If you had modern knowledge but were limited to 1860 tools and materials what might be possible?

I would assume since there were already repeating rifles available that would be an easy accomplishment. But what else would be possible that would be a game changer for an army fighting in that period?

BQ78 said:

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Tell them germ theory is real and save thousands of lives.

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thats not sexy.

I was thinking more along the lines of horse drawn mortars or similar.

Machine gun

This will depend on time. I'm not sure what I would do immediately in the short term other than the flamethrower, tactics, and strategy. But if given time, a year or three, the first thing I would do is improve tools and materials since that is your bottleneck. I would try to obtain, develop and produce better materials such as steel, rubber, plastics, petroleum, with the goal of being able to make gasoline and diesel engines. Once you do that you could make simple vehicles and increase your mobility and improve logistics.

Krupp's C64 3 Inch breach loading field gun... developed in 1864. Used extensively in the Franco- Prussian War of 1870.

There is a Principle of War called Unity of Command which means there is only one boss. The Union army failed in his regard at the start of the Civil War. The generals ran independent campaigns. Grant changed that and reigned in all the generals: Then he was able to devise and execute a relatively cohesive campaign plan.

AK-47
Cheap
Easy and simple to produce

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One of the problems with producing modern guns or equipment back in the 1860s is that they did not have the precision necessary to do it. Even if you took a blueprint of a modern machine back to the 1860s with you, they did not have the technology to build the machine.

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This is a good point, and we forget how things are interconnected. Optics was a growing field, and later on would allow us to take precision photographs of a blueprint, blow them up to scale and cut templates. So for instance, they would do this with the wing design of a WWII aircraft. This process could be a lot faster than doing all kinds of complex measurements.

To the original poster's point, there are a lot of technologies that were complex with low technology that could have certainly continued along their development without other techs taking over. For example, sailing ship technology was advancing rapidly in the 1840s and 1850s. It continued after ironclads, because most of the tech was on civilian ships, but about 1880, it basically stopped, other than increasing scale. But various pulleys and windlasses, etc. were reducing crew sizes, and other technology was making ships more stable or faster platforms that could have improved their capacity in combat, had they not been made obsolete.

Not necessarily a tooling issue, but, what about smokeless powder?

You would still have to do something to make the gun barrels more stout, as black powder weapons aren't strong enough for smokeless powder.

I imagine agriculture would see a lot of improvements.