AHC/WI: Nerf the guns!

Right gentlemen, your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to try and engineer a TL which is technologically speaking similar to the IOTL second half of the 19th century, but in which military technology is lagging behind compared to our world. Line infantry firing smoothbore muskets would be good, pike blocks even better. :D

Having thought about the matter a bit, I don't think that keeping tactics in the line infantry phase should be too difficult: butterflying away the Minie ball and breechloading gun mechanisms should be enough to do it, as without at least one of these inventions rifles wouldn't really be feasible for anything except skirmishing weapons. Keeping them in the pike era would, obviously, pose more of a difficulty. The only plausible way I can think of would be to go back right to the early gunpowder era, and butterfly things so that handguns don't really take off, at least not to the degree they did. Possibly you could have European armies adopting Chinese-style fire arrows instead after seeing them used by the Mongols, although then again maybe these would just follow a course similar to IOTL firearms and advance to a stage where they make deep formations and close-quarter combat obsolete.

Assuming, though, that you can retard or alter military progress, what do you think the effect on world history and geopolitics would be? European armies would have less of an edge over the various native peoples they encounter, so we'd probably be less likely to see a Scramble for Africa equivalent, although then again not having rifles didn't stop the Spanish conquering most of South America, so maybe not.
 
Right gentlemen, your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to try and engineer a TL which is technologically speaking similar to the IOTL second half of the 19th century, but in which military technology is lagging behind compared to our world. Line infantry firing smoothbore muskets would be good, pike blocks even better. :D

Having thought about the matter a bit, I don't think that keeping tactics in the line infantry phase should be too difficult: butterflying away the Minie ball and breechloading gun mechanisms should be enough to do it, as without at least one of these inventions rifles wouldn't really be feasible for anything except skirmishing weapons. Keeping them in the pike era would, obviously, pose more of a difficulty. The only plausible way I can think of would be to go back right to the early gunpowder era, and butterfly things so that handguns don't really take off, at least not to the degree they did. Possibly you could have European armies adopting Chinese-style fire arrows instead after seeing them used by the Mongols, although then again maybe these would just follow a course similar to IOTL firearms and advance to a stage where they make deep formations and close-quarter combat obsolete.

Assuming, though, that you can retard or alter military progress, what do you think the effect on world history and geopolitics would be? European armies would have less of an edge over the various native peoples they encounter, so we'd probably be less likely to see a Scramble for Africa equivalent, although then again not having rifles didn't stop the Spanish conquering most of South America, so maybe not.

Right off the top of my head, keep Europe peaceful. Perhaps completely butterfly away the Crimean War and you don't have the conflict that first stressed the logistic importance of railroads, telegraphs, modern ships, modern formation, the need for more efficient firearms, etc.

Oh and butterflying the Crimean War could put Russia on an even playing field with the other continental powers (thus not Britain. However peaceful and sluggish you want Europe to ever be, Russia would never match the technological level of Britain with a PoD in the 1800's).

I don't know if this is what OP wants as infantry units in 1910 may still probably have at least trapdoor rifles or repeating rifles akin to those in OTL from the 1870's as service rifles.
 
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Delvestius

Banned
Right off the top of my head, keep Europe peaceful. Perhaps completely butterfly away the Crimean War and you don't have the conflict that first stressed the logistic importance of railroads, telegraphs, modern ships, modern formation, the need for more efficient firearms, etc.

Given the trends of capitalist industrialization, you would have to have a PoD before the industrial revolution to halt weapons development.
 
Given the trends of capitalist industrialization, you would have to have a PoD before the industrial revolution to halt weapons development.

I'm not saying it's halted, just... it's slowed due to the low demand due to the lack of war itself. Funding is put into other research sectors, thus creating OTL-level equivalents or greater with a slower development in military weapons and tactics.
 
Actually, gunpowder seems to have been a unique invention.

If it didnt happen that once, it might not happen for hundreds of years. Having it not be invented all the way to an 18th century eqivalent might be a bit unlikely, given all those crazy alchemists around, but it should be possible.

It would be mildly amusing if the first explosive discovered was guncotton...
 
I'm not saying it's halted, just... it's slowed due to the low demand due to the lack of war itself. Funding is put into other research sectors, thus creating OTL-level equivalents or greater with a slower development in military weapons and tactics.
The Crimean War is still far too late: The first modern breech-loading artillery (there were attempts from the very beginning of firearms) was introduced in 1837, the needle gun entered service in 1839, Molke the Elder thought about modern logistics at least since 1843 and so on. Maybe - and that is a big maybe - a total avoidance of the French revolutionary wars can throw development of modern warfare back almost a century as it destroyed the old structures and concepts in a number of countries, most importantly France and Prussia. If those two are still wedded to corporal punishment for common soldiers, noble officers only and pre-levee-en-masse recruitment (and the results for strategy, tactics and procurement) a lot of smaller land powers might follow their lead.
 
You definitely have to keep Europe peaceful for long periods of time, and to do that you have to keep Europe united. Sudden and extreme bursts of violence are ok, but you cannot have sustained levels of violence for long periods of time.

I would argue that this state of affairs could be achieved had pan-European empires like the Roman Empire or Charlemagne's Empire had more centralized governments and had also adopted a comprehensive bureaucracy. Anything after that, and local identities would be too firmly entrenched to stop the fragmentation of Europe.
 
The American Revolution brought a great deal of consideration on rifled weapons, and tactics. I think any PoD would have to be before that.

Maybe Rocroi goes differently and the Spanish tercio remains the epitome of military power.
 
Just to be clear, when I talked about "military technology" in the OP, I was referring specifically to guns and canons and items of that sort. Technology like railways and telegraphs, while used by armies, wouldn't be included. An army which travels to the battlefield on trains and then fights hand-to-hand with pikes and swords would be fine (and also kinda cool, in an awesome anachronistic appeal kind of way :D).

In re: PODs, I agree that the Industrial Revolution would have to be changed somewhat. Three possible butterflies I can see are:

- A kind of steampunk-y IR which is centred more around mad scientist types making intricate machines than around people in factories mass producing stuff (would probably slow weapons tech advancement, although might end up working too well, and stopping tech advancement tout court).

- A Black Death-style plague striking Europe sometime in the late 1700s/early 1800s would be absolutely devastating to workers in overcrowded slums and factories, and might end up stalling or even reversing the IR, as industrialists find it difficult to run their factories without everybody dying and people flee to the less crowded (and therefore less infectious) countryside. (Same probs as above.)

- Completely or partially butterfly the Agricultural Revolution, meaning a smaller surplus population to work in factories, and hence less industrialisation. Some technological development would probably still occur, so you could arrange things to ensure that railways and telegraphs and so on still appear, but technology as a whole would probably advance more slowly and haphazardly.

Alternatively, butterflying away gunpowder for several centuries (as Dathi suggested) would certainly help. Alternatively we could butterfly away gunpowder's taking off like it did (after all, it was only really in Europe that gunpowder took off in a big way [well, and in Japan, but they were at least partly influenced by Europeans in this], so it doesn't seem like gunpowder is inevitably destined to become central to warmaking), or make it take a different course to IOTL. That's why I mentioned Chinese-style fire arrows and rockets: by the 19th century these weapons don't seem to have been as effective as conventional guns and cannons (although that might just be because most technological innovation was focused on the armies' main weapons), so if they managed to displace guns early on (14th century or so) when guns were still pretty bad at killing people, we might see military tech hitting a wall at a lower level than IOTL.
 
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