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Originally Posted by General Pain
How extensive is this timeline? Is it basically just US forces or have you added info about other armies?
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Having just US forces wouldn't get us very good results. The US forces probably show the greatest change in operational areas from canon, both because there are more of them and because we know the most about them.
I'm currently finishing up the Warsaw Pact armies in the Western theater (basically, from the Danube to the Baltic.) I've got the Soviets, Polish, Czechs, Hungarians, almost all translated from their native languages in various forums and websites. That's why I've been dribbling orbats out these many months - they're being cross checked against equipment holdings, and since many of the units were low readiness units that were disbanded in 1990 there isn't much information about them. (What is the phrase for "anti-tank regiment" in Hungarian????)
Today I checked over what we had worked up last year on the East German and Danish armies. For the NATO forces, we are using the orbats being worked on for several years on tank-net.org - a massively reworked and improved version of the NATO orbat on orbat.com, now over 200 pages long. We're basically taking that 1989 orbat and updating the equipment with what the respective army was planning to do in 1987 or so (so we get an extended-Cold War procurement rather than the post-Cold War cancellations, slowdowns and new requirements). I'm pretty happy with the quality of that work - an awful lot of people from around the world have contributed their knowledge of their little piece of the puzzle.
I also have a pretty good picture of the Korean armies and a surprisingly good Chinese orbat.
In the near future we are going to start on wargaming out the conventional phase of the war, using GDW's Third World War series. We've adapted those rules for the Twilight War and generated new maps and counters. By doing the wargaming via email, we'll have a week-by-week log of each unit's activity (and fate up to the TDM).
The internet and the end of the Cold War have made much more detail about the armies on both sides available than the folks at GDW ever dreamed of. We are also doing this in our spare time, without the pressure of deadlines (GDW turned out a new product every 20 days or so for 15 years!), so we can spend lots of time making sure we do things right and without contradictions (try making sense out of the description of the strategic nuclear exchange as described in the referee's manual, the target list published in Challenge magazine and Howling Wilderness!). We
loved GDW's work so much that we devote endless hours creating more details about the fantasy world they created. So I don't see what we're doing as creating an alternative timeline (except for the recovery plan, which deviates from 2300 quite drastically) - I see it as we're continuing to develop the world that they created, with the gift of time and better information to inform that effort.
What's our goal? A whole bunch more publications similar to our prototype - the
Czech Army Vehicle Guide. If that's deviation from canon, please call me a deviant, I'll be proud!