I am not sufficiently informed on the economics and logistics of law enforcement and small arms to rule on that. I know militaries are generally starting to transition towards caseless, although there are holdouts. Not sure where cops would be. Thus, non sure about New York.
If I may venture an opinion, NYC sources it's equipment from Europe in this AU.
Both for cost-effectiveness and logistic commonality, with a little bit of dollar diplomacy thrown in, the way the Saudis mostly buy US milspec.
If Europe has moved to caseless anytime in the last three decades, the NYPD would have followed suit.
Speaking of which, bringing over a couple loosely linked ideas from discussion in the discord:
This is kinda late. My apologies.
1) American organized crime wars between legitimist expats who still claim to be, like, loyal to the state department or intelligence apparatus, generic American expat/refugee mafia, and Vic mafia.
2) The Victorian overseas mafia is run in large part by the Inquisition and is HARD into human and drug trafficking to gain the foreign specie they need to scrape by and is basically all they can do for foreign intelligence rings that isn't a bunch of reactionaries not good enough for Alexander screaming at them that "INDIA IS RIPE FOR THE PLUCKING I TELLS YOU, White settler colonism in India is totally viable against the degenerate darkies old chap!". These guys also do the vaunted Victorian turbo hacking that doesn't actually amount to anything.
3) After the Old South defeated the NAC, the Victorians helped them set up new confederacy which (predictably considering it would have almost certainly been the fate of the first Confederacy had it successfully seceded) dissolved acrimoniously and turned into islands of little plantation economies. The local Victorian divisions and Inquisition, in all their wisdom, decided that perhaps the best cash crop that said plantations could produce would perhaps be opium for... Traditional Western Medicinal Use. Medicinal use that also sees most of that cash crop exported overseas via the Victorian Mafia. (And only occaisionally hijacked by pirates from Miami who fight the non-shit parts of the Vic navy stationed in the ATLANTIC)
5) One of Miami's expansion choises might be to realise "Hey, we're a thassalocracy" and just... take control of the mouth of the Mississippi while we're still working our way overland south. Which presents a huge conundrum because even if they operate in good faith with use as a fellow democratic revivalist power they still get powerful economic advantages denied to us via control of the gulf and just... being there first.
6) Unrelatedly, TIL I learned about Saddam's
Blood Qur'an, and now I imagine that one of the Victorian divisional generals had as his personal project a Blood Bible made from the lives of criminals and Cultural Marxists executed for defying Christ and this is how they give back. Possibly in Appalachia?? [Victorian TURBOHERESY intensifies]
(I'll probably be finding a way to omake these at some point. Probably in the form of an Journalistic expose of Victorian smuggling and crime. Real Iran-Contra hours in like, West Africa or something.)
1) I can't really speak to organized crime.
We do know that significant portions of the KGB turned to the Russian Mafia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s, so it's possible you'll see significant portions of CIA/DEA-descended factions out in the black market. But there was still a nation to parasitise.
If those factions exist, look to the Western Seaboard, out of Cali into Cascadia, and New Mexico/Texas/Mexico.
Because California serves as an existing significant economy with trade links into those areas for organized crime to parasitize.
2)I think I pointed this out before, but Victoria is quite wealthy. Has to be.
Alexander handed them some of the most immediately profitable chunks of Canada on a platter, and even with Russian megacorporations skimming off the cream of the output, ideological fixations, and their general economic mismanagement, there is a lot of money there just from exploiting the excess hydroelectric power generation of Quebec .
And that's without accounting for the general exploitation of the rest of the continent, like the Farmer's Federation and the Lakes communities.
You do not run an expeditionary force of a hundred and twenty thousand light infantry, an extra forty thousand men in mechanized formations, over a hundred jet fighters and a continent-spanning network of
spies aid workers every year for at least three decades on a shoestring budget, even while living off the land.
Vic intelligence does not need organized crime to make money.
They might need it/use it for gathering intelligence, mind, exerting influence and keeping tabs on parts of the country they seldom visit.
But they don't need it for the money.
3) Like I pointed out earlier, opium and it's heroin end product gets out-competed in a world of fentanyl and oxycodone.
Especially if you are attempting plantation scale agriculture with
slave indentured workers with no real incentive to make you money.
And the fentanyl producer has lower costs, too, both due to having to feed fewer workers, lower shipping costs, and less product loss.
Not to mention that with South America quite capable of growing it's own product, thank you very much, the only other markets are Europe, Africa and Russia/India. Europe and Africa as destinations incur significant transport costs post-Collapse*makes hand gestures* with Victoria sabotaging all industry above the machine shop level, no narcosubs, and you can't fly a loaded Cessna across the Atlantic.
And given the IADS in Western Europe, you'd probably get shot down anyway.
And Russia?The Okhrana will not be well pleased by Victoria doing that.
Where you're likely to see organic drug production mushroom are Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they are going to be produced and shipped into India and Russia overland, where there are customers who can pay for it. And even there I suspect chemists will outcompete farmers.
5) The problem with Miami making a grab for the Mississipi is all the people living there, who might have opinions about it.
I mean, the mouth of the Mississipi is obviously a strategic location, but the whole New Orleans-Baton Rouge axis is going to have a lot of people with strong opinions about their neighbors.
While they might want to, I don't think Miami currently have the power projection to militarily secure the mouth of the Mississipi, and their diplomacy was not focused that way previously. They'll be going in from a cold start. I do suspect there will be significant conflict there in the next couple years though, as multiple warlords and microstates try their luck to dominate the area.
6) Eww. Some things I could have done without knowing.
I mean, there's weird, and there's weird. And there's no indication that Victorian state religion as envisioned by Lind embraces the sort of folk syncretism that would embrace this sort of thing, especially if parallels can be drawn to a similar practice by, horrors, a brown
Muslim Mohammedan. And one without a history of martial glory, either.
Do recall how much Victorian internal security worries about their raiders picking up external beliefs.
Enough that they get occasionally deployed with CMC political escorts, not counting the unofficial CMC agents in the division.
It's really not the sort of thing I suspect they will tolerate, unlike say rapine, kidnapping and murder.
A Victorian client-state with some warlord type doing this? Yeah, sure; imperfect tools and all.
A Vic general? Nah.
EDIT
7) You were looking for plot hooks? Here's one:
en.wikipedia.org
There is going to be a significant US diaspora, possibly in the tens of millions.
How do they move money to friends and loved ones in the absence of a banking system? Something like this.
Is allegedly responsible for 1.6 billion dollars worth of remittances to Somalia alone each year.
**********
Ok another omake
The Crown Dependence and the Collapse and aftermath By Professor Callum McKenney, MBE, OBCB.
The Crown Dependencies of Mann and the Channel Islands have always inhabit an unusual place in the political structure of the United Kingdom both before and after the Collapse.
Jumping off this.
One of the things I find we overlook is that the UK is just off the coast of Europe. And Ireland remained a member of the EU.
There's even a Channel tunnel between the UK and France, which people can literally walk if all the train and truck services stopped working. People aren't just going to sit in one place and starve; if Britain collapses due to political mismanagement, excess population will cross the Channel.
The UK has 66 million people or so.
Assuming we're looking at Syrian civil war refugee levels of migration, where 25% of the population are external refugees outside the country, that's maybe 17 million people. The EU sans Britain is 446 million. That would be around 3.8%.
For comparison, Germany, population 83 million, currently has 1.3 million refugees, which is 1.5% of their population.
And their total population is 14% immigrant.
Assume not all of the British went to the EU, with some to parts of Africa (Kenya/South Africa/parts of West Africa) and others to Australia/NZ and South America. Call it half of that 17 million, leaving the EU dealing with 8.5 million British refugees, not counting the Americans and Canadians.
Might also be one reason for some of the political instability in France next door; British Brexit propaganda did them no real favors in the rest of the continent, but France produces an agricultural surplus, and always has. So in the event that the British government fucked the goat in an economic crisis so badly that food supply actually became a problem, France and the other Channel nations would see large numbers of Brits.
Parties like le Pen's
neo-fascist hard-right National Front have always looked for wedge issues to ride into power, and while one of their planks has primarily been opposition to
non-white non-European immigration, it doesn't take very much to extend that to post-Brexit British immigrants.
Which could quite easily lead the country to splinter if they gained enough support to control a couple regions.
