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.

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.

Sansing

Sansing, n. A scythe blade affixed to a sword hilt.

In 1523, Terra Mariana a peasant revolt; later historians remember it as "the Livonian Revolt," and more generally as "the Güntherite Wars." But the rebellious peasantry had more pressing things to worry about than what the hell their fight was called. Specifically, their issue was how to arm themselves for a fight against a serious (if perhaps not unchallenged) enemy: the Teutonic Order.

Peasant revolts being what they are, they naturally gravitated toward peasant weaponry. Like the IRL Hussites, one of the great weapons of the Revolt was the threshing flail, reinforced with metal. The other was the scythe [Pomm. Sansa], which saw use in a number of varieties.

The least common conversion involved mounting a sword hilt. Compared to the much larger war scythes, they were given a Pommersch diminuitive, forming a distinct word of its own: Sansing.

Commissars

Commissars. Huh. What are they good for?

It's pretty much inevitable that any alternate-history Russia will have commissars; as inevitable as it being called vodka instead of spirt. Why do they exist? Because Russia, that's why. And because Andalusada does use its share of clichés, Great Russia has its commissars too. The only problem is justifying them - and this is my basic idea.

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.

Breastbinding and gender in Taiping China

IRL, 太平公主 "Taiping princess" is apparently Mandarin for "a flat-chested woman" (Taiping apparently doubles as "very flat.") In Andalusada today, I'm going to take a pun and use it to do horrible things to the universe. Here's how.

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.

20th-century ships of war

Let me begin by saying that I'm an amateur at this. I may know the first thing about it, but that's entirely due to Grey Wolf's blogging on the subject himself. Today I'm going to talk about naval power.

Scots influence on Japanese military uniforms

The Imperial Japanese Army of IRL was not sexy. Not even "not sexy" as in "inevitably they're measured against the Wehrmacht, who had their uniforms decided by Coco Chanel." They just don't look cool. Nobody feels guilty about thinking that their uniforms are kinda hawt. Nobody tries to cosplay them.

This seems relatively true across most alternate histories. (The same people invent the same things. Germany, even irrelevant Germany, will always invent all the nicest hardware; by comparison, Japan will almost always have the kludge and Zeros, even if Germany's completely irrelevant and Japan has, say, conquered China and built an empire that beggars the Co-Prosperity Sphere. For the same reasons, Japan always has fugly uniforms.)

And this irritates me, because I wanted a distinctive Japan. A Japan that isn't obviously the only one it could only ever possibly evolve into being. And one that has cet certain je ne sais quoi that we associate with all things Japanese. (It also irritates me because a great deal of the visual thinking I've done about Andalusada has been animesque. Which is why I observed that nobody cosplays the IJA.)

So I have a solution of sorts.