Headscratchers / Iron Sky

• So there's probably no answer to this, but why 2018? We're in 2018 now and the Earth tech depicted seems pretty far beyond what someone would have guessed it to be a mere six years ago. Why not just set it in the then modern day? Just because they wanted a different president? Then why not set it in the actual year 2020 to make sense of the whole relection plot point? Or better yet, why not just make the date completely ambiguous, which would have been pretty easy to do.
• There may be an answer, why the USS George W. Bush never uses the Orion drive on-screen, resorting to some kind of more conventional engines.
  • First and foremost, the Orion drive is the most efficient for launching payloads from Earth to orbit. In space, it's not the best kind of nuclear engine.
  • Second, the USS George W. Bush does not looks like something modular, suggesting, that it was built in one piece back on Earth, so, the Orion drive would be a great solution to launching this kind of a ship to space in one go.
  • Because of how the nations were fighting over the Helium-3 supplies and how the Moon scouting mission had a scanning equipment for Helium-3, Earth nations must've had some sort of a fusion reactor technology already.
  • The noticeable blue exhaust trails of the USS George W. Bush, therefore, suggest, that it has some kind of an afterburner fusion engines with decent mass flow for movement in space.
  • So, we now can extrapolate, that USS George W. Bush used Orion drive only for taking off from the Earth, switching to more efficient fusion engines once in space.