I am well aware that i only (briefly) covered the ideological basis for radical enlightenment imperialism in my post. When I came up with the idea this was an obvious problem. They have to deal with the British Empire first if they ever want to go crusading. So they need some better technology to conquer the world and compete with the Empire, something that can happen with the right combination of the following PODs:
Jacuard/Vaucanson start an early industrial revolution in france with a proto-NC machine. (A really cool POD idea by
MacCaulay)
Vaucanson died while he was working on regulating the French silk industry. He had designed a mechanical loom that more or less took manual weaving out of the equation and only had the person load it. The concept was that punch cards would be fed through the top, giving a modicum of control to the speed and movement of the loom.
Enter Joseph Marie Jacquard: this man took Vaucanson's design and improved on it, taking multiple punch cards and putting them together into a string with each line on a card representing a line of pattern that the loom prints out.
In 1801 Vaucanson and Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a proto-NC tape machine.
NC is short for Numerical Coding, or the use of a code to tell a tool (in that case a loom) where to move and how. It was the precursor to CNC, or Computer Numerical Coding which allowed modern flight control surfaces of helicopters and jets to be built with accuracy and repetition. (literally: CNC was actually invented by a man who had a USAF helicopter contract from Sikorsky)
What Jacqaurd (or anyone else for that matter) didn't seem to put together for many decades was that the same punched cards that could move a loom (or a player piano) in incredibly precise and intricate steps could also be used for a lathe. Vaucanson was one of the few men who seemed to have both ideas at once, but he never put them together.
Now they can reliably and precisely mass produce weapons. This means those two things become much more viable:
1.The Ferguson rifle was the first breech loading rifle to be widely tested by the British military. Other breech loaders were experimented with in various commands, including earlier versions of the Ordnance rifle by Ferguson when he was in the "Fever Islands". It was often misreported by historians to be a .65 (.648 true) caliber rifle. However, it actually used a standard British carbine ball of .615 caliber. The use of an oversized ball contributed to some of the erroneous claims of fouling and inaccuracy. The Ferguson Ordnance Rifle was used by the British Army in the American War of Independence at the end of the 1770s.
Its superior firepower was unappreciated at the time
because it was
too expensive, the Crown treasury was too low,
the Brown Bess musket was too new (only 10 years into its 50-year lifespan)and the
gunsmiths of England could not produce them fast enough for mass deployment during the American War.
The combined gunsmiths of England could produce 500 muskets a month, but the 4 gunsmiths making Ferguson's Ordnance Rifle could not make 100 in 6 months at 4 times the cost per arm of a musket.
2. The Puckle gun (also known as the Defence gun) was invented in 1718 by James Puckle (1667–1724) an English inventor, lawyer and writer
It is a tripod-mounted, single-barreled flintlock weapon fitted with a multishot revolving cylinder. It was intended for shipboard use to prevent boarding. The barrel was 3 feet (0.91m) long with a bore of 1.25 inches (32mm). It had a pre-loaded cylinder which held 11 charges and could fire 63 shots in seven minutes—this at a time when the standard soldier's musket could at best be loaded and fired three times per minute.
The Puckle Gun drew few investors and
never achieved mass production or sales to the British armed forces, mostly
because British gunsmiths at the time could not easily make the weapon's many complicated components. One newspaper of the period sarcastically observed, following the business venture's failure, that the gun has "only wounded those who hold shares therein"
Add stuff like Robert Fultons steam ship and Nicéphore Niépce internal combustion engine and they have all the firepower they need.
