Never Ending Streams of Horse Nomads Enter Eastern Europe

By how much would the following scenario likely speed up the development of fully automatic rifles? Would we get folks in the year 1880 running around with fully automatic rifles or would it perhaps be later such as perhaps 1910 or 20? Would it be the same as OTL?

The threat to Europe of horsemen from Central Asia never goes away in this timeline. The Europeans drive them out and they keep coming back. Through timeline shenanigans the centre of most scientific and economic development is in Eastern Europe in regions near or directly under the threat of invasion from the horsemen.

The Europeans have horses of their own but whichever civilization dominates central Asia at the time has better or at least comparable cavalry and more of them. The Europeans advance technologically but as they do those in Central Asia keep scaling up in power too (kind of how the Central Asians seemed to keep scaling up in power as China OTL got more advanced).

Central Asian powers rise and fall but every time one falls it gets replaced by another one of comparable size eventually. Fighting in Central Asia, or at least defending Eastern Europe where it is more open is going to make trench warfare less effective.
 
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One other question. If we provide Europe early on with the design of a Chu Ko Nu and the design for Rockets, landmines and sea mines soon after they are invented in China how much sooner could we get Percussion Caps and thus metal cartridges invented? Perhaps see the development time cut down by a third? More?

I'm guessing that this would be relative to whenever this timeline's Industrial Revolution occurs since it helps in making these cartridges. I'm wondering whether early common knowledge of the idea of a magazine you can insert into a projectile weapon, plus a well known design for a weapon that can reload with the pull of a lever (not the same as a gun but perhaps seeding the idea of this possibility in a gun and thus encouraging people to look into it), plus research into combustibles for rockets, plus the general idea of having a propellant packaged with the payload that would accompany rockets would help with the development of the cartridge and encourage people to try developing a percussion cap.

I also heard that rockets saw usage in Medieval Europe. How extensive was that? If we ramp up rocket usage to the levels that they were in Song China and have it get more prominent from there at a plausible rate would that make any difference or was it already very prominent, thus making little difference?
 
Okay. Perhaps a shorter question then. Was a lack of horses ever a strong motivation for weapons development in Europe as it was in China?

Those in Europe did have to face off against forces like the Hussars and the northern European Plain covers a large stretch of Europe.

On the other hand Britain had so little threat from any land force, let alone cavalry usually that it had a comparatively small army, focusing instead on navy. The Holy Roman Empire and France had decent cavalry and highly defensible geography so needing to compensate with infantry would not really occur to them.
 
One, rockets although they were used occasionally by some states in a Europe were really rare. Remember that Britain in the 1800's didn't get their initial rocket tech from another European state. They got it from the Indian subcontinent. Having rockets be common would very much speed up metal cartridges and thus automaticatic rifles.

The scale in Song China of rocketry was not the same as in early europe.

The guy that developed the percussion cap substance did so for hunting purposes. Can you imagine how much faster things could have gone if there was rocket experimentation?

The concept of a magazine would certainly speed things up. People would certainly look at the concept for arrows and start trying to figure out how to adapt this for firearms. They'd figure out they needed some alternate way of triggering a bullet and now you have a whole cadre of scientists working on it instead of one lone bird hunting enthusiast.

The Hussars aren't as strong a motivator for infantry tech as the Central Asians because other nations in Europe could get them. Napoleon had some. Also other European nations had pretty good cavalry, although not as good as Hussars.
 
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