Hmm well Hunpecked good points about the spelling, beleive it or not I actually looked up Triumvirate right before typing it heh. Well yeah the other stuff is hiccups too I'd pay a LOT more attention for a final draft of the history.
As far as where their history and ours diverge, it goes all the way back to pre-history as you can see by the starting date of 2,000 BC and Sparta as far as I read was always rather warlike which is how they took so many slaves. I just bumped up their "time table" for full scale conversion to the warlike Sparta of later centuries.
The reason for this draft I did not give a direction of Icara yet is because honestly I was not quite sure where to put it just yet
As far as the Iron goes, funny thing is some people think that some culture's actually used primitive iron during the bronze age, I mean some folks actually invented a battery during the bronze age (can't remember whether it was a Greek or an Egyptian).
I just made it that the Icarans embraced the sciences and primitive iron instead of taking the usual ancient world approach to new things. Also I kind of heard while watching the history channel that the discovery of Iron was more or less an accident, so the Icarans just got lucky faster
.
The Icaran female cavalry archers are loosely based on this one Japanese warlord who created a cavalry raiding corps entirely of women. The main logic behind this for him was that:
A) Women are lighter and thus the horses can move faster, longer.
B)He was kind of running out of men because well let's face it Japan was pretty much just a warzone for a good long while.
Oh and on the advice of other sci-fi writers they said I should change my weapon yeilds from actual power (i.e how many terrawatts) into tonnage yields. I.E how many gigaton yield per weapon and let people figure out watts and whatnot from that.
One guy said "It's easier for most people to work gigaton back to power; rather then power to gigaton. So if you just give them the end result they can work their way back to how much power is required to get it."
I figure I can work with that
