Okay, a few things to bear in mind.
First, a Ferguson
flintlock using loose powder and ball is capable of about 10 aimed shots a minute. The maximum effective
aimed rate of fire for a bolt-action, magazine-fed rifle is about 15. Note my use of the term "aimed," which has a great deal to do with my third paragraph, below.
Second, a Fereguson with a properly designed breech plug (not one of the duplicates attempted before people figured out how Ferguson's actual screw was made) is good for
at least 60 rounds before fouling becomes a significant problem,
unless the weapon is allowed to cool without cleaning and with the breech plug in place. If that happens, the varnish will, indeed, glue the plug solid. It's been estimated by at least one late 18th-century/early 19th-century Britsh shooter and gunmaker who personally fired one of the original Fergusons that he could have fired pretty much "indefinitely" if he hadn't taken a break for lunch and allowed the gun through which he'd already put in excess of 60 rounds to cool down with the breech plug closed while he ate.
Third, the greatest advantage of a bolt action rifle is not the
maximum rate of fire it will allow you to lay down, although this is obviously a critical factor if the action closes to close quarters and the enemy is coming at you. At more common engagement ranges, however, the primary consequence of having bolt action, magazine-fed rifles is that the troops fire off a lot more ammunition a lot more rapidly without necessarily scoring the same percentage of hits they might have scored if firing more deliberately. I am not putting this forth as a hard and fast rule, since a
well-trained rifleman doesn't waste ammunition firing when he doesn't have a target except in circumstances where purely suppressive fire is called upon (and those situations certainly do arise). The
primary advantage of a bolt action rifle magazine rifle, however, is that it can be manipulated from a prone position (which a muzzleloader simply can't be, under any imaginable circumstances)
better than a
single-shot weapon. There's less waste motion and it's possible to stay somewhat closer to the ground, but the bolt action per se has no huge tactical advantage over a single-shot breechloader, many of which actually were bolt actions of one sort or another. A secondary advantage of the magazine-fed bolt action rifle is that it pretty much requires strong, durable, self-contained, and — above all —
waterproof metallic cartridges. That means they are much more reliable, especially in wet weather, and that ammunition deteriorates much more slowly in storage.
Fourth, the Church's final version of the Saint Kylmahn rifle is a substantial refinement of Lieutenant Zhwaigair's original design, which is capable of an even higher rate of fire than the original Ferguson.
Fifth, whatever one may think about the
secular armies serving the Church and the Group of Four, one should be very, very careful about accusing the Army of God or its leadership of tactical or strategic ossification.
They don't have the advantage of Merlin or Owl. The tactical doctrine that they evolved for their initial invasion of Siddarmark went from (effectively) black powder matchlocks and pikes to tactics Lee, Jackson, Grant, or Sherman would have recognized,
without the advantage of any advisers from a high-tech society with an institutional memory of what black powder armies did wrong.
Do not sell the adaptability of the AOG's senior or
junior officers short. Whether they can adapt quickly enough to the lessons they're being taught by the Imperial Charisian Army to match the Charisians' tactical flexibility or rapidly enough to offset the Charisians' technological advantages is one question; whether they can adapt as quickly and as well as any other military force in human history is quite another.
Sixth, don't forget weather conditions in Siddarmark. Safehold has a substantially cooler average temperature than Old Earth, and a substantially greater axial inclination. This means even summers are much cooler on Safehold (latitude-for-latitude) than our own experience and that winters in northern Siddarmark are genuinely arctic. At the same time, that same extreme axial tilt means that summers are considerably warmer relative to
their winters than is generally our experience, so despite the lower average planetary temperature, the permafrost line doesn't drive a lot further south than it does here on Old Earth. One of the critical components of Safeholdian military planning is that the summer campaign season once you get out of the equatorial regions is significantly shorter than Old Earth generals had to worry about. That means, among other things, that there is more time between campaigning seasons in which supplies can be built up (although ice and snow may lead to transport problems), troops can be drilled, lessons can be digested, et cetera. Recall that Eastshare moved south to Fort Tairys because it was possible to campaign through the colder months that far south, but also recall the miserable weather conditions which still obtained, and while you're recalling that, don't forget that Fort Tairys is roughly 100 miles
closer to Safehold's equator than Miami, Florida, is to
our equator. The implications for a planet-wide war are sufficiently pointed, I believe.
Seventh, remember that while Safehold has a far more sophisticated transportation net than Napoleon Bonaparte did when he headed for Russia, it's still far [iinferior [/i]] to the transportation net Ulyses Grant had when he was trying to figure out how to deal with Vicksburg and
immeasurably inferior to that of Europe in the second decade of the 20th-century. The Schlieffen Plan failed in 1914, despite the existence of a highly developed and quite dense rail network, because of the limitations of animal traction (admittedly, without dragons). Now that both sides are prepared to destroy canal locks, take out bridges, blow up high roads, and dynamite (or black powder) tunnels, logistic considerations are going to preclude anything remotely like blitzkrieg operations, no matter how great a weapons technology advantage one side has over the other.
Eighth, scale. Even a World War Two mechanized army in good supply would quail at the sheer distances involved in a Safeholdian campaign. The distance from Berlin to Moscpw fpr Adolf Hitler was approximatelym 1,000 miles. From Paris to Moscow was approximately 1,550 miles for Napoleon Bonaparte. The distance from Siddar City to Zion for Cayleb and Greyghor Stohnar is roughly 5,300 miles — 3.4 times the distance Napoleon had to cover to reach Moscow, and 5.3 times the distance Hitler had to cover. Even Gorath is 1,200 miles in a straight line from Thesmar. So the ability to deliver some sort of fatal strategic thrust is hugely mitigated simply by the distances which have to be covered. And, by the way, the fact that Bahrnabai Wyrshym was able to cover over 1,100 miles in his initial advance to the Sylmahn Gap as quickly as he did should tell all of you volumes about the capabilities of the AOG's quartermaster's corps. A comparison to the Army of Shiloh's performance might also be informative.
Ninth, remember that briefcase the Church acquired in Siddar City — you know, the ones with the plans for open hearth furnaces in it? One thing Mother Church is good at is putting together large-scale projects, and one of the large-scale projects to which her loyal servants have been paying a great deal of attention is the improvement of their steel producing capacity. The main reason Charis has been able to systematically outproduce the Church has been the sophistication of its techniques and its labor force. It certainly
hasn't been due to Charis' huge advantage in population and resources. Even with the captured plans, documentation, and (yes, I'm afraid) basic notes on steel formulation, the Church isn't going to be able to match those sophisticated techniques of someone like Ehdwyrd Howsmyn. But Ehdwyrd Howsmyn is still unique, even on Charis' side, and any significant disaster at his Delthak Works would have enormous repercussions for Charisian productivity in general. He, Cayleb, and Sharleyan are all aware of how much of their total capacity is invested in a single very large, very productive egg, and that is as great a reason for them to be encouraging the spread of heavy industry to additional areas of the Empire as any concern over inequity of income or the possibility of one lobe of the Empire becoming a debt peon to the other as the American South had become to the North even before the American Civil War, far less after it. In the meantime, the Church now has the knowledge required to
rapidly expand the productivity of all of its blast furnaces, steelworks, and foundries, and thanks to Duchairn's comb-out of the great Orders' underemployed (or completely unemployed) workers, it has an even larger labor force than it had before. Worse, in people like Lieutenant Zhwaigair and Brother Lynkyn, it has thinkers and innovators who understand both the need to innovate and the general fashion in which Charis
has innovated. They don't know about Merlin, and they don't know about Owl, but they
do know about interchangeable parts, the need to produce more (and more sophisticated) waterpowered machine tools, et cetera, and I think you can take it for granted that they will be doing all within their infernally creative power to find ways to mitigate and offset Charis' advantages.
None of this is to suggest that the Church isn't in deep, deep trouble, or that if I were a member of the Group of Four,
I wouldn't be getting progressively more and more nervous. I would venture to say, however, that it ought to suggest that Charis is
not looking at any sort of cakewalk, nor is the Church about to simply curl up and die.
That being said, the title of the most recent book —
Hell's Foundations Quiver — is an allusion to the fact that even the most complacent members of the vicarate are being forced to face the possibility that they might actually lose this thing. Because the truth is that up through the destruction of the Army of Shiloh, it never really occurred to the majority of the vicarate (any more than to Zhaspahr Clyntahn) that Mother Church's reverses in the field could be anything but temporary. Her resources were so vast, the support of the Faithful was so strong, and the favor of God and the Archangels was so firmly on her side, that it was surely only a matter of time until she found the right commander and the right combination of forces to triumph.
Unfortunately, they are somewhat less certain of that after Fort Tairys and the Battle of the Kyplyngyr Forest.
I suppose things could always get worse in HFQ, but, hey — what do I know?