2 ms·

For All Mankind is so so drama but it becomes super good if you are familiar with the nuts and bolts space program, and all the seasons hold up from this aspect

by fsloth 3y ago

For All Mankind is so so drama but it becomes super good if you are familiar with the nuts and bolts space program, and all the seasons hold up from this aspect - as the timeline diverges the tech becomes a bit less grounded, but it's forgivable for the audacity of a parallel history space dream the script shows. The character arcs are more like ... Space Soap Opera arcs rather than more grounded but that makes it only more entertaining IMO. They don't fully open the soap box on first season which is probably why it's the best of them. The soap aspect is also somewhat defensible. A number of significant individuals critical to the space program back then had super weird life stories beyond their technical contributions. For sure, you had the stereotypical buttoned up test pilots with nerves of steel... but you also had.. Black magicians and Industrial scale mass murderers. So, it's arguable are the For All Mankind characters too looney or not looney enough by a large margin. [0] Black magician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons [1] Industrial scale mass murderer:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph

aebtebeten 3y ago
Some (sub)orbital geopolitics don't seem to have changed much in 8 decades: You too may be a big hero Once you've learned to count backwards to zero "In German oder English I know how to count down Und I'm learning Chinese" says Wernher von Braun (for countdowns in a Japanese translation, see "Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise") Someone on HN convinced me recently that "Hitler in his Bunker" was on the looney side, but up until then the only non-looney explanation I had found for his behaviour was that he had been hoping he could sell germany wholesale either to the US[0] or to the USSR, not anticipating they would actually stay allied until after the war, each picking up the bits[1] they wanted retail (Operations Paperclip and Осоавиахим, respectively). [0] had the Sportpalast speech been given in 1953 instead of 1943, the "only we are protecting the West against communism" shtick might have gone over much better in the States. [1] it turns out that developing not just rockets but also jets is far less useful when, logistically speaking, you no longer have much oil and can no longer refine or synthesise sufficient jet fuel. (someday I'd like to figure out how much early-50's graph theory may have been just the first unclassified publication of network analyses developed during the war for strategic bombing purposes; compare Kantorovich' development and application of linear programming during the Siege of Leningrad) Linebarger relates that at the end of WWII, when getting Nazi units to surrender, they had difficulties[2] because although the officer corps was aware how operationally screwed they were, morale in the ranks was still high. [2] supposedly the difficulties decreased after the psychological warfare operators created an official looking "surrender form", in the blanks of which soldiers could fill in their name, birthplace and Jahrgang, occupation, etc. etc. then provide, dutifully filled out, to Allied units. As an anglophone, it's certainly plausible, but maybe those are just my stereotypes speaking?

by fsloth 3y ago

aebtebeten 3y ago

Some (sub)orbital geopolitics don't seem to have changed much in 8 decades: You too may be a big hero Once you've learned to count backwards to zero "In German oder English I know how to count down Und I'm learning Chinese" says Wernher von Braun (for countdowns in a Japanese translation, see "Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise") Someone on HN convinced me recently that "Hitler in his Bunker" was on the looney side, but up until then the only non-looney explanation I had found for his behaviour was that he had been hoping he could sell germany wholesale either to the US[0] or to the USSR, not anticipating they would actually stay allied until after the war, each picking up the bits[1] they wanted retail (Operations Paperclip and Осоавиахим, respectively). [0] had the Sportpalast speech been given in 1953 instead of 1943, the "only we are protecting the West against communism" shtick might have gone over much better in the States. [1] it turns out that developing not just rockets but also jets is far less useful when, logistically speaking, you no longer have much oil and can no longer refine or synthesise sufficient jet fuel. (someday I'd like to figure out how much early-50's graph theory may have been just the first unclassified publication of network analyses developed during the war for strategic bombing purposes; compare Kantorovich' development and application of linear programming during the Siege of Leningrad) Linebarger relates that at the end of WWII, when getting Nazi units to surrender, they had difficulties[2] because although the officer corps was aware how operationally screwed they were, morale in the ranks was still high. [2] supposedly the difficulties decreased after the psychological warfare operators created an official looking "surrender form", in the blanks of which soldiers could fill in their name, birthplace and Jahrgang, occupation, etc. etc. then provide, dutifully filled out, to Allied units. As an anglophone, it's certainly plausible, but maybe those are just my stereotypes speaking?