• Registered: 2005-03-30
  • Posts: 272

Topic: Baltimore Gun Club?

I know Wells is canonical for Iron Stars, but are we adopting anything from Verne?  Obviously the Baltimore Gun Club didn't land men on the moon in the 1870's, but do they exist in the setting at all?  It's easy enough to ignore the moon shot by just assuming that the crew were killed on "launch" (as they would have been in reality) and the shell missed altogether...but having the (disgraced by failure?) Gun Club as a background element would be cool, and it might give a technologically-justified theme (really BIG guns!) for the US fleet.

Did I mention I REALLY like Keel Bombards?  smile

Rich

  • From: Denver, CO
  • Registered: 2005-03-27
  • Posts: 3,578

Re: Baltimore Gun Club?

hundvig wrote:

I know Wells is canonical for Iron Stars, but are we adopting anything from Verne?  Obviously the Baltimore Gun Club didn't land men on the moon in the 1870's, but do they exist in the setting at all?  It's easy enough to ignore the moon shot by just assuming that the crew were killed on "launch" (as they would have been in reality) and the shell missed altogether...but having the (disgraced by failure?) Gun Club as a background element would be cool, and it might give a technologically-justified theme (really BIG guns!) for the US fleet.

I'm not as familiar with Verne's story as that of Wells-- is there any way the two can be reconciled?

Did I mention I REALLY like Keel Bombards?  smile

Not yet. What do you think of keel bombards?

big_smile

Daniel Kast
Majestic Twelve Games
cricket@mj12games.com

mj12games's Website

  • Registered: 2005-03-30
  • Posts: 272

Re: Baltimore Gun Club?

cricket wrote:

I'm not as familiar with Verne's story as that of Wells-- is there any way the two can be reconciled?

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!  smile

Rich

  • Registered: 2005-03-30
  • Posts: 272

Re: Baltimore Gun Club?

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

  • From: Denver, CO
  • Registered: 2005-03-27
  • Posts: 3,578

Re: Baltimore Gun Club?

hundvig wrote:

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.

Well, the Americans are the next big power to insert into IS. There's no reason we can't include the BGC as an organization without specifically saying that Verne's story is canonical.

Daniel Kast
Majestic Twelve Games
cricket@mj12games.com

mj12games's Website

  • Registered: 2022-11-15
  • Posts: 1,286

Re: Baltimore Gun Club?

cricket wrote:
hundvig wrote:

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.

Well, the Americans are the next big power to insert into IS. There's no reason we can't include the BGC as an organization without specifically saying that Verne's story is canonical.

Maybe they're working on a gun that can shoot down Martian cylinders?  :wink:

  • Registered: 2005-03-30
  • Posts: 272

Re: Baltimore Gun Club?

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