[war321]

But by being alternate history, you're already conditioning the audience to expect divergences and that presents a great opportunity to explore more varied alternatives that were being thrown around in the post-Apollo era. The Sea Dragon alone shows they were willing to expand audience expectations. They could've played around with ideas like the National Launch System (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Shuttle_...) and different kinds of lunar tugs.

I mean, James Cameron could've gone with generic sci-fi brick or saucer spaceships for Avatar, but instead gave us the beauty that was the ISV Venture Star, which introduced a lot of people to hard sci-fi design aesthetics.

[jessriedel]

The audience wants the historical feel, but they don’t actually know enough about spaceflight to judge reasonableness.