Worldwar: Striking The Balance - References To Actual History and Current Science

References To Actual History and Current Science

Turtledove is careful to avoid any elaborate technical details about the Race's technology. However, from the descriptions given in the novel it is possible to surmise that much of the technology used by the Race is not only feasible but is in fact in common use at the start of the 21st century.

The military equipment of the Race is almost entirely analogous to human technology. Their primary ground forces are composed of tanks and mechanized infantry with supporting self-propelled artillery and gunships. In one respect, at least, the Race's military equipment is actually inferior to human technology, that being naval warfare. Since the Race's homeworld has only a few large lakes and rivers, they never developed the sophisticated warships of the human forces. Battleships and aircraft carriers in particular strike the Race as literally unimagineable. In addition, the Race was caught completely off-guard by the use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas to the point of not having any countermeasures such as gas masks. As a result, it is possible that the Race either never used chemical weapons in their pre-unification wars, or that the use of such weapons (and the information that they ever existed) has been removed via censorship from the historical record at some point during the ~25,000 Earth years of unification.

Their air forces are not fundamentally different from human air forces in terms of tactics and doctrine, being based primarily on the concept of achieving air superiority through the use of fighters. From a technical standpoint, the Race's aircraft have a tremendous advantage over human planes in that they are powered by turbine engines whereas most human aircraft in mid-20th century were propeller-driven.

The Race apparently makes use of several theoretically feasible but not yet materially possible technologies, namely nuclear fusion power and interstellar travel. Turtledove describes the alien vessels making the journey from Tau Ceti to Earth in twenty years, implying that they can travel at one-half the speed of light. Vessels of the Race seems to create artificial gravity by means of rotation. During their long interstellar travels, part or all of a ship's crew is placed in suspended animation by some unexplained method of artificial metabolic arrest referred to simply as cold sleep.