The joint Japanese-American defense of Okinawa was nearly as vigorous as the defense of the Japanese Home Islands. The only difference was that the defenders knew they would fail long before it started. Every single one of them was a volunteer, and they handed their dog tags to those who left on the ships. They were dead men walking and they knew it. Twilight dramatized that scene for America and then showed us the last of the Japanese mecha, thousands of American servicemen, and an entire squadron of American warships holding the line against the Chinese invasion as the evacuation fleet set sail. And true to life, none of them ever returned home.
We were the first to build an orbital elevator. That was the Port Harcourt Elevator in Africa. For once we actually beat the Chinese to something. They were right on our heals at Singapore though. And the Russians built one in Sri Lanka not long afterwards. One of the problems with being a far northern nation was that they never were able to build an old elevator on their territory. They did build one over the North Pole after Contact though. That is the only Earth elevator that does not orbit. It is held in place by a series of gravitic generators. Severnyi Polyus is I do believe the most amazing piece of engineering ever built by the Russian Federation.
I’m starting to realize there’s all kinds of things we don’t know about interstellar travel. I used to think we knew everything there was to know. But now I’m thinking the Peloran left a few things out for us to figure out on our own. I should have seen that coming. I guess I just assumed they unlocked everything back during The War. But then they never did tell us what was so important about the Hyades until the very end. They never like to give us the whole story you know. They can be bloody annoying in that way.
The fall of the American federal government forced many foreign-deployed American commands to look to local resources to survive. The Japanese island of Okinawa was one of the largest such bases, and was one of the last parts of the Japanese islands to fall to the Chinese invasion. Twilight season four’s first episode showed that fall in living color. And while not entirely historically accurate, it also showed Twilight and Dixie performing an emergency transmission over the remaining communications lines across the Pacific in order to help. The network had to show the stars of their show doing something more than watching after all.
The F-12 Avenger was part of the Fleet 2300 Project to upgrade America’s starfighter capabilities for the coming century. The primary goal was to build Earth’s first hypercapable starfighter and thereby place America on a more even footing with the alien powers. America had only recently begun to miniaturize hyperspace system down to a scale that could work for fighters though, and the main hyperspace needle running down the length of the Avenger’s long nose assembly resulted in the largest starfighter ever built. The Avenger was in fact too large for the Navy to approve production and it would have been relegated to the status of a mere testbed platform had The War not come upon us all. The Cowboys became the first operational squadron to fly them, and the rest is history. They still fly them now, a statement to anyone who sees them that even the ugliest of ducklings can become swans if allowed to fly.
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