I’m a big Ace Combat fan so with the AC7 trailers earlier this year, I felt I should finish a one-shot for it (that I've been sitting on for almost a year) where the bad guys in my favorite AC games win. I’m not going into much detail about each nation: they’re pretty much mirrors of real-world equivalents, though Belka is akin to Germany in the “East Germany meets German Empire” sense.





The PoD is that the player character in Ace Combat Zero, Cipher, gets shot down during their first B7R sortie by Belkan aces in much superior aircraft. The war still goes about the same until the Coalition attack on Gladisant Fortress, which bogs down the advance, and then later the completion of Excalibur gives Belka the aerial domination they need to launch a counterattack.

Excalibur, being essentially a giant laser tower designed to shoot down ICBMs found it was just as effective at swatting Allied aircraft out of the sky. Although the Allies launched several airstrikes on it, their forces were repelled by aces stationed nearby Excalibur. The Belkan counterattack itself bogs down especially when they cross into Osean disputed territory. Tactical nukes are used on Belkan soil to further soften up the Oseans, who cannot respond in kind due to the Excalibur nuclear shield provided by Excalibur.

Belka “wins” the Belkan War simply by making the conflict far more costly to the Allies than themselves and signs a favorable peace treaty that recognizes their 1987 borders. As a result of Belka winning, the World With No Boundaries organization are not a thing, though many would-be’s melt into resistance groups against Belkan occupation. Belka reestablishes its tight economic hegemony over former break-away states and other Cold War client states, revitalizing their economy at the expense of nations such as Ustio.

Ulysses 1994XF04 still makes planetfall, and although international efforts to stop it such as Stonehenge and Chandelier manage to destroy most of the fragments, enough get through to cause devastation in many northern hemisphere countries in Anea, Usea, and Osea[1]. The aftermath included a lot of upheaval, civil wars, natural disasters and millions of displaced peoples on top of the few million that perished in the initial planetfall[2] and shook the Osean-dominated world economy.

Countries such as Yuktobania and Belka remained relatively unscathed if not spared. Both take advantage of Osea’s weakness in the post-Planetfall years to expand their political and economic spheres of influence by reaching out to weary members of the former Osean world-alliance.

The Usean Continental War still breaks out in 2003 - all the prior animosities are still there, the eastern-centered FCU has even more trouble helping the central Usean nations, and armed conflicts in those regions result in the ISAF attempting to reassert control in those nations. Erusea, though devastated, seizes control of Stonehenge in the confusion and then launches a blitzkrieg-style offensive into Usea on the pretext of stopping FCU/ISAF belligerence in the central continent. Stonehenge becomes the focal point of the war: it gave Erusea complete domination of the skies as it could swat out ISAF aircraft unless they flew at dangerously low altitude, and additionally the Erusean military was already bolstered by much more modern equipment -often bought from Belka- allowing them to take most of the continent within two years.

The ISAF is able to counterattack through Operation Bunker Shot and retaking Istas Fortress, but again like the Belkan war the player character is shot down and killed, and the war bogs down in stalemate. Things begin to resemble the later stages of the Iraq-Iran War OTL as chemical weapons become used with increasing frequency and foreign nations being to intervene in favor of a cease fire, particularly to protect Usea’s vast oil industry from being further destroyed [3]. Erusea kept Stonehenge and pulled back its occupation force by creating an anti-FCU bloc, which in turn joined the Belkan bloc against the mutual threat of Osea.

The Circum-Pacific War does not occur: the Grey Men are not formed due to the Belkan victory in the war, and Yuktobania was already seeing growing and competing economic growth with Osea, and after some reforms becoming the workshop of the world at the expense of the workers of their former Cold War rival. Osea’s blatant disregard for the equivalent of the Outer Space Treaty with their Arkbird program[4] also spurs Cinigrad to create their own knock off, reigniting the Cold War in low orbit. Conflicts over islands in the west-central Pacific between Yuktobania and Verusa are not helping matters either.