WI: Union soldiers were equiped with rpeating rifles during the ACW?

Art

Monthly Donor
Hadn't thought about ammunition . . .

what is really needed, then, is better weapons, such as bolt-action magazine rifles. Sell 200,000 of THOSE to the Union, and the South will lose in EARLY 1862. Why is it nobody writes TLs like that?
 
what is really needed, then, is better weapons, such as bolt-action magazine rifles. Sell 200,000 of THOSE to the Union, and the South will lose in EARLY 1862. Why is it nobody writes TLs like that?

There are dozens of time lines just like that in the ASB forum. There would have to be too many POD's to produce that sort of change for in a realistic Pre-1900 TL.
 
of the U. S. Army Board of Ordinance, was a real dinosaur. He wanted to fight the Civil War with muskets. Kill him off, and the army may get Gatlings, Coffee Mill machine guns, Spencer's, Henry's, and OF COURSE Sharpe's rifles. Shoot the Confee fools to pieces.

Not true as has explained many times before here and on most other USCW sites given the scope of the war and the small size of the pre-war US military and arms industry General Ripley made the correct call by sticking with what they already knew and could make the easiest.
 
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elkarlo

Banned
That would be a pretty big deal by itself. A company of skirmishers with the firepower of a brigade?:eek: How much harder would they be to kill? A lot.:eek: Even if the dispersal only goes up 4-5:1, which is less than half what it did OTL by WW1.

Still a supply nightmare as well as a smoke machine. Generals tended to not like smoke and ammo wastage.

BTW more fire doesn't mean more hits esp with so much smoke.

My dad was an officer in Nam. At night or when visibility was low, most his men shot up the tops of trees. I suspect this would happen as well here. Think the tech was too advanced for the time. Was better in the west. Where actions were smaller

Quantrills guys liked to have multiple revolvers in order to spray and pray
 
Even so, it doesn't fit the existing premise- which is to have Union troops armed with repeaters from the start. By the time you've manufactured and distributed large numbers of repeaters, a halfway competent war strategy should have the Confederacy start to totter. The problem is that the domestic industrial sector needs time to gear up, but most European powers have only just rearmed with rifle muskets and they aren't available in surplus in large quantities. Getting everybody armed with rifled muskets is an achievement under the circumstances,though not one which people tend to credit.

true, I don't think there is any realistic scenario to get the whole of the Union army armed with repeaters at the start of the war, given their 'barely just invented' and unreliable nature. However, if we can get the whole of the Union army armed with rifled muskets at the start of the war (and sufficient quantities to arm all the suddenly raised new divisions), the Union could experiment more with repeaters. I don't think they are ever going to be anything but experimental, with the bulk of the combatants fighting with rifled muskets. Still, there might be several units armed with repeaters. If nothing else, they would be in high demand among garrison and guard troops in the rear, who have to deal with Confederate cavalry raiders...
 
It would be a slaughter similar to the battle of Sadowa in the Austro-Prussian war. The musket armed Confederates would be slaughtered.
 
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