WI Rifling Not Invented Until The 20th Century

How would history have been changed if rifling had not been invented until sometime in the early 20th century? People still develop breech loading and rapid fire weapons, just no rifling.
 

Paul MacQ

Donor
Well that would be a 400 year odd delay. Not sure how you can delay what is basically a simple solution, Even if slow firing before the introduction of the Minie Bullet
 
Probably not too much, weapons are less accurate, especially at long range. Maybe submachineguns come to prominence earlier, and sniping is less heard of, if not completely unheard of.

However, stopping people from inventing rifling doesn't really make sense to me -- why wouldn't they? Anyone with a football can figure out that spinning something makes it fly further and straighter, and any gunsmith worth his salt is going to try and figure out how to do that to bullets.
 
Something like the Nessler ball or Brenneke slug would probably be invented to improve range and accuracy.Though its hard to see how rifling could be delayed that long.
 
Ironclad ships might not have been developed until the 1870s. Rifling was one of the reasons that ironclads were built. So WWI is fought with pre-dreadnoughts (maybe).
 
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