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.

New Ireland

As a general rule, you can get away with a lot in alternate history by mentioning any given place once. Most places are still there, and it isn't foreordained that the same stuff should happen at the same places; that's what gave rise to the Skete of Orsa, for example - the random derpy idea that there may be a Battle of Taizé, and there is a Battle of Stockholm, and where in Sweden could I plausibly put a Taizé-like community? That minimal amount of work saves you a lot of the shame of Hollywood geography by making a lot of ill-documented places important.

Then there are the hard ones: the places (usually countries) that have long, well-documented histories, which potentially are going to be significantly altered by the changes you make. Places that give rise to lots of people who understandably have the right to wonder what the hell happens there.

Places like Ireland, for instance.

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.

The Great Powers, ca. 1930

Andalusada's arbitrarily defined present day, as set down by GURPS canon, is 1930. This is what the world looks like then.

France 

For most of the early modern era, France was a Catholic dystopia, using the power of the Sodality and the weakness of its neighbors to horrifying effect. In the aftermath of the War of the French Succession, it's become significantly less dystopian (and slightly less Catholic), but as of the present day it's a large, powerful unitary state in a world that's convinced they aren't going to last.

• Has a slightly different core territory (missing some of the east and southeast, but including more in the north, including Alsace, Lorraine, and a fair chunk of the Low Countries.)
• Imperial holdings: India. All of Dravidian India is basically under French control; so is most of its coastline, stalled firmly by little Bengal (and its international allies.)

 England-Scotland

 England and Scotland are sort of two separate countries. During the

• Imperial holdings: Almost all of North America between them (most notably New Ireland), "Guinea" (a lot of sub-Saharan West Africa), and some chunks of southeast Asia.
• Alliances: A close alliance with Bengal, to act as a check on French expansion out of India. Historically, Japan's been a close ally of England-Scotland, but since the breakdown of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance a decade ago it's nothing quite as secure.

"Great Russia"

A *Narodnik republic with a needlessly wordy name (the Autocephalous Revolutionary National Sobor of All the Russias, or something like that. It changes every few years.)

• Capital: Tver, because it's never Tver.
• Core territories: Russia and Siberia.
• Imperial holdings: A loudly complaining *Alaska, most notably.
• Alliances: Propping up proxy states in Karelia, Anatolia, and some parts of Central Asia. Great Russia has a nonaggression pact with Japan that's older than Great Russia itself; it used to have close ties to Korea, but those have waned since what happened to Evgeny the Old.

Saxony

• Along with the Kingdom of Bavaria, one of the two vicars of the Holy Roman Empire (which is defunct but hasn't been abolished.)
• The smallest of the Great Powers; not so much a power on its own, but the keystone of the alliance that tips the balance in almost every European land war.
• Core territories: Electoral Saxony, along with most of what we'd call the Duchy of Saxony, the better part of Thuringia, and some scattered others.
• Imperial holdings: The Suez* Canal. After some rearrangements, Saxony wound up with almost controlling ownership of it, and has made itself a bit of a broker. Quixotically, they've also colonized Port Sudan, which they're trying to build into a respectable international harbor.
• Alliances: At the moment, Poland-Ruthenia and the Baltic states in the east, which it's trying to cement into a central European military bloc against Russian expansionism. Egypt and Abyssinia have some relatively equal treaties too, as a check against Anglo-French adventurism.