Wholesome ☺️

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I was gonna say that probably wouldn't help but then I saw the modern weapons. They would rip through the opposition like they were field mice under a roto tiller. Just bring like....all the ammo. You're gonna need to HOLD Harper's Ferry for the long term and that is gonna be tough with only 4 automatic weapons. With the proper displacement of forces with at the time current weapons i think it could be done, mostly cause a key access point is a bridge which would be easy to guard with an automatic weapon against flintlock guys. How to deal with artillery once it gets to that point would be a huge issue.
- Iirc, the intention wasn't to hold Harper's Ferry it was to raid the arsenal and then evacuate up into the mountains. Brown stuck around too long because he was expecting reinforcements that never showed.
  
  They could have done even more time traveler-y bullshit and not even directly interacted with John Brown.
  Pop in with those weapons, full combat gear and load out, 180 to 240 rounds of ammo each, radios, scopes and binocs.
  Split into two groups of two, position one team in the hills on the north side of the Potomac, a bit South of the current day (and historical?) Naval Battery Outlook, put the other team at the modern day Ridgetop Outlook, with ability to reposition if the Naval Battery Outlook team can see something they can't.
  (Apologies for whipping up shitty map on mobile)
  Lets say these weapons are all... Daniel Defense M4V7s, with about 1 MOA accuracy.
  Let Brown start the attack, and the South of Naval Battery Outlook team can operate as Designated Marksmen doing overwatch, and plink off Armory Guards and 'local militia' with accurate fire from across the ridge... ideally, allowing JB and his crew to be able to hold the much more defensible Armory than the house he was forced to make a hasty retreat to in our timeline.
  As the alarm is raised, the Ridgetop Outlook team basically lies in wait for an ambush, or if reinforcements come from an area they have bad visibility of, South Of Naval Battery team can tell them where the baddies are coming from and where to reposition.
  The time travelers have dramatic advantages.
  Smokeless powder.
  The enemy will realize they are being shot at, but will likely have absolutely no visual indication of where from, instead having to just try to figure it out by ear.
  Much, much better accuracy and range... and reload speed / time before needing to reload.
  Even the further removed South of Naval Battery team will be shooting roughly 5 inch groups at worst, at the range they are at.
  Aim for center mass, and thats still pretty much a guaranteed hit for each shot.
  The Ridgetop Outlook team is intended to plan on repositioning if necessary, so they'll be at an even closer range.
  Basically, just act as guardian angels, assist with the initial assault on the armory (JB and his crew canonically march south along the road Naval Outlook team is north of, then across the bridge), screen the entire counter attack against Brown, help put the fear of god into the inital Armory defenders... and heck, maybe bring some swan feathers or something, scatter them in with some piles of spent casings, and maybe now Brown is both a succesful revolutionary and also has the mandate of heaven.
  
  o7
  I also forgot to mention something ... possibly massively historically relevant:
  The force that responded to Brown's raid on the armory?
  Led by Robert E Lee himself.
  Maybe make him a high priority target for our timeline rectification force.
  If I remember correctly, historically Lee's force came marching down the major road just south of the Ridgetop Outlook... but time travel tends to make things fucky wucky (that and 'no plan survives initial contact with the enemy'), they may come in from a different route, hence Ridgetop team planning on potentially needing to reposition, under direction from the other team who is more elevated on the other side of the Potomac.
  But if Lee approaches from what I think is the 'canonincal' route, then they're already well positioned for an ambush.
  EDIT:
  Fucking Jeb Stuart was Lee's second in command, add his portrait to the card deck.
  
  There was a game about this called like ~~Darkest Hours~~ Darkest of Days or something lol
  
  You know, I remeber watching some kind of 'wtf is this weird game' type review of that game sometime ago.
  I don't think it involves John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, but yeah basically its like... a WW1 soldier, I think?, is 'killed' in the 'canon' timeline, and the literal instant before that, he is timefrozen, recruited by the timepolice into the timepolice, and is then deployed to various civil war (and other?) battles to ... unfuck some other kind of nonsense some ... basically timeterrorists are doing.
  ... Something like that.
  Also, it is apparently now abandonware.
  https://www.myabandonware.com/game/darkest-of-days-ipk
  ... I was gonna post a gif of Einstein shaking Hitler's hand and dematerializing him, from Red Alert, but I can't actually find any, and I can't find a screen record -> gif flatpak that works on Bazzite... no Wayland support.
  ... Do any of the TimeSplitters games go to the civil war? I don't remember.
  
  I think it was oboeshoes that reviewed it
  
  Yep, that sounds about right.
  
  Do images work in site taglines because if this isn't immortalizing-worthy material idk what is
- I agree but as a pedantic correction those soldiers are going to have percussion cap black powder rifles not flintlock muskets
  
  Fuck! I knew that! Thanks for the correction, didn't stop to think before posting there.
- forget john brown, go back to king phillip's war
  
  Seems easier just to shoot a few rounds off at the landings at what would be Plymouth and Jamestown and popped a hole in some sails the whole hornets nest might be avoided.
  
  pull up to columbus's "fleet" in the middle of the atlantic and fire some grenades at them or whatever. make sure to do the same to the portuguese about to discover brazil too.
  
  Just nuke europe
- I'm far from expert on this but wouldn't overheating be a significant problem with trying to use these rifles as machine guns?
  I think the psychological effect of the bursts of fire would be strong but 4 ar-15s or m16s aren't going to be able to sustain a high rate of fire for more than a brief period.
  
  It isn't the volume or rate of fire that is really that important.
  They ar15 armed time travellers have dramatically more accurate weapons (they are actual rifles, with... rifling), able to make slowly paced (by our modern standards, very rapid by the standards of a ramrod reloaded weapon), controlled shots from much, much greater ranges.
  They also have smokeless powder.
  This will basically be seen, or rather heard as 'fucking magic.'
  At that point in time, you as a soldier or gunman or hunter would be expecting to be able to identify gunfire both by the sound, and by the large volume of smoke created by even a single ... well, often, not even a rifle, more of a percussion cap musket.
  Even revolvers of the time produced much, much more smoke than modern day revolvers or semiautos.
  An enemy force (or the local militia) being shot at, accurately, effectively, with distant sounding gunshots, but no visible plumes of smoke... would be a totally alien experience and likely utterly terrifying.
  ...
  Basically, you don't make your tactics leverage volume of fire suppression... you operate as mobile, long range ghosts calling down accurate, invisible thundercracks, whose actual source location cannot be determined.
  Make each shot count. No full auto at all. All semi auto, fire as you are exhaling.
  Entirely unironically, most people of this era would experience that as some kind of supernatural intervention.
  ...
  More directly to your question:
  Those are not machine guns.
  Machine guns, as you are thinking of them, would be like an M249, ~~RPK~~ (derp, I think an RPD would be a better example), something with belts or drums of 75-200 rounds of ammo.
  What is pictured in the image is ... some kind of AR15 pattern semi-auto rifle, with 30 round magazines.
  Generally speaking, basically all civillian variants of the AR15 are semi auto only, the military M16A4 has a 3 round burst mode, but not full auto.
  Barrel overheating would only be a problem for most AR15s if you are intentionally doing a 'burn down', which is more of a stress test thing than something that is likely to happen in any engagement.
  If you are just mag dumping like a COD player, which in real life you would have to do semi-automatically because most AR15 style weapons an average person can get their hands on is not full auto capable...
  ... yeah barrel heating could be a problem, but that would be a very stupid tactical decision with this given kit.
  One or two bullets to the body is gonna put down your entirely unarmored opponents, who likely will have no idea where you even are.
  No reason to pray and spray, conserve ammo instead, that way if you do get spotted, then you can lay down some suppressing fire in a leapfrogging retreat/repositioning.
  
  Good enough for people who group up to fire musket volleys and if they don't know the possible rate of fire and what they've seen is already mind blowingly faster, chances are the colonial militias with a few professional soldiers or veterans would scatter.
- I still think you could maintain accurate fire on their artillery position and basically pick off anyone who mans the cannon.
  
  Artillery can arc, bullets cant
  
  Maybe I'm underestimating what a bunch of slavers with muskets can accomplish, but I think one could sally out and just capture that artillery, no? Would they even understand what kind of fire power they were up against? Think about how poorly the military leadership adapted to technology advancements like machine guns during WWI, and then put that power into the hands of a single mobile soldier instead of a fixed position. I just don't see how that kind of advantage could be overcome.
  
  I do think the sheer terror of an automatic weapon would probably fuck up the opposition pretty good. Probably sending a force of normal for the time dudes and flanking with a ar 15 guy would be best. All guns are gonna be on your AR 15 guy so you still wouldn't wanna be too sure of yourself.

31 comments