The I.C.&Cie. Modeste AR

The world's most famous tierseur is also its least respected. In the market ecology of tierseurs, the Modeste's niche is to be the pariah, the untouchable, the one that all other customers sniff their noses at. The Modeste exists as a designated inferior for all others in the industry to be better than in every way. It also exists because a valid market niche exists for such a device.

Before 1895, the tierseureries coexisted in peace. Oh, there was drama between the tierseureurs - what artistic medium isn't without its petty feuds and legendary rivalries? - but the industry, such as it was, was governed by a rigid unspoken code of honor. Each tierseurerie was distinct, and they made a point of not stepping on each other's toes.

In 1895, Innocent Cauvigne et Cie. introduced their own interpretation of the tierseur. No sooner had the first order been shipped than the Calais firm was buried under a dozen lawsuits from outraged tierseureries, each and all striving to destroy the upstart.

Tierseur

Tierseur, n. French. A third-bore rifle, esp. used for the hunting of dangerous game.

In the French Empire, no hunt is more revered or mythologized than the tiger hunt. And just as no iconic Great White Hunter IRL is complete without a big-bore double rifle, no great French hunter is great without his weapon of choice: a tierseur.

The Ryalkirk rifle

Late in the second round of the Northern Wars [when?], the armed forces of New Britain - which had heretofore struggled against those of the Anglo-Scottish north, New Andalusia, and assorted aboriginal nations [details?] - fielded something fairly commonplace by our standards, but unheard of at the time: a repeating bolt-action rifle. It was named Ryalkirk, after the armory it was first built in [where?], and it changed military history forever.

Line-based calibers

As an American, calibers come in two varieties: Imperial, and metric. While there are some irregularities with the Imperial system (some .44s are actually .43 because they originally used heeled bullets, and anything may or may not have an extra .008" to allow for rifling), the Imperial system is blessedly devoid of any such. (Except, of course, for 8mm Mauser, which is 8mmJ or 8mmS.) Those two systems of measure - one of which I grew up with, one of which is intuitive - are the only ones that matter. Not so in Andalusada.

Sans decimalizing revolutionaries, France doesn't adopt the metric system. Sans France, nobody else necessarily does either. Up until the French Revolution, the world had worked just fine without universal metrication; there's no reason to think it couldn't continue to do so. (Except for France, and even that Augean stable doesn't need metrication.) And that means two, three, many systems of measurement - making my beloved gun porn a nightmare to write about.

But today, poring over two, three, many obsolete customary measurements, something clicked - and after doing some math, I found a beautiful heuristic in which to express calibers: for most of the world, smokeless cartridges are measured not by any international norm, but in lines.

Andalusian gun culture

This is a work in progress. It will be expanded upon.

Seadling

IRL, Japan exported many more guns than it ever sold. The IJN left Arisaka rifles scattered around the Pacific Rim; the IJA, across mainland Asia. All of them were rechambered, for every caliber and cartridge in use at the time, and shot until they were obsolete. But even though most of their military hardware was freely available for sale, it didn't have many buyers - in part because it was so kludgy.

This is not the Japan of Andalusada. My Japan has a reputation for high-quality craftsmanship that Taisho Japan never earned IRL. My Japan's guns are not monstrously kludgy. My Japan's guns are quirky and groundbreaking and there's nothing else like them on the market.

My Japan's guns have a brand name. That brand name is Seadling.

The H11 controversy

The UCNA always struggled to standardize. Decimalization was still underway at the time, and it was surrounded by several distinct, and mutually incompatible, customary measuring systems: Anglo-Scottish to its north, an Ibero-Baltic blend down south, and French scatterings in the Caribbean (and its own borders.)

Matters came to a head, however, in 1893, when the UCNA finally phased out its long-serving .49-94 for something altogether new. It's still causing headaches in several continents today, where it's commonly known as the H11 Controversy.

Go-guns

With all of modern history retconned, Andalusada faces an enormous number of problems. One of the smaller but more nagging ones was first mentioned here: the verse has (almost) no gun brands, and a universe of generic products wrecks verisimilitude.

And so, in the interest of verisimilitude, I introduce to you the official infantry small arm of the Imperial Union. It comes in more varieties than Heinz ketchup, and in all of them it's called the Go-gun.

ACP

The last weekend was spent doing two things: consolidating my non-blogged Andalusada writing (scattered across dozens of files when it's recorded at all), and overhauling my other blog's writing about Andalusada's logic. In particular, the second installment of that, about GURPS.

Both of those consolidated on a specific detail: gun porn. And then, last night, I fatefully wrote this:

Take the CRC, for instance, which uses 7.65mm Mauser because Argentina did IRL - that was also the standard caliber of Belgium, home of FN and the world's de facto armorer; in Andalusada, where Belgium doesn't exist, the Triple Alliance has been assigned to a new role as one of the arsenals of the world - which changes a lot of gun sales because they're otherwise such a noxious place.

I didn't even know that until I typed it out myself, and yet it's an obvious thing from what I know about the CRC. Making it the home of Andalusada's *Fabrique Nationale is so obvious I'm surprised I hadn't thought of it earlier. All it needed was a name - and as of this morning, it's had a name: ACP.

Instead of 9mm

What we call ".38 caliber" or "9mm" IRL is anything but. .38 Special is .357", for instance, as is the (aptly-named) .357 Magnum. Only one pistol cartridge actually fired a .38" bullet, 9.65mm ACP - and you've never heard of it, because it never entered production. (And for another outlier, there's .38-40, which fired a 10mm bullet. There's some speculation that the name is dyslexic, and it should've been called the .40-38 instead.)

This discrepancy goes back to the ur-9mm handgun: Colt's Texas Paterson. It (and the Colt Navy Revolver that came a decade later) established .36" as a revolver caliber, and later in the era, some .36-style cartridges loaded with heeled bullets, which actually were .38" give or take a few thousandths of an inch. After heeled bullets fell from fashion, the standard shifted to the largest bullet that could fit inside the case mouth, whence .357.

What happens in Andalusada, where Col. Colt is never born? Ballistics favors convergence - and for the sake of laziness, I'm ruling that this converges - but for that frisson of difference, the big successful caplock caliber was about a hundredth of an inch off.

And that, as I complained in a long-ago sonnet, changes everything.

Skopetchka

Skopetchka, n. Russian. A sawed-off rifle.

The concept of the shortened rifle is basic and old. England-Scotland's menagerie of Go-guns mostly exists because the Infantry Pattern's 30" barrel is burdensome and hard to handle; France is probably no different.

The idea of shortening a rifle, though, is fairly new, and in popular consciousness is known by the Russian name for such a modification: skopetchka (cf. Russian skopets "eunuch.")

The Warsaw School of ballistic thought

In the beginning, there was the Russo-Japanese War, in which Japan... didn't exactly win, but managed to make the Russian Empire lose. After that came the Russian Civil War, in which the Vechists decisively did win; and once the Vechist government had shored itself up enough at home, it addressed the fact that it was also at war with almost all of its neighbors.

There was, first off, a war in the Caucasus, which dealt a humiliating defeat to the by now space-filling (probably Turkic) empire that picked up where Constantinople left off. And after that there was the war in Armenia, and the war in Georgia, and possibly some struggles with the Sorani dynasty that took over most of Persia the last time the Russians had fought around there. There was, of course, that issue in Karelia that ended about a thousand days later.

And then there was the European theater. And the first opponent, as usual, was the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth. Here ends the backstory; let's move on to the gun porn.

On machine gun taxonomies

By 1930, the real world had pretty much sorted out what a machine gun was and what they could be, establishing the light/medium/heavy trichotomy that survives more or less to the present day (with adjustments for the GPMG.) Andalusada, however, is nowhere near as straightforward, despite having invented and adopted them pretty much on schedule, and having started a major war cycle (the Great War, most recently the Russian Wars) that really should have sorted this stuff out.

And because I've derped about this at length offline, I may as well take the opportunity to say why. And that answer is: It's France's fault.

Chinese six-guns

One small but important problem with alt-history gun porn is that no recognizable brand exists in Andalusada. There are no Colts. There are no Brownings. There are no Mausers. There are no Maxims. This is at once liberating and imposing; freedom to explore ballistic history's roads less traveled, but with no name recognition I have to explore those roads, or I'm wasting my keystrokes and your time with wordy spellings-out of the word *1911. A world this far gone needs some recognizable new guns with recognizable new mystiques.

Taiping China was the first state in modern history to field significant forces of (flat-chested) soldiering women under their own command. As such, Taiping China was also the first place that had to consider a woman's physique when it outfitted soldiers. In the later 19th century, once Fraternal Studies had started to pick up steam and Taiping China was starting to become an international buyer, representatives of the Phoenix Hosts gave rise to one of Andalusada's iconic weapons: the Chinese six-gun.

Calibers of the UCNA

The Muslim world gave rise to lots of guns (they introduced gunpowder weaponry to Europe), but not to many cartridges. The united case-charge-ball assembly that we call the cartridge was a product of the Industrial Revolution even if the idea was much earlier, and by that time the Muslim world was lagging far enough behind that it was importing, rather than introducing, military technology. (There are some cartridges that were big - Egyptian Remington, for instance - but even then, there's no evidence that the Egyptian Remington was designed by Egyptians rather than Remington ballisticians on contract.)

This is a problem for me, because in the end this story is about Islam. And for the part of its history that I know the most about, there is a major Muslim state that's got enough resources and vision to seriously develop their own guns during the cartridge era. This post exists because it's where GURPS intersects with sloth - and because I sweat gun porn in general, I'm going to sort out some issues here.