US preparations for War
OK, this was closer to ready to go than I thought.
US preparations for War.
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]In 1841, when Clay is elected, he sees a clear chance to regain 'America's rightful land', the British army is in disarray, the Canadian rail network not complete. He moves forward with raising the number of troops and building military capability, promising his supporters a great victory.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]By the end of '41, beginning of '42, the American position isn't looking quite as rosy as had been expected – bottlenecks of all sorts have appeared and the militia isn't as well trained as it's supposed to be. Still, the US will have a massive numerical advantage over the British, and they still have every hope of making huge gains, so planning continues. Also, by now, Clay has painted himself into a corner. He was elected on a platform of recovering those lands, and spent the first year war-mongering. It would be political suicide to stop now.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]One of those bottlenecks is the production of Hall Rifles. It was initially hoped that every every man in the attack force, at least, could be equipped with one (which would mean producing some 100,000 or more over the course of 2 years, or better yet, twice that). Given that Hall had invented a whole range of machines to help manufacture the rifle at Harper's Ferry arsenal, it simply wasn't possible for a random gunsmith to produce nearly as many. Between upping production at Harper's Ferry, and having regular gunsmiths duplicate the work by hand, they managed to produce 30,000 Halls in those two years, but even that stretched the limits of what could be produced.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Another bottleneck is percussion caps. While it was possible to hand make handfuls of caps with highly refined mercury fulminate, making the millions necessary turned out to be far more difficult than had been anticipated. Given that a Hall rifle can fire up to 10 rounds a minute, an hour of fighting for 20k rifles could use up 10*60*20k = 12 million caps. Of course, a gunpowder weapon can't fire 600 rounds in an hour – the barrel would be fouled solid, and probably be glowing red hot – but that gives you a taste of the production quantities involved[1]. In fact, the percussion cap bottleneck was bad enough that some of the cap weapons were converted BACK to flintlock, which was a bit tricky because the existing conversion kits went the other way.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Millions of caps requires a large supply of mercury, which is not available in the United States[2]. Spain is happy to supply US needs, but the increase in demand caught them by surprise and they can't increase production in their mines fast enough to supply the US with all they want, yet.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Gunpowder is not, currently, a bottleneck, as the US has built up their gunpowder factories, and has managed (at great difficulty and cost) to stockpile some saltpetre (the limiting ingredient) ahead of time. They have also prospected bat caves, and are mining them for the nitrates in bat guano. They have reason to believe they have this problem well under control. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]The Maceroni[3] rockets are another problem, too. While each individual rocket doesn't require much metal, and they can be built by a skilled smith, the nozzles are tricky and require particularly skilled workers. Putting together 10 of them is (relatively) trivial. Hundreds isn't hard. Thousands is trickier, and 10s of thousands starts being really difficult. Still, they started work early enough that they worked out some of the kinks in the production, letting semi-skilled workers work on the bodies, while the most skilled smiths dealt with the most finicky work. Each team can produce about 2 dozen a day or a gross in a week. Of course, this rate is after they figured out the dies and tools needed and after that team had couple of months practise...[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Reactionary Spain and Republican America are a bit of an odd strategic pair, but Spain figures that if she sells the US her stocks of saltpetre (at a healthy profit), and what mercury is available, that the US will stay friendly and not attack Florida. Britain keeps warning Spain of the dangers involved, but the Spanish Crown figures a) that the Brits have ulterior motives, and b) the US wouldn't be stupid enough to attack BOTH Spain and Britain at the same time. Keeping the US happy should keep them aimed at Britain, with any luck.[4] So Spain sells the US strategic materials and does not increase the defensive levels in the Floridas. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]Another piece of war preparation that did go as planned is that the US manages to complete a rail line all the way to Pinckney Georgia (OTL Jacksonville, Florida)[5]. To do this they had to build rail not only south from the existing rail lines at Savannah, but north from Pinckney and heading both directions from the crossings of the Altamaha and Satilla Rivers.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]1 Not that the US realizes that they need that many yet. OTL, in the First Opium War, the Brits shipped 400 percussion muskets with 50,000 caps. That works out to 125 caps / musket for an entire campaign. That's only ~30minutes worth... OTOH, that wasn't the kind of intense warfare that the coming war would involve, but still the US is likely to underestimate the number of caps needed. [The Opium War, Peter Ward Fay, p.313][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]2 There is, of course, mercury in California, but it hasn't been discovered yet AFAIK, it's certainly not being exploited, and California isn't in the United States (even iOTL, yet).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]3 You KNOW the British are going to sing a filked version of Yankee Doodle 'Stuck a rocket in his cap and called it Maceroni'....[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]4 Note the similarity in reasoning to Stalin's before Barbarossa. [hint, hint][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]5 Note that rail isn't actually going to St. Augustine, the jumping off point for that invasion. From Pinckney they can ferry supplies down the St. John's River to St. Augustine, and that's a chunk of rail they don't have to build then.[/FONT]