(Variants include the Orange Crackverse, in which the full might of the Imperial Navy descends to save the hapless Earthlings from an unspeakably evil mind-controlling alien horror manifesting, inexplicably, in the form of a ghastly toupeé.
Other variants which have occasionally been mentioned are We Accidentally Steampunk Wakanda, in which a damaged ship making a stop for repairs accidentally rewrites the history of the 18th century, and the Kaguya-hime 'verse, in which the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter turns out to have been much closer to literally true, and having found the planet again her descendants have come to bless the courteous, hospitable people who helped said princess out with many rewards, starting with immortagenic peaches and Space Battleship Yamato.)
Currently, the oldest movie on Netflix is The Sting.
There are going to be a lot of classic Imperial movie fans that are going to be very upset about that…and “I can’t accept ‘artistic license’ for this kind of crap…”
Here’s a proposal for a ‘high-interaction’ shardverse of this scenario:
Contact is made by the rescue fleet turning up after someone runs the numbers and notes that there was a known habitable with a radio shell in the computed path of that recent gamma-ray burst. Said gamma-ray burst hit Earth somewhere off the coast of west Africa; while most of the other hemisphere survived, the Americas, Africa, and most of Eurasia did not.
Surviving regions include Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, China’s coastal fringe, Korea, and Japan, (ETA: also Hawaii) all of them in desperate need of a supply chain after the other 90% of the population got rad-fried.
It is a month past briquette day. The rescue fleet enters orbit and realizes the scale of the mess they’ve inherited. Go.
Fortunately, a GRB is a very quick pulse and ozone reacts away pretty quickly.
And I’d assume given the usual distribution of these things that there’s a decent chance that there’s a carrier in or deployed near either or both of US Fleet Activities Yokosuka and/or Pearl Harbor.
(The Atlantic, Med, and ME carriers I think we can safely assume are waterlogged toast.)
Wouldn’t that kind of just, y’know, delete that portion of Earth altogether? Which I don’t think would be particularly survivable for anyone. Unless this was a near miss/it was the backscatter(?) from, say, the Moon getting flash-seared/partially melted that hit Earth?
Well, it is intended to cause a planetary catastrophe big enough to require a rescue fleet and thus high-interaction situations, belike. You’re not going to get those from a small one.
So this is what I get for not fact-checking myself: apparently ozone is not the concern but in fact depletion of it, resulting from NOx production in the upper atmosphere from the direct action of the GRB on atmospheric gases.
If it’s close enough to toast all life on that side in short order, it’s definitely enough to brown out the atmosphere for a good while. Intervention may be required.
I don’t know what are the odds that the carriers just start doing their thing, on the grounds that after the pulse the inability to phone home sounds oddly like the aftermath of a nuclear exchange
Mostly the SSBNs to worry about, I suspect, given that the carriers lack nukes or by-and-large instant-use weapons and so there’s at least a chance to talk 'em back off the ledge. (“Yeah, you’ve noticed you can’t call anyone else on that half of the planet either? We’re all already fucked, try to be part of the solution, m’kay?”)
And even the SSBNs ought to (these no longer being the days of the Cold War) at least notice they can still raise Pearl before torching open the various safes and going all nuke-happy. Although even if they do, most of their preprogrammed targets are going to be places that are already dead. (Sorry, coastal China!)
How long is it before someone dusts off the term “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” because that’s literally all anyone has left in this situation?
If that rescue fleet doesn’t arrive, Australia would be screwed. We’d cope okay with the initial disaster - being food independent and having more than enough energy reserves for the rest of the year - but coastal China is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet, and Australia is the only surviving bread basket.
When the survivors include most of China’s military and leadership, that’s a terrifying position to be in.
I suspect much of the surviving US Pacific fleet might be in coordination with Australia and New Zealand, under similar sort of logic to the Dutch East Indian fleet during WW2 (since the Netherlands wasn’t able to do anything due to a nasty case of nazis, when they were overrun by Japan they retreated south and became an unofficial branch of the aussie navy for a little bit under the logic of “and we’ll sort the political mess out later once we have some breathing space”).
To be honest, even that much power projection, assuming that such forces remain combat-capable, might be enough to make China less than willing to try for a land grab.
Actually, though, how badly damaged would the other side of the planet be on the whole?
If they were behind the Earth, could the crew of the ISS survive the GRB?
Stretched a bit too thin to be writing narrative right now, but I can dump some other things that probably need handling off the top of my head
Assuming the GRB kills off the fauna but the flora limp through, there’s going to be a massive corpse-cataloguing and reseeding program to stabilize the American continental ecosystem. If the flora buy the farm as well, I’d requisition a 1 gigaton aspirin tablet for the rescue fleet’s ecopoiesis team
As @Will_Treaty_2 mentioned, food independence is hard to come by in the RIMPAC region (indeed not just China). Cornucopia based solutions are going to come with associated not-built-for-that shenanigans
Singapore’s entire business model dries up overnight, so obviously the answer is to aggressively make the case for the relief beanstalk having its anchor right in Marina Bay instead of, say, Borneo. Any homeless US Pacific Fleet assets obviously also welcome at the not-at-all-suspiciously-deep-enough-to-accomodate-carriers naval bases on site.
There’s going to be a mad dash for the oil-generating assets now quietly ticking over in the Middle East, no matter how much the rescue fleet tears their hair out trying to promote nuclear. No bets on who wins this one.
There’s a very big question on whether India survives. That would substantially change the pretty picture I just painted
Might be helpful if we can see on a map what areas get hit? IDK if there might be some sort of map editor/map generator that’ll allow for that.
Also, how much would physical infrastructure have been damaged? If surface flora could survive, then I have to imagine that at least some stuff like buildings and the like could survive, though electronics would likely be utterly fried.
Also, would it just be the one half of the world, or would it be more or less than half by some degree?
Wiki says basically none of the gamma rays actually get through, so instead what you have is an ultraviolet pulse on the hemisphere facing the burst from all the Compton scattering in the upper atmosphere. If it’s close enough for that pulse alone to be immediately lethal, as is the case here, then that’s also accompanied by a very heavy layer of nitric oxide smog which breeds its own problems, including a complete obliteration of the ozone layer (yes this is a reverse of what I claimed earlier, I cannot read)