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Charles de Bange was a French artillery officer who in 1872 manage to invent the so-called de Bange system, a method for safely sealing breech-loading cannons. (Before this they'd had an unfortunate tendency to explode in the middle of battle, due to the stress of repeated firing.) What if de Bange had never been born, and the system he invented was either not invented at all or at least delayed by several decades? How would military tactics and technology develop without him?
One difference would probably be the absence of the sort of massive naval guns which battleships IOTL started carrying in the late 19th century. Since it would now be harder to penetrate enemy armour, we might see torpedoes taking over as the primary naval weapon instead. Since torpedo boats tended to be quite small, this could result in navies building a large number of smaller vessels instead of a few big battleships as they did IOTL.