Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[mainiac]

Going off the Mongols, what if the empire as it was conquered by Ghengis Khan managed to last as one unit rather than being splintered for at least a century after his death?

Alien space bats mean too many variables to predict.

[Kot]

Inb4 what if the Poles destroyed the Ottomans entirely at Vienna then destroyed the Hungarians entirely and took Vienna for themselves then just kept conquering everyone into greater Poland

In a better universe, sure. Also, Vienna was and is Austrian, no? Fuck backstabbing Austrians, though really what do you expect from a nation of island convicts with incredibly hostile wildlife.

[mainiac]

Well I expect decent nature documentaries.

[Loud Whispers]

Inb4 what if the Poles destroyed the Ottomans entirely at Vienna then destroyed the Hungarians entirely and took Vienna for themselves then just kept conquering everyone into greater Poland

In a better universe, sure. Also, Vienna was and is Austrian, no? Fuck backstabbing Austrians, though really what do you expect from a nation of island convicts with incredibly hostile wildlife.

Yeah, but the Hungarians would've been the easiest target to take afterwards, whilst the Austrians were still heavily dug in

[jaked122]

Well I expect decent nature documentaries.

Heh.

Inb4 what if the Poles destroyed the Ottomans entirely at Vienna then destroyed the Hungarians entirely and took Vienna for themselves then just kept conquering everyone into greater Poland

I have a hard time imagining that, otherwise the old origins of the name wouldn't have the secondary meaning.


You know; land fit to be plowed.


Particularly true for invading forces I fear. From what I remember, the greeks called the area the same thing in their language, not that they really went all that far north.


Anyway reading too many polandball comics have probably influenced me significantly.


I just looked it up actually, and the name just generally descends from a word in an ancient language of the area that meant field. So not really involving plows then.

[Kot]

I just looked it up actually, and the name just generally descends from a word in an ancient language of the area that meant field. So not really involving plows then.

Yeah I got confused by you, plowing doesn't really have much to do with it.
Also, in modern Polish, pole means field, and polana means glade, and it didin't change a lot since old times, apparently. The name Poland is said to come from the tribe of Polanie which could be translated as "people living in glades/fields" or something. And majority of that territory back then was forests, so it's not really that easy to plow through, though the soil is not that bad, I guess, which has led the Poland to be called "granary of Europe" in later centuries or something.

[Culise]

But all I really wanted was my fix of indignant Polish nationalism, which I'll give a 6/10, didn't include the ponymen with their bird outfits.

*prancing nobility on horses intensifies*
You do realize that winged ponymen appeared like over 200 years later than Teutonic losers? Back in the days we still had knights of some sorts.
This This is apparently how they looked like.

Giant mech in that first one, the heck? lol......

*dashes in*

^{I've literally sat on that for 8 years waiting for a shot at posting it. Validated at last. ^_^}

Also, let's say the Poles sweep out the Turks, Austrians, and Hungarians and seize Vienna in 1683 against almost twice their number in Germans with over four times as much cannon.  Let's say they even seize Vienna from a garrison that has already stood strong for two months against seven times that number of Turks with even more cannon than both the Austrians and Poles combined, and somehow accomplish this before the Austrians can raise another army and drive the Poles back.  What do they do with the city now that they have it?  They don't have the the military force to turn it into either control of Austria or Royal Hungary, and the Hapsburgs still control the Carpathians and Bohemia.  Poland has not fully recovered from the Deluge by any measure after only two decades, and Jan Sobieski's position at home is more precarious than it would have seemed at 1683; he had just accused some of his own nobility in this year of financing a plot with German backing to depose him and install Charles of Lorraine.  An unending war against the Germans, Hungarians, *and* the Turks simultaneously would have been an excellent way to cripple the Commonwealth, though I'd imagine France would have been rather satisfied.  Worse, it would have overturned all of Sobieski's careful diplomatic work undertaken after the harsh lessons taken from the Deluge - that an ally in the south and west (the Holy Roman Empire) was critical to counterbalance the Swedes, Russians, and Turks.  The fact that Charles XI and the young Peter I (later the Great) were not at the time interested in a Polish war due to their own domestic consolidations and considerations could not be considered a guarantee. 

EDIT: Oh, wait, that was just a silly "inb4," not a serious assertion of any sort. Oopsie.

[mainiac]

I feel like you can really learn a lot of history from the serious answers to the question "why not?"

[Kot]

That's okay. Poland still wins in the long run because power of Jesus.

[mainiac]

Tallest jesus most powerful jesus.

[Kot]

Spoiler: All hail Aragorn II, also known as Elessar, the son of Arathorn II, 26th King of Arnor, and the 35th King of Gondor and first High King of Gondor and Arnor, since the short reign of Isildur. (click to show/hide)

[PTTG??]

Archduke Franz Ferdinand isn't assassinated. There are tension-relieving "frontier wars" in the colonies, but it takes until the '40s for a great European war to break out.

The use of dirty bombs as an area-denial weapon is frequent, even to the point of special "snowfall" weapons mounted on dirigibles. They leave a trail of heavy radioactive dust with a half-life of weeks, making troop movement hazardous and restricting the front to narrow corridors and specific dense urban areas that are to be captured whole.

One suggested elsewhere is the antarctic ice sheets collapse in the '90s, resulting in immediate sea level rise. Al Gore is swept into office in 2000, part of a wave of climate concern; the world harshly condemns and sanctions polluting corporations after CO2 levels pass 350ppm, and climate refugees from Bangladesh to New York keep the global focus on sustainability and climate concerns, and an Apollo-level effort to reconstruct the economy on ecological lines takes place.

[Fniff]

Hitler is a sculptor instead of an artist.

Absolutely nothing changes because he's equally useless at that.

[Kot]

Sculptors are also artists.
What about Hitler being, well, Hitler, but never stopping painting? Like, Hitler painting stuff sitting in a bunker in 1944 and after the war people see it and are like daaaaamn this Hitler guy was an one big piece of shit but daaaaaaaaaaaaaamn his painting actually got fine.

[Fniff]

What if some Red Army soldier loots Hitler's actually decent paintings and then pretends they're his own, getting mega-famous as a Soviet artist?