoping to make the local too busy fighting themselves to cause problems elsewhere.
The Carlists might go for it if the Basque accepted the King of Spain was also the King of the Basque, everything else being filed under Basque Home Rule. It sort-of worked before so could do again.
The problem will be the rest of the Monarchist coalition, Franco may be dead but the "Rebuild a purer, unified Spain" ideas didn't come from him and so won't die with him. The Falange hated separatists and that is not going to change, as they are both numerous and the route for German arms and advice they cannot be ignored.
There is the French Basque country I suppose, but Wiki claims this was less of a problem after WW1 as there was a degree of 'French' identity forged in the trenches, and the language had started to die out. I'm not sure if the Spanish Basque would happily give up their French Brethren, but as a desperate measure they probably would.
France does need to work out what it's overall policy is. The preferred option, of the British forgetting about the whole Abyssinian War non-joining incident and signing a new Entente, is not happening. The current plan of strengthening the Little Entente is all well and good, but no-one really thinks a collection of Eastern European states is a real replacement for the British Empire. Just assuming Germany will be good from now on may well work in London but no-one in Paris is buying it, so there does need to be a plan, but what?
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