4040 Alternate Timeline

While designing a video game, I was eventually tasked to create a story and a setup. I already knew that I wanted a Diesel Punk/Sci-fi setup in space and I began with a classical Future timeline. I quickly realised, that it would be very hard to explain away compleate autonomation and digitalisation, so I opted for a alternate history playing in 2080 instead.   In this history, instead of computing technology expanding very fast, aerospace and nuclear tech take over. So we now have efficient way to get stuff into space cheaply, but it still takes time to transport goods between planets.   The sociopolitical landscape is more or less stuck in the 20s (Communism, traditional american way of life, social progressive movement, fascism), just that the main political agents are now planets instead of nation states, which are more or less ideologically unified.     The two main powers of the story are the determined socialist totalitarian regime of Mars with big industrial power and the nations of Earth with mostly democratic but often corrupted governements. The other planetary agents will have to pick a side against these two ideologies.