My opinion is that cannons had pretty reached the plateau of what could be done with the technology of the day. Further improvement had to wait for advances of chemistry, metallurgy, and communications (being able to park cannons out of sight of the enemy and call in artillery fire via spotters was a major advance in bringing artillery back into the battlefield).
If you were looking for an area to improve combat effectiveness in the 1860’s I would have said go for machine guns. It was an idea that was in the air and it was something that could have been done with existing technology. There were a few machine guns used in the war but they never caught on. But if somebody had given them a push they could have been common.
If adding machine gun fire to an already bloody war seems like a bad idea, then go the opposite way. Over half the soldiers who died in the war died of simple infections. And they need not have. Ignaz Semmelweis had already figured out how to prevent most infections and tried unsuccessfully throughout the eighteen-fifties to get people to listen to him. (Semmelweis’ problem was that he knew from empirical evidence that his ideas worked but he couldn’t explain why they worked. It would be another twenty years before germs and their role in causing diseases were discovered.)
I suspect if we looked carefully we’d come to the same conclusion about machine guns as you just did about cannons: that they needed advances in metallurgy and manufacturing to be useful.
For instance, Gatling guns had been invented by the Civil war but weren’t used much. Which makes sense, since I understand Gatling guns weighed about as much as a small cannon, and a cannon firing canister twice a minute probably gets about the same amount of bullets downrange as a gatling gun, but is much less mechanically temperamental and can fire solid shot or exploding shells as well. Why use a Gatling gun in that case?
Sure, a few .30 cal machine guns with a few tens of thousands of rounds of ammo would have been just as useful at Gettysburg as a 105mm howitzer, but just as impossible to produce with 1860 technology.
That’s very unlikely. People constantly tinker with technology, trying to make improvements. Cannons were a long established technology and machine guns were just being introduced. So there had been decades to discover all the possible things that could a cannon work better but there was a lot of potential for discovering new things to improve in a machine gun.
History supported this. The cannons that were used in the American Civil War were pretty much the same as the cannons that had been used for the last few decades - it was a mature technology. But the machine guns that were used in that era were quickly replaced by newer models.
Why not? I’m Lutheran (ELCA rostered laity) and have a 4 pound cannon and three swivels. Zombies or not, the apocalypse isn’t catching me unprepared. :smack:
Now to the OP – one of the biggest/best things that could have been done, and one that they had the technology to do, is better control of the size grains in the powder and better storage/transport of same. Cannon powder was usually pretty coarse but with fine stuff mixed in. Closer screening near site and going more by specific volume rather than rough weight would have helped a lot.
Inventing the portable mortar 50 years earlier might have been possible. It looks like a lot of Civil War battles involved charging improvised fortifications like stone walls in the kind of terrain where cannon couldn’t be easily be brought to bear. So you basically sent in wave after wave of soldiers to be chewed up by rifle fire. A few mortar rounds dropped in the right place might have made quite the difference. And given that roman candles are a big part of every fireworks display, it looks like the technology is not that complex.
Can’t link it because I am on my tablet but there is a whole wiki Page on siege guns of the civil war, that has a section on mortars and there were even man portable mortars from the late 1600’s Coehorn Mortars
Capt Kirk
Bronze was actually “stronger” than iron in the sense that it was much less brittle. Early iron cannons frequently burst on firing, while bronze cannons almost never had that problem.
The problem with bronze is it can’t be rifled. Well, it can, but the rifling would wear away after a limited number of shots fired.
Therefore, rifled artillery would not come around until ironworking techniques improved. They did eventually, and reliable, rifled iron artillery pieces began to replace bronze smoothbores.
By the way, the 12 pound Napoleon was named after Napoleon III, the French emperor at the time, not the Napoleon I whom many people think of when they hear that name.
Yeah, but (according to Wikipedia), “Coehorn-type mortars of approximately 180 pounds (82 kg) weight were used by both sides during the American Civil War.”
So, in the spirit of the OP, I’m talking about improving the existing technology and coming up with a truly single person portable mortar that you could use on the battlefield to winnow troops out of cover.