Many of you have asked how much of the world of the Flying Cloud is real. This is a fair question, which most certainly deserves an answer! The airships are as real as I could possibly make them. I compiled reams of specifications and design notes as background for a novel, and much of this material – along with some of the ships – serves as a background for the story. The Flying Cloud herself may lie near the upper limit of performance that could be achieved with the technology of the time, but with smaller 12-cylinder counterparts of the big 16-cylinder Daimler Benz LOF6 diesels aboard the Hindenberg, streamlining comparable to the R100, and high-efficiency four-bladed propellers, her speed and fuel consumption figures are possible. Most of the other technology is real as well, though some gets developed a few years sooner than it did in our world, and it’s possible that the Alice Springs-Darwin narrow-gauge rail line was not quite as slow as I suggest 
For the most part, the major public figures are the same as they were in our world. The points of departure between Captain Everett’s 1926 and ours are small, so there was little chance of someone like Winston Churchill forsaking a career in politics to became a soccer player for Balgownie. Some differences are part of the historical background (“Actung, Herr Zimmerman! Passen sie vom bus auf!” CRASH! “Oops”). Others were unavoidable. Since the War ended in 1916, the Germans had neither reason nor opportunity to smuggle Lenin into Russia in 1917, and he remained an obscure bookseller in Geneva. But the October Revolution still happened, and the Communists took power under Trotsky instead.
The places are also real. I even visited a few to make sure. One possible exception is Sarah’s island. At the time of Captain Everett’s visit, this was a sizable body of land, with and area and population comparable to that of a small English county. If you examine Google Earth today, you will find an island at the same location, but this is a barren windswept rock less than a mile across with no permanent inhabitants. What is the relationship between the two, you wonder?
Life is full of mysteries…
Up until THIS YEAR, I had believed the term “aircraft diesel” to be on the order of “screen door on a submarine”. Then, I attended an event at a local historic machinery museum http://www.agsem.com/ where I witnessed a WW2 9-cylinder radial diesel engine in operation. To further confound my credibility, I learned that, although this particular relic was started by a pulse of nitrogen gas, it originally used a 12-gauge shotgun shell! The engine had a relatively low compression ratio for a diesel, in order to keep the weight down, but it developed sufficient power for its needs. The air-cooled radial diesel was also used in tanks and landing craft.
Anyway, after that, diesels on the Flying Cloud didn’t strike me as much fantastic license as, say, the presence of British naval airships in the 1920’s South Pacific.
I also have to say that one can’t really appreciate the bending of history, à la steampunk fiction, if one doesn’t know the real history being bent. Your reference to Lenin sent me to Wiki, where I learned the origin of the line “From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station” in one of my favorite songs by the Pet Shop Boys, but didn’t discover if historians consider the gambit by Germany to disrupt Russian politics to be militarily successful.
I am very impressed with the extent of you research. Were your visits to sites you mentioned for actual research, or merely incidental to travels for business or vacations? Either way, I envy your opportunities; I would have loved to travel the South Pacific. I did visit Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Bangkok in the 1960’s, and I took at least some time out from drinking and wenching to do the tourist thing.
I really do love a blend of history and technology – being a naval scale modeler, your online series really hits the spot, albeit a little higher in the air than usual!
I do wonder if the Communist revolution would have occurred – their slogan was “Peace, land, and bread”. But with peace already achieved, would land and bread have been enough to bring the country to a successful revolution? Hmm.
Also, do you foresee a struggle between speed vs. endurance regarding aerial technology – i.e., a belated comeback of aeroplanes?
Half the fun of doing this story has been the research. Not just the big things, like airship operations, but little things, like tracking down some images of the 1902 Mauser rifle so I could do the graphics for Episode 48. Though I got a bit careless when I drew the front and rear sights. This has lead to any number of surprises. I had specs for most of the inline diesels that were used aboard airships, but I was entirely unaware of the Guiberson and BMW radial aircraft diesels until Kirk clued me into them! I imagine there will be more surprises as Season Two begins.
This should be fun…
I do think the Communist revolution was pretty inevitable. Perhaps the Czars could have lasted if the War had never happened, but after the disasters of Tannenberg and the like, they were so thoroughly discredited that it’s hard to imagine their survival. I suppose a military takeover and some form of fascist government was also possible, but part of the game has been to keep the differences between Everett’s world and ours as small as I can. A lot of thought went into the choice of late-1916 for Woodrow Wilson’s Peace! It’s early enough to have a profound effect on how the post-war world economy and technology might develop, but late enough so that most of the major campaigns that shaped the War will have happened, to produce a world whose politics and national boundaries could plausibly resemble our own. Though I will admit that I was being cute when I picked 11-November for the Armistice
As for how aviation will develop, the short answer is that by the late-30s, the points of departure become so numerous and significant that predictions get tricky. Maybe they really will have flying cars by 2009! I’d imagine that they’d ultimately develop mixed fleets of airships and aeroplanes, some of which perform missions and tasks — such as long-duration flights and/or transport of heavy cargoes to and from undeveloped sites — that don’t have any analogue in our world’s economy. They might also develop flying aircraft carriers as an alternative to mid-air refueling for aircraft in the 2-20 ton range. But it’s hard to come up with numbers for these things that are much better than guesswork.