The Spencer repeating rifle gave the Union a distinct advantage late in the U.S. Civil War.
“All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?”
Undoubtedly tanks which enabled France to be conquered by the Germans in six weeks. Probably the fastest and easiest defeat of a Great Power in recent times.
Though I think Ethilrist alludes to it, how about the development of Bronze in a Stone Age world, and later, the development of Iron weaponry and armor?
For modern developments, how about the use of synchronized machine guns for aircraft? (was quite the game changer, until the Allies developed a copy from, IIRC, downed German aircraft). Would the first tanks qualify? (Edit) It’s not their fault that the Allies hadn’t invented blitzkrieg doctrine yet. Similarly, in Qin Shi Huangdi’s example above, the French and British had tanks too, and comparable ones; it was their doctrine and deployment that were the fatal flaws in 1940, not the hardware.
Stealthy aircraft, both manned and unmanned, are a giant game-changer and advantage that the U.S. still has over its opponents.
France had more and better tanks than the Germans did.
A very old major weapon advance - sword tangs.
Swords were originally cast as a blade. A hilt was then attached to the blade. (This probably carried over from older weapons like axes, spears, and arrows where the sharp part and the part you hold were made separately and then attached together.) Because of this there was a weak spot where the blade met the hilt. When you gave somebody a strong chop with your sword, the blade might snap away from the hilt.
The somebody came up with the idea of a tang. This was an extension of the blade and the blade and the tang were cast as a single piece. Then the hilt was built up around the tang rather than being made as a separate unit. The result was that the entire sword was a solid unit without the weak spot where it could break in half.
Absolutely, that’s what I came in here to suggest.
The origin of the chariot is poorly understood, but historian John Keegan has proposed that since it marries the horse, first domesticated on the steppes of Asia, to the wheel-and-axle, developed by Fertile Crescent civilizations, the chariot probably developed on the borderland where the “irrigation societies” of Mesopotamia touched the nomadic herding cultures of the steppes.
Horses at that time were still too small to be ridden on their backs effectively, but were able to pull a lightly-built chariot. Suddenly human movement speed over distance was multiplied by a factor of ten.
The chariot was not a “battle taxi” as some have claimed it is depicted in the Iliad, nor was it a weapon of collision as in Ben Hur – it was too lightly built. Chariots typically carried two men, a driver and an archer. Equipped with the composite bow, chariot archers could shoot arrows at footmen with impunity, retreating from contact if the footmen charged, and returning to shower them with missiles when they tried to fall back. Keegan has described the impact a small force of such chariots would have had:
And they were successful everywhere the terrain was level enough to permit the employment of chariots:
For five hundred years the chariot lords ruled much larger conquered populations with a (bronze) fist. That’s immensely longer than most of the weapon systems described in this thread have existed, and orders of magnitude longer than such advances as tanks, machine guns, and aircraft provided one side a lopsided advantage. Horse, chariot, and composite bow were one of humanity’s first “weapons systems,” and one of the most dominant in all of history – maybe THE most dominant.
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My contribution (already alluded to) is the combination of composite bow and horse used by the Mongols. They could move at (relatively) great speed, tactically and strategically, and their bows had a longer range than anything they came up against. It is a large reason they dominated Asia and Europe.
I was wondering whether I too should mention stealth technology. I mean, it was a game changer for Osama, and other missions we don’t know about.
But what about composite materials, then?
But for the list, for sure, the profound power of the US computing, eavesdropping, cryptography, and satellite tech.
We have no clue what’s going on there. Even the leaked, sparse descriptions of Stuxnet and its spooky more capable (and still active?) big brother Flame show them to be tactical game-changers.
More than stealth, the cruise missile is alleged to have been the piece that made the USSR crumble. The USA could deploy thousands of small, cheap(er), hard to detect and hard to stop little ground-hugging missiles. The whole cold war until then had been about matching ballistic threat to ballistic threat. The next step after highly computerized ground-huggers was a way to stop ballistic missles well before they neared their target - a sort of “star wars defence”, if you will.
The fact that American tech could (a) threaten to hit the Soviets at will and (b) neutralize their defences meant the old balance of terror did not work. The fact that the US promised at first not to put nuclear wareheads on cruise missiles, and Star Wars never actually materialized, was irrelevant. At the outside edge of feasible but not impossible, both technologies neutralized what the Soviets relied on for defense and they did not have the tech to catch up. Something had to give.
Interesting.
Of course, anti-ballistic missile technology (“Star Wars” is a political word) is well entrenched now, and its development is continuing apace.
When it comes to the code breaking systems, Colossus and the Bombes, they were not as asymmetric or a game changing as popular history usually suggests.
Much is made of how the Enigma codes were broken, using the Bombes, however a tiny footnote, rarely mentioned is that the Germans had also broken the UK naval codes, which were much weaker. So there was not the level of asymmetry people imagine.
The Colossus machines didn’t come into use until much the same time as D-Day, and thus it was only in the closing stages of the war the the German high command codes were broken. This was important, and allowed the offensive to proceed better than had the code not been broken, but it wasn’t a game changer.
Indeed, the history of the code breakers is very much a case of the victors writing history. Not to diminish the phenomenal contribution of the Bletchley Park engineers and mathematicians, the British made some appalling mistakes. The biggest mistake was when Churchill wrote his history of the First World War. In it he revealed that Britain had broken the German codes. So, in response the Germans developed much more sophisticated code systems - Enigma and Lorenz. The game changing technology that was asymmetric in the war was probably Enigma and Lorenz, not Colossus and the Bombes. Given how the British had thrown such resources at breaking the German codes, it remains something of a puzzle, verging on scandal, that they didn’t seen to worry that their vastly less sophisticated codes were not secure.
The bow
the leather shield
the viking sword
plate armor
mounted archer
firearms (including artillery)
nitroglycerine
armored ships
armored vehicles
war planes
guerilla / assymetric warfare
Unmanned Arial Vehicles.
The Sarissa pike, helped out Alex in his early days.
I agree.
Not just UAVs but smart weapons in general. Desert storm was the first example of wholesale fighting that most citizens in the opposing countries just read about in the news or on tv. You wake up one morning and find out the enemy has dropped as many bombs as those used throughout WW2, and much of your major infrastructure has been destroyed.
They represent a quantum leap over the Times New Roman vehicles.
:rolleyes: :smack:
And Bach (the weapons designer?) wrote extraordinary canons.
Church law has some too.