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Comments

Okay, so let's talk HYDRA Won AUs

[(Anonymous)]

You all seem like people who have thought a fair bit about HYDRA. I've been thinking a lot about AUs where HYDRA won, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Variation #1: HYDRA Won in 1945

Steve never gets the serum, or Steve goes off the train too, or Steve doesn't manage to get on the Valkyrie, or whatever, and New York gets flattened. Possibly all of the eastern seaboard. Possibly also the capitals of Europe. What then? Schmidt doesn't have the manpower or organization to take over directly, but I imagine that plenty of places would be happy to pull a Vichy to avoid the wrath of HYDRA.

Variation #2: Project Insight Succeeds

What happens then? (On a geopolitical scale. What happens to surviving supersoldiers is clearly nothing but trash parties.)

Re: Okay, so let's talk HYDRA Won AUs

[slybrarian]

Variation #2 depends a lot on which version of success happens. Let's call them Plan A (no one knows anything is wrong beforehand) and Plan B (what happens in the movie).

In Plan A, the three helicarriers were meant to be fully deployed and operational before the switch was thrown. I imagine that SHIELD would have deployed them in three locations: North America, probably over the midwest, Europe around Germany or so, and East Asia, maybe around Korea. This gives them coverage to 'protect' the main industrial and economic centers of the world, and be reasonably placed to move elsewhere if aliens attack India or Australia or whatever. This also means the initial attack wipes out all government and military leadership of the advanced countries in the opening minutes, prioritizing those in a position to counterattack like Tony Stark, missile defense centers, and people on the SHIELD Gifted list, as well as those who you need to kill with no warning like Banner or, presumably, Stephen Strange. Pierce also likely uses Insight to kills any members of HYDRA he finds inconvenient, because he does not need weirdos like Strucker running around his nice, orderly planet. The carriers will then start moving to attack places that were not in range, like the west coast of North America and India and so forth. South Africa dies last. My guess is Pierce had a plan to blame all this on aliens or the WSC, take over "for the duration of the emergency" and then never actually relinquish power. He may or may not keep the helicarriers around. I think he would ground them unless necessary, because he doesn't want to risk them being turned against him, and instead rely on kill teams or the asset to take out any trouble makers who pop up on the algorithm's radar.

(For those interested, it takes a little under five days for Insight to kill 20 million people, and that's assuming they are all in range and in suitable density, so it should take a bit longer to enact Plan A than that. I guess those carriers are nothing but bullets inside. Or maybe those special guns are lasers. Pew pew!)

Plan B is much messier. The initial targets we see are 700,000 people on the eastern seaboard of the US, with New York the furthest place from DC seen. I would say that means anyone between NY or Boston and, say, Atlanta at most, with the Appalachians blocking shots west until they reach at least 50,000 feet or so. Anyways, even at 1000+ people per minute per carrier, that means it takes about 233 minutes / 3.8 hours to kill everyone in range. On the one hand, that's pretty slow. On the other hand, the first people to die are people like Tony and Rhodey, who can directly attack the carriers, and the president and various people we saw at the Pentagon who can order air defenses to engage. I imagine any non-HYDRA pilots at the nearest airbases are also toast. From there it's mostly a matter of working through the list of potential malcontents, while spreading out to attack the rest of the world. The problem of course is that at this point everyone knows some serious shit is going down and the rest of the planet has time to try to mount a defense. That will be difficult given the incredible cruising altitude of the carriers and the apparent range of their weapons, but that's what SM-3 missiles and nuclear air-defense missiles are for. (You can't tell me the Russians didn't put those back to full operational status the minute after the Chitauri attacked.) Also people will have time to realize how the carriers are targeting them and ditch anything that might be used for tracking. HYDRA's cleanup is much messier and it is obvious who is responsible, breeding massive resentment from the start and meaning more people must die. It also means that various gifted individuals have more time to respond, meaning you are more likely to have an angry Hulk or Thor ruining the day and/or busting into your victory gangbangs at the most inconvenient moment. In fact, Thor is a wildcard period because AFAIK no one knows he is actually hanging around on Earth.

Re: Okay, so let's talk HYDRA Won AUs

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for this. I hadn't even considered all those details and now I have a resource for my own AU.