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Suppose this happened after the US civil war ended. Northernize the South!

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  • #46
    Originally posted by astralis View Post
    the war would be WWI-like in intensity of fervor but not rate of fire. an 1870s style breechloader fires roughly 6-8 shots a minute, compared to 15-20 shots for a WWI style rifle.

    a springfield musket can fire 3 shots a minute. so yeah, the logistics nightmare is considerably worse but not impossibly worse, IMO. especially because the south would also be improving her industrial and logistics infrastructure over those 10 years.
    It's not the rate of fire. It's the reloads. So, yes, the log train would be impossibly worst, especially when you consider no one had any clue how to drag that much ammo from a supply depot to the line. It would be a situation fire what you got and then walk back to get more and that means the entire regiment has to fall out of battle.

    Originally posted by astralis View Post
    i doubt it. it's not as if the franco-prussian wars was some sort of sitzkrieg where everyone dicked around. most of the battles were ferocious events where the ratio of dead/wounded to the overall number of combatants was as high if not higher than the ACW counterparts. in the end there's only so many rounds a minute you can fire, after all-- even assuming (rightly) that the ACW counterparts were not half as well trained as the professional French/Prussian armies.
    Which would make the munition expenditure picture even worst. The ACW armies would be missing their targets and hence, wasting ammo, far, far worst than the Franco-Prussian armies.
    Last edited by Officer of Engineers; 01 Aug 13,, 15:32.

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    • #47
      Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
      It's not the rate of fire. It's the reloads. So, yes, the log train would be impossibly worst, especially when you consider no one had any clue how to drag that much ammo from a supply depot to the line. It would be a situation fire what you got and then walk back to get more and that means the entire regiment has to fall out of battle.
      I think and AR would be the one to answer this for sure, but most of the early battles were fought on/near rail lines, pikes and rivers in part for logistics reasons. A later start to the war with breech loaders might simply compress the range of movement for the armies.

      How much brass did the south have to make casings for rifles and cannon? Its a lot easier for a resource poor South to make paper cartridges that that muzzle loaders used.

      Also, it looks like the US got its first Bessemer process mill in 1865 and by 1877 had 11 of them. Figure 5 by 1870 vs 0-1 for the south. Without a modern steel mill, the South cannot make breech loading cannon light enough for the field and will have to import them from Europe (British Armstrong????) but only if those government permit it.

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      • #48
        Looking for breech loading artillery of the time

        UK- Armstrong Gun (6,9,12 pounder)*
        France- Reffye 85mm
        Prussia- Krupp 60mm-87mm

        Also, indirect fire on any type of a large scale was still 15+ years into the future in 1870 based on when the discussions about the math required started to be seriously talked about. It was still very much a direct fire age.

        * A few Armstrongs were imported to North America during the ACW.

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        • #49
          Originally posted by astralis View Post
          the South was just starting a period of industrialization when hostilities started. had the war been delayed 10 years it would have been very very bad for the North-- not just in terms of firearms (breechloaders favor the defense) but in terms of railroads and production capability. the South would still have been nowhere close to the North but they would have benefited significantly more from even a modest increase in capacity.
          The most industrialized city in the South as the Civil War started was Atlanta, and Sherman burned all that industrialization to the ground.

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          • #50
            If they northernized the south then the southern states and cities would have English, German and Norwegian names.
            Hit the grape lethally.

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            • #51
              Originally posted by Wonderful Plans View Post
              If they northernized the south then the southern states and cities would have English, German and Norwegian names.
              Please don't resurrect years-old threads. Thank you.
              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

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