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.

Why Seadling? In the beginning, it was a very complex pun based on the Anglicization of Tanegashima (not, in this case, the place where Japan was first introduced to firearms, but still fairly important to the history in Andalusada.) [how?] Before the company went global, they established that nobody was interested in buying Tanegashima guns, and decided to change their name to something more marketable. "Seedling" sounding rather silly, they eventually settled on the plausibly British-sounding name they still know today. (Since England-Scotland lost a lot of respectability by the end of the Great War, they've since adopted the plausibly Saxon-sounding name Siedling for sales in the European mainland. And Hispano-Baltic Texas.)

The three hallmarks of Seadling

The first and most important thing to know about Japan's major firearms manufacturer is that Seadling guns are needlessly overdesigned. By the time Seadling was big enough to market globally, they ran into a problem: the best designs were already taken. ACP was a recognized trendsetter; Gran Peru (and Cabralia, and some parts of India) already had a cottage-industrial complex bootlegging the simple and obvious. Tsarist Russia, drawing on the first fruits of its polytechnical institutes, was trying to be self-supplying. Half of its buyers were notoriously prone to defaulting on their orders once they'd had enough time to reverse-engineer the products; half its competitors, notoriously prone to high-powered lawsuits that the Japanese Empire, as a young nation, couldn't get away with ignoring.

Seadling's solution? More complicated guns. It's generally taken for granted that Seadling's engineers are all mentally ill or addicted to hallucinogens, because nobody in their right mind would ever design a gun like Seadling does. These are the Rube Goldberg engines of war, and everybody bitches about how many parts they have, and the literally dozens of ways they can malfunction.

The fact that the products don't malfunction, or only ever seem to malfunction in a few predictable ways, never gets remarked on.

• Part of this complexity is because Seadling also designed their guns to be fairly easy to adjust on the fly. They never expected to monopolize anybody's sales, so they've avoided designing anything as specific as, say, the Go-gun. This allows them to work on smaller scales.
• In another time and place, Seadling would be praised for how adaptable their designs are. If after-market tactical gear was a flourishing market in 1930, Seadling would be all over it.
• Seadling's company policy is to never infringe on a patent you can "simply" work around. No matter how low-end their product line, there's always a sort of cheap-and-cheerful creativity to the designs that's classically Seadling.

Second thing to know about Seadling? Seadling guns are archaic. When Seadling got off the ground, it had a lot of room to play with revolvers and single-shot rifles. After Tanegashima spent the first several years reinventing known firearms designs, they proceeded to spin these roots in entirely new directions which nobody else would bother doing.

• In particular, zigzag-cut cylinders seem to be a company trademark. Seadling is quite enthusiastic about the potential of revolver-based designs, and if the world laughs, it's because the world has yet to see how they scale up.

Third thing to know about Seadling? Seadling is cool. This cannot be overstated enough. Rule of Cool is one of Andalusada's core values, and Seadling's R&D team - driven as they are to design things like nothing on the market - is an elegant one-stop shop to produce cool things.

• Seadling recognizes that "cool" is in the eye of the beholder. Unlike , which exists to reinforce the ACP caliber bloc, Seadling has thus far avoided proprietary cartridges. This policy was a vain attempt to make their products more marketable; most people consider them so weird that they wouldn't be any less saleable if they were proprietary.

The third thing to know about Seadling is the simplest: Seadling is for sale. ACP began as Patagonia's state armory, and remains so to this day; when you buy from ACP, they'll do what they can to promote their national calibers first and foremost. Seadling has no such loyalties. Because Japan is necessarily a limited market, and Seadling was a latecomer to the industry, they opted to avoid product-specific cartridges.

The Seadling catalog

The most steady-selling product in the Seadling catalog is, very simply, the Seadling rifle, and before you ask, yes, it is an Arisaka clone. Why? Because of a simple advertising slogan: "The Strongest Action on Earth." The basic export model (in one of a number of variations) will happily be sold to you in any caliber that can fit through the action, as long as you're willing to pay up front for a few thousand or so. (For particularly extravagant customers, they'll also happily do a proprietary run of ammunition too.)

Chambered for whatever their regional enemy uses (or 7mm H11), Seadling rifles are the standard used by most third-rate states and some wealthier insurgencies (certain Maroons, for instance, or the Imamate of Somalia.) They're also a substitute standard in an astonishing number of places (by the end of the Great War, both England-Scotland and France were buying from them) - and because they have no parts moving under their own power, the Seadling rifle's the only product in the catalog that nobody hates for its complexity.

But it wouldn't be a proper Seadling catalog without hilariously over-complex designs, and here's a sampling of those designs:

• Seadling auto-revolvers. Needlessly complicated? Yep. Archaic? Yep. Cool? Hell yes. The Webley-Fosberry is a thing in Andalusada, and that thing belongs to Seadling.
• It should be noted that, unlike Chinese six-guns, Seadling auto-revolvers aren't usually engraved. An iconic Seadling is nickeled, though (a lot of its domestic buyers are navy types; shiny nickel works with the uniform and helps prevent rusting.) 
• "Cossack Carbines." This is one of the newer additions to the Seadling catalog, added after the Russo-Japanese War made Seadling a major ammunition supplier for Meammosirsk and a bunch of others. Russia had already invented a Nagant-style gas-seal revolver; as long as they were producing ammo, ran the reasoning, why not produce a gun that can use it too?
  
  The so-called "Cossack Carbine" is, at heart, a loooong-barreled revolver: maybe 14-16," with a special loading of the Cossack service revolver cartridge to go with it. It's a smart design, and really shows off what a gas-seal can do: the Cossack Carbine duplicates .32-20 performance in a shorter, faster barrel. By our standards, that's a neat trick; in Andalusada, where .32-20 may not exist, that's impressive, and it's unique enough to merit some attention.
• *Madsen clones. The IRL Madsen gun was expensive to produce, because inside it was a Rube Goldberg weapon designed specifically to avoid stepping on anything patented. A cliché about the Madsen gun was that the most impressive thing about it was that it worked at all (although apparently it only seriously struggled with .303 British...) Despite this, it was chambered in at least a dozen calibers, officially sold to 34 countries (none of whom officially adopted it, apparently...) and saw front-line service until the Korean War.
  
  Archaic? Yes. Overly complex? Yes. Cool? Hell yes.

 

Seadling as ammunition company

What Seadling sells the most of, however, is ammunition.