Hopefully they bought the hull from someone else and refitted it to taste?  It's certainly a decent pocket battleship, for a country that might reasonably be suffering from dreadnaught envy. 

The designs themselves seem okay to me, not over the top in terms of cost or equipment or anything.  Not quite sure why they *need* an ether squadron, but whatever.  Foolish military expenditures are a very 1890's kind of thing.

Rich

Or bombard the Spanish colonies...or the Selenites, if they get uppity.

Which raises the question of whether we really want the US armed with cannons that could just as easily drop building-sized shells on the cities of Europe and Asia, doesn't it?  Everyone remember Castle Falkenstein and the Verne cannon keeping the Prussians out of France?

Rich

Okay, having finished the book (again), I'm still not sure how compatible it is.  The main problems that I see are:

1) The US having a cannon that can shoot a three-man capsule into Lunar orbit, way back in the late 1800's.  The "shell" doesn't ever actually reach the moon (and in Around the Moon, it circles back to Earth to splash-land in the Pacific), but with better aim it certainly could have.

2) Being shot out of a cannon at 25,000 mph is a non-fatal experience as long as you use some water to absorb the shock.  Similarly, landing from orbit is workable with 1870s tech.

The second point *could* be handwaved away, if we assume that IS physics are noticeably different from ours.  Which they are, or ether props and cavorite wouldn't work.  So maybe it's not a problem...although orbital reentry in an aluminum shell seems a bit of a stretch even then.

If we assume that the physics assumptions involved are correct, the question becomes "why didn't the US continue to launch moon shots until they succeeded?" They clearly didn't in the IS timeline, and that's hard to explain unless something went disastrously wrong somewhere.  Maybe the "Columbiad" cracked after one firing, or worse, failed catastrophically on the second.  A "launch failure" that blew Stony Hill and the city of Tampa to fragments would be an event on par with Vesuvius or Hiroshima.  That (along with the original miss) might be enough to cool the "moon fever" the world was suffering from, at least until Cavor comes along.

So...maybe it works.  The Baltimore Gun Club might be a valid IS organization, and if they are, the inheritors of Barbican and Marston would undoubtedly be involved with the US ethership program.  And the BGC really, REALLY likes things that go boom.

Rich

I'll have to finish rereading "From Earth to the Moon" to be sure, but I kind of doubt it.  The tech end of it might be doable, but the changes in history are hard to reconcile.  OTOH, if the events up until the launch went as the book, and *then* things went wrong, it could be plugged into Iron Stars without too much tweaking.  Maybe they missed Luna altogether, or reached it but the landing was missed by Terran telescopes so everyone assumed they'd failed, maybe the crew was (realistically) squashed on takeoff, maybe the cannon failed catastrophically and blew a big hole in southern Florida...or a combination of those.  From an IS POV, having a relatively recent worldwide craze for space travel (even if it failed in the end) would help explain why investing in ether ships is such an easy sell for the politicos and military types.

Give me a day and I'll get back to you.  It's much better than I remember it being back in grade school, probably because I get the jokes this time around.  Verne's quite the comedian when he wants to be, but asking a third grader to understand his humor is asking a bit much.

Oh, and Keel Bombards?  I loves 'em! 

Rich

Fire Arrows and Hale Rockets in the same fleet?  Is that legit?  I thought that was an either-or choice.

Other than that possible quibble, nice designs.  Scary big torps, there.

Rich

Heh.  Try the Apollo design with Thrust 8, Gyrostabilizers, and quad machineguns instead of lights.  I've been fielding those for ages and ages now...gyros mean you rarely if ever miss getting a keelgun shot.

Did I mention I'm fond of keel bombards? 

Rich

Yes, the ship designs themselves look fine...it's the idea of the Greeks somehow building them themselves that bothers me.  Tell me they called in some favors to get the Brits to sell them hulls cheap and I'll believe it...or maybe they had more luck recovering Martian tech than the Turks did?  Maybe the Invasion accidentally crshed a cylinder into the Agean Sea or something?

I could see them buying ships from other nations (USA?  Germany?) but not building them themselves.  Even then, how many could they really afford?  As you pointed out, their economy was less than impressive at this point, historically.  OTOH maybe the industrial and technology boom caused by the Martian invasion, the space race, and the K-F Cluster have changed that?

Rich

Y'know, presumably every station should have some (maybe even most) of it's SUs tied up on non-combat stuff, like docking gear, expanded living quarters, cargo bays, maybe refinery equipment, and all the little things you need to extend your endurance to "nearly forever" status...it's not like they can go back to Earth to pick up more supplies when they need them.  Combat effectiveness is probably a secondary consideration at best, right?

Rich