But take a look at the actual history of gunpowder weapons. Gunpowder was around for a long time, and people were trying for all that time to make gunpowder weapons more effective. But most of the time the problem wasn’t that they didn’t have good ideas for making more effective weapons, it was that the materials and techniques for making those weapons didn’t exist yet.
I suppose if we’re sending firearms back, the most effective easily copied weapon would be something like a rifled flintlock muzzleloader, with a minie-style ball and paper black powder cartridges and an offset socket bayonet. You’d have to make a carbine but you could fit a disassembled rifle with a 3 foot barrel into the box easily. Rifled barrels were an early invention but were very seldom used in combat because they were extremely difficult to load. So your gunsmith in the 1400s is going to know how to make a rifled barrel, and the minie ball solves the loading problem.
More sophisticated weapons depend on smokeless powder and percussion caps, neither of which your early gunsmith would be able to make or reverse-engineer. So stick to black powder. Heck, can we add a detachable telescopic sight? I say we can. The idea is to incorporate as many incremental improvements we can onto a single blackpowder weapon than can still be easily understood and copied with native technology.
Give the peasant boys back in 1450 an effective rifled flintlock with a bayonet, and they’ll soon have the aristocracy swinging from the lampposts, once lampposts get invented.
Assuming I can be somehow alleviated of the actual task of building this, what I’d want is a combination lock, maybe in the shape of a hollow cylinder made up of dial rings. Each ring would have some large number of symbols (whatever would pass the OP’s muster to avoid being “writing” or “pictures”) and there would be however many rings I could cram on this thing and still fit it in the box, say, 1000. The idea is to have a lock that’s unfeasible to brute-force crack. Then I’d gild it and cover it with jewels, and drop it in the lap of some king, whoever would be most likely to add it to the crown jewel collection and keep it safe for 1000 years.
Then all I need to do is break into whatever museum it’s stored in 1000 years later and open it. I’d get my 15 minutes of fame and hopefully avoid jail. Unless the existence of this object would somehow prevent me from being born, in which case, bummer.
Oh, and for my special rifle I forgot to include a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time. Very important. Maybe include some eye-patches for the poor guys who have to field test it.
I think my plan would have required cows to work, anyway. I 'm not sure if Cowpox is airborne, but I don’t think so. IIRC, it was milkmaids and others in physical contact with bovines that showed immunity to smallpox.
Eh. The problem with France’s use of missile weapons was mostly ideological, not technological. They did not want a weapon that might make a commoner the equal of a knight. While the Genoese crossbowmen they employed in the big battles were not quite the technological equals of longbowmen, the French commanders never gave them much chance to succeed. And France had bows of roughly equivalent power to the longbow, and could have fielded them if they really wanted to. Your bow would be a threat to the status quo, not an equalizer. And as we eventually learned in 1789, the French nobility was quite right to fear an armed peasantry.
As much as I love longbows, I’m going to have to point out that the Mongol composite bow was quite capable of dealing death at equivalent range and penetration. If you’re proposing China could have held off the Mongols with such a bow…well, it’s not like China had never seen a Mongol composite bow. They could have made and used composite bows themselves if they’d been so inclined.
In any case, I bet exposure to the possibility of gunpowder would have advanced things a bit, but I do wonder whether it would have been revolutionary, for the same reasons you give.
Printing presses were even in use before Gutenberg. They used a single, whole page engraving plate. Most printed items were heavy on the graphics, with text to explain or amplify.
Therefore, although the subjects were literary; the first printed materials could be described as …
A small thermonuclear device sent to detonate on arrival delivered to the Vatican. Would be interesting to see the path of RC religion if the Vatican was wiped out 1000 years ago.
If the rule on sending living things could be relaxed in this instance, I’d send a box of live seedlings to an Aboriginal tribe around where Sydney currently is in Australia, near a good source of fresh water. Send them Sweet corn, beans, chillis and tomatoes. Would be fascinating to see what may have happened if they had developed into an agricultural society 1000 years ago, whether other technology would have developed as a consequence etc.
A replica Viking helmet with horns in the hopes the Norse would start adding horns to their helmets. That way, the current false depiction of Vikings with horned helmets would then be accurate.
Although at 1014, may be at the end of the Viking age. Perhaps ad another 100 years?
On an old episode of the Brit show QI they were talking about why Chinese fell behind the West technologically. One reason they gave was porcelain. It worked well for cups and bowls and things so they never pursued transparent glass, then lenses, telescopes, microscopes, etc. So send them a magnifying lens and see if they get the idea?
I don’t think a great leap of technology would be much help to anybody. They’d just stand around scratching their heads trying to figure out what it’s supposed to be. Something 1 or 2 steps advanced from their current level of technology, on the other hand, might give them a bit of a boost.
Maybe some minor advancement in hand tools? A metal plow blade and some picture instructions for it’s use? Reins, bits, and bridles for a horse? A “Cross your Heart” bra with picture instructions.
Heck, I’d probably just send back a treat from the future to make them happy for a couple of minutes. I’m thinking of filling the box with Hostess Twinkies.