Fantasque Time Line

[Thomas27]

Pas mal, elle est de toi au un gars d'AH t'as filé la patte?
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[Hendryk]

[Thomas27]

En tous cas t'as un sacré niveau en Anglais, chapeau.
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Ma boutique : https://www.redbubble.com/fr/people/Artof-ThomasD/shop?asc=u
Mes livres: http://www.amazon.fr/-/e/B0191PGYUE?ref_=pe_1805951_64028601

[Hendryk]

[Collectionneur]

Au niveau impérialisme nippon, cela ne fait plus que la Chine comme cible, la frontière yakoute me semble assez en profondeur pour éviter de tenter certains officiers japonais.
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"La défaite du fanatisme n'est qu'une question de temps"
"L'abus d'armes nucléaires est déconseillé pour la santé"
"La Démocratie est le pire des systèmes, à l'exception de tous les autres"

[Thomas27]

[Casus Frankie]

Il serait peut-être bien, Hendryk, que tu postes un résumé de ton uchronie (du moins, de la partie déjà rédigée).
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Casus Frankie

"Si l'on n'était pas frivole, la plupart des gens se pendraient" (Voltaire)

[Hendryk]

[Hendryk]

Sur ce, suite et fin provisoire, la partie couvrant 1935 à 1945 restant à écrire:


If the previously little-known city of Yakutsk, official capital of Yakutia, had first earned a mention in the international press with the 1925 serum run, it was in 1929 that it became know to the general public, thanks to the hugely publicized round-the-world journey of the Graf Zeppelin. The world-famous airship, piloted by Hugo Eckener in person, took off from Lakehurst, New Jersey on 6 August for its 23-day cruise. After its first stopover in the Zeppelin Company’s hometown of Friedrichshafen, Eckener intended to reach Tokyo in a single nonstop leg as a show of the airship’s range, but as it flew over Yakutian territory—being the first civilian aircraft since the War of Independence to cross the border between the USSR and Yakutia—he realized that refueling would be necessary after all. Thus the Graf Zeppelin made an unscheduled stopover at Yakutsk, which fortunately happened to be on its itinerary, and Lady Grace Hay Drummond-Hay, who covered the cruise at the behest of press magnate William Randolph Hearst, took the opportunity to write a colorful report on the city, where she met Queen Khongordzol, Prime Minister Horvath and several other prominent figures (of Horvath, she wrote “A taller version of Santa Claus with his long white beard, squinty eyes and debonair smile, Yakutia’s Premier hides behind an avuncular demeanor a keen political mind, one that is unencumbered by the useless burden of adherence to principle.”). She returned to the city years later, this time as war correspondent. The Graf Zeppelin would remain the only airship to have crossed Yakutian skies until the Xanadu seven years later.

1929 was also a landmark year in the history of Yakutian aviation for another reason: the country's first woman pilot, Yevdokia Anatra--the young widow of Artur Anatra's brother, who had been killed in the Russian civil war--competed in the first Women's Air Derby, between Santa Monica and Cleveland. Her plane was the Angara, a custom-made biplane racer designed by her brother-in-law for the occasion. She was one of three non-American pilots, the other two being Australia's Jessie Miller and Germany's Thea Rasche, though the most famous competitor was of course Amelia Earhart. She came in sixth, and then went on to a tour of the US East Coast, which ended in Lakehurst on 30 August so she could watch the Graf Zeppelin arrive home at the conclusion of its round-the-world flight.

***

Yakutian aviation between the wars was also involved in another great human adventure, the exploration of the country’s Arctic frontier. Yakutia, in fact, was from the beginning home to several prominent Arctic explorers: men like Vladmir Rusanov, Boris Vilkitsky, Pyotr Novopashenny, Fyodor Matisen, Georgy Sedov, Georgy Rybin, Irkutsk native Sergey Obruchev—son of explorer and SF writer Vladimir Obruchev—and last but not least, Yakov Gakkel, son of the eponymous aviation pioneer, and whose children would later embrace political careers. In the years following independence, Vilkitsky and others completed the mapping of the Northern Sea Route in order to facilitate communication between Yakutsk and Yakutia’s eastern seaboard; their workhorses were the sister ships Taymyr and Vaygach, launched in 1909 and claimed by the Whites during the civil war, the Kozma Minin, and especially the Svyatogor, at the time the world's most powerful icebreaker, designed by Yevgeny Zamyatin, who would later gain international fame as a writer of dystopian fiction. With their efforts and Chinese assistance, in 1928 the Northern Sea Route was open to commercial shipping, at least in the short window when it wasn’t blocked by ice. Every expedition made extensive use of aircraft to map the route ahead of the ships: each icebreaker came with its own seaplane, the preferred models being the Fokker Universal and the F-VII, bought from Chinese manufacturer Luoyun which produced them under license as the Fouke Guifan and the Fouke-7 respectively. On 3 June 1927, a specially modified Fouke-7 taking off from the Yakutian Arctic base on Vilkitsky Island in the Emperor Nicholas II Archipelago reached the North Pole; it was the third flight over the Pole, the first two being Richard Byrd’s and Umberto Nobile’s in May 1926. It was also a Yakutian Fouke Guifan, using the icebreaker Svyatogor as a tender, which spotted the wreckage of Nobile’s airship Norge on 5 July 1928; unfortunately, when the Svyatogor reached the site, it was to discover that there were no survivors.


The Svyatogor.

In 1930, Yakutian experience in polar exploration resulted in China organizing a joint expedition to Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica. It was, for both countries, a flag-showing initiative intended both to lay claims on a part of the world’s last unsettled continent on the one hand, and to detract domestic popular attention from the worsening economic situation on the other. China’s first icebreaker, the Xuelong, was built specially for the occasion, under the supervision of Boris Vilkitsky, who was also entrusted with the co-leadership of the expedition together with Chinese Navy reserve officer Chen Hongtai. The Xuelong, carrying two Fouke-7 and a CAC Qu (the licensed version of the Curtiss Robin) was joined with the Kozma Minin, carrying a Fouke Guifan and a customized TTC Baykush with an enclosed cockpit; one of the Yakutian pilots was none other than ARS veteran Ivan Smirnov, of Nome serum run fame. Setting up camp on the Ross ice shelf, the Sino-Yakutian team conducted several overflights of the region, including the South Pole where, as had been the case at the other side of the Earth, they closely followed Byrd’s trailblazing flights. The Yakutians, upon discovering a heretofore unknown group of mountains in the Ford Range, named them the Smirnov Mountains, in memory of the pilot, who had died on 9 February 1931 when his plane hit a protruding block of ice while landing and tipped over. The Chinese, not to be outdone, got to name another group of mountains discovered in the course of the expedition, the Zhuoru Mountains, after recently departed Prime Minister Liang Qichao’s courtesy name. Preparations were made for a permanent Sino-Yakutian Antarctic base, though neither country would have the opportunity to organize a follow-up expedition until 1946. Vladimir Obruchev, whose son Sergey had taken part in the endeavor, was inspired to write his third and best-known science fiction novel, Beneath the Ice, which was published in November 1931; it was translated in English the following year, and is usually credited with convincing Howard Phillips Lovecraft to expand his recently completed novella "At the Mountains of Madness" (inspired in its original form by Byrd's expedition) into a full-fledged novel.


Insignia of the Yakutian Air Force.

When Dmitry Horvath retired in 1933 after 11 years as Prime Minister (plus another four as head of the Provisional Siberian Government), he was succeeded by former Chief of Staff and Czech Legion veteran Radola Gajda. By then the prospect of war was becoming increasingly likely, and the new government wasted no time in implementing a policy of rearmament, which also served the purpose of boosting Yakutia’s depressed economy through public spending. The Yakutian Air Force was in bad need of new aircraft, as the bulk of its inventory consisted of already obsolescent models: most of its fighters were Huanlong Type 19 (the Chinese version of the Wibault 72) and Luoyun Model 35 (Fokker D-XVI) and its most modern light bomber was the Anatra A-7 (the Yakutian version of the Breguet 19). Orders for the new Anatra A-9 as a ground attack aircraft were placed, as well as for the versatile TTC Baykush, as an all-purpose utility, liaison, observation and medical evacuation aircraft.

With the assembly plants of Anatra and TTC working at full capacity, and its main foreign supplier China also rearming in prevision of war and reserving nearly all its domestic production for its own air force, the Yakutian government turned to other sources to accelerate its re-equipment. Since independence Yakutia had cultivated close ties with Poland, and for the past several years Anatra had been pooling some of its R&D with PZL; when the first PZL P.7 prototype flew, the YAF had expressed interest in future orders, and those were placed shortly after deliveries to the Polish Air Force were completed in 1933 (Anatra also considered purchasing the production license, but the question remained moot so long as it had no production capacity to spare). Yakutia also kept a good relationship with Czechoslovakia, thanks to the influence of Czech Legion veterans, chief of whom Gajda himself, in Yakutia's political and military spheres; this translated into sizeable purchases of Czech equipment, especially light arms and tanks, but also aircraft as well: 35 BH-33E fighters were ordered from Avia. In the ground attack role, as a stopgap measure until the A-9 was available in sufficient numbers, batches of C-X were purchased from Fokker. To complement its modest fleet of Luoyun LY-13 (Fokker F-IX) bombers, the YAF acquired a dozen Curtiss BT-32, the militarized version of the Condor passenger plane. Large orders were also placed from British manufacturers and especially Hawker, specifically for the Hart light bomber and the Fury fighter. The Navy's own obsolescent Shangshan SS-9 patrol flying boats and SS-12 torpedo floatplanes were phased out as a batch of CAMS 37 and Latécoère 290, respectively, were ordered to replace them; four Short Rangoon were also bought to replace the three aging Lioré et Olivier LeO H-13 used for long-range reconnaissance over the Sea of Okhotsk. By early 1935 Yakutia had practically completed the re-equipment of its military aviation; it would soon be put to the test.
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