Early breechloaders and production technology

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The line infantry combat of the late 18th century had - aside from skirmishers - two lines of three (British: two) ranks depth opposing each other and unleashing salvoes at each other with smoothbore muskets. The disciplined salvoes would degrade into uncoordinated single individual shots quickly as losses and fear break the discipline. The rate of fire of the best-drilled troops was 3 rounds per minute, but 2 rpm was more usual.

The muskets were not accurate at all, and even lacked real sights because sights were largely superfluous anyway. Even a large target such as a line formation of men would be hit by a few per cent of the men at 300 m distance, with salvoes fired much earlier than at 200 m distance being rare due to their inaccuracy.

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Now imagine a breechloading (quick-loading) rifle such as the Ferguson rifle was introduced en masse.

The rate of fire would have been increased by a factor of two at the minimum. 

The lethality of aim would be multiplied by a factor of more than two at more than 100 m, and still be substantially better at less than 100 m.

As a consequence, the first salvo might have been unleashed at 400 m already, and at a stead 4 kph pace this would expose the advancing hostile line to three minutes of lethal and demoralising fire before they would commence firing at 200 m distance.

The riflemen would also have been able to reload and shoot while lying, allowing for a two rank deep formation of lying and kneeling riflemen. This would have reduced the target silhouette by about a third compared to the standing three rank line. A third rank would not be advisable because the blackpowder smoke would have blinded the riflemen if they stood in a too dense formation.

Such breechloading rifles would have yielded at least two firepower multipliers greater than four and a survivability multiplier and in addition to this the skirmishing would have been vastly superior and Lanchester's equations point out that the effect on the casualties taken would be even greater than the basic firepower and survivability multipliers.

So why wasn't such a rifle introduced en masse earlier?

No doubt the basic idea of a screw breech was known long before the Ferguson rifle!
(Actually, one such rifle dates back to 1667.)

For an answer, let's look at an even greater and even older marvel of firearms history:

That's merely anecdotal evidence, but it's nevertheless extremely likely that the (in)efficiency of production (thread cutting for the Ferguson rifle, intricate parts in the Lorenzoni pistol) was the culprit. That's also why matchlock firearms were much more affordable than wheellock firearms. The unreliable yet also cheap flintlocks firearms later replaced both, after a series of short-lived interim solutions.

Let's assume an ahistorical scenario: A 17th or 18th century prince had a genius of the kind of Leonardo da Vinci on hand and commissioned him to devise a manufactory for the cost-efficient quantity production of screws, rifled barrels and flintlocks. A decade later, an army depot would be filled with 25,000 screw breechloading rifles and copper engraving plates for rapid education on a new set of drills and tactics.

In preparation to a war the entire army would be retrained during a summer, producing a field army of 30,000* with vastly superior firepower ready for the beginning of the next campaign season in spring.

The result would have been an unbeatable army, and the dominance of its infantry firepower might have eliminated battlefield (shock) cavalry much sooner than historically and generations would have been deceived into thinking of artillery as rather unimportant in battles.

Real quantity production even with exchangeable (instead of laboriously fitted) parts became important only during the mid-19th century. The huge importance of this development is largely hidden to those interested in firearms history because the percussion caps, the Minié ball, the Dreyse needle rifle and metallic cartridge cases revolutionised firearms at about the same time.

A cheap thread cutting manufactory process devised and implemented in the early 18th century could drastically have changed Europe's or India's history.

a few links about the Ferguson rifle:
www.historicalfirearms.info/post/89997396784/ferguson-rifle-major-patrick-fergusons-ordnance
americansocietyofarmscollectors.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/B024_neal.pdf
www.guns.com/2011/08/12/qthe-gun-that-could-have-won-americaq-the-notorious-ferguson-rifle/

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Larger armies were unhandy, since they would take too long marching on a single road from one bivouac to another. That's why later on Napoleonic corps were roughly of this size and armies of 20,000 to 30,000 men were more common than all larger ones in military history. 

P.S.: Breechloading also offered advantages regarding cleaning the barrel of all the foul from burnt blackpowder. You can pull some cloth on a cord or small chain through the barrel to clean it, as with modern rifles. The Ferguson rifle wasn't quite optimised for this yet (nor had proper iron sights). 

Edit April 2016: I should have mentioned that the flintlock technology didn't really allow to exploit the full rate of fire of such small arms becuase the flintstones became unreliable quickly, after a few shots. A return to the pyrite-based and much more expensive hwelllock might have been advisable for these two firearms, but that would have increased the price even further.

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