How much damage could you do in ancient times with a modern weapon?

[BEHIND_THE_MASK]

1 Man Armed with a Machine-Gun vs. (Oh, lets say) 10,000 Carthaginians led by the Father of Strategists himself, Hannibal.

You can fight, but really, you wont last long, even if it wasn't by a great general like him. You have to sleep sometime. They sleep in shifts, always have fresh men available. A Machine Gun, unlike a bow and arrow, is one loud S-O-B... You can have the element of surprise to start with but once that gun goes off every soldier in a 5 mile radius will be able to find you.

 

[Eli]

Very simple. Enter some ancient town, have the populace all come and see, shoot their leaders and declare "I am the lord your god and you shall have no other gods before me". That's enough to get you a lifetime of luxury.

 

[Verbose]

Position a machinegun in a defensive position on an ancient battlefield and you obviously have a battlewinning superweapon.

To get to that position you're still going to need a bit of an army around you.

There also has to be a point to fight you. Somehow you have to become part and parcel of that society. So, one would need to find the likeliest warlord around to offer one's services.

The ability to massacre people has to serve some point. To really reap the benefits of it, it has to be inserted in a big and complex society — say Rome. Otherwise one might perhaps set oneself up rulling a village therough fear. But that's not very grand in most epochs of history. Besides, taking a machinegun to peasants won't leave many alive, which defeats the point of having people work for you. And the first time you go to sleep, they're likely to stove your head in. Or burn the cottage you've barricaded yourself in. To make that machinegun work for you, there would have to be at least a small group.

It would actually be necessary to insert yourself and the gun in a society and its politics. If it's somewhere as complex as Rome, you would still need a "Patronus". Without one, if you let your guard down, with a weapon like that, you'll end up with a dagger between your ribs at first opportunity. Come to think of it, even with a Potronus you're going to need him to set up a protective perimeter to keep his political rivals from rubbing you out.

If it was all as simple as plopping the man and the gun down on a battlefield there would be no problem, but in order to actually enjoy some benefits from that position, you have to actually interact with people, and then things quickly get very complex.

 

[Verbose]

Very simple. Enter some ancient town, have the populace all come and see, shoot their leaders and declare "I am the lord your god and you shall have no other gods before me". That's enough to get you a lifetime of luxury.

Which they would think daft, sine you're clearly a man, even if you've got an amazing weapon.

Or maybe it would work on the Romans. Never on the Greeks though.

 

[Mirc]

400 horsemen charging at you in groups from all directions ideally from cover, they'll cover the ground swiftly and whilst taking losses, mob you and put your head on a spike.

You know, a civ unit doesn't consist of a single person... For this to be a real-life tank vs. spear, you would need more than one person in both sides. And if you have something like 30 people with machine guns under your command, the enemies stand no chance!! Heck, even 4 people is enough, just to have turns for staying awake.

That being said, I do believe that if the adversaries had a whole army and enough time for planning, in the end you would definitely be defeated. Don't underestimate human intelligence, though they did not have technology, they had plenty of intelligent minds. But I also think that with such an unfair advantage you could win enough battles to ensure your victory.

 

[Verbose]

For some times and places, the premise of this thread works sort of OK. One man, machinegun or no, is too little though.

Make it a group and it might not even take a machinegun. I figure the Norman d'Hautevilles set themselves up as rulers of the kingdom of Sicily in the late 11th c. by bigger horses, better armour, better tactics, and being utterly ruthless in exploiting these advantages, making them the single strongest group around, able to beat Arabs, Langobards and Byzantines alike into submission. A machinegun is just an exotic step-up from that kind of situation.

 

[fishjie]

again, you have to sleep sometime. and you are not immune to poison. etc.

another thing, i thought of, you are not immune to simple traps either. the generals would wise up and refuse to fight you in large open terrain where you could mow their troops down. they would only fight in terrain such as forests or mountains, where they could set up various traps.

you are not immune to nets, pits, ropes, etc....

 

[Traitorfish]

That was two armies of roughly equal size. We're talking a guy and 50,000 troops with arrows and spears.

No it wasn't- the number of German machine guns was a fraction of the number of attacking British troops. And those were relatively thinly spread troops moving out of a heavily defended line across short distance of broken ground and armed with rifles, grenades, etc, not an ancient army marching towards you across flat ground in a line.
I mean, it's quite possible that, if they managed to keep up the attack for long enough, they would overwhelm you, but you have to wonder how many of those 50,000 troops were left.

 

[cybrxkhan]

of course, then agiain, if you're fighting some crazy enraged super-homeland defenders like the Vietnamese p), you probably don't stand a chance.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

The Germans benefited from both tactics refined over the course of the war, and at least some semblance of a supply line.

 

[civverguy]

I would try to kill as many people as possible before they find about me. So not much damage. One guy can't kill thousands of people.

 

[Traitorfish]

The Germans benefited from both tactics refined over the course of the war, and at least some semblance of a supply line.

Granted, but it doesn't take any of that for a single machine gun to take out several hundred, if not thousand troops, particularly if they do him a favour by lining up in nice little blocks and marching forward quite slowly.
Don't get me wrong, a single machine gunner taking on any army single handedly would be overwhelmed sooner or later- assuming the enemy moral held- but he'd take a hell of a toll on his opponents first. Anyone taking on the machine gunner would have a large chunk of their army obliterated for no material gain, the military equivalent of slicing your hand off to get rid of a hangnail. "Pyrrhic victory", y'know?

 

[cybrxkhan]

of course, facing the greatest generals of history, such as Caesar, half the people from the Three Kingdoms, and Genghis Khan, they're not stupid enough to march in slowly once they know your "godly" powers.

then again, if you're facing a really pathetic general, yeah, you could win pretty easy, but we can't assume all generals who aren't known in history as "the greatest generals in history" are all pathetic.

 

[cybrxkhan]

oh yeah, another factor:

how good you are with the gun.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Of course, machine guns aren't that easy to use.

Also, bear in mind the high probability that most of the enemy troops will panic once they see what is happening and run off.

 

[Traitorfish]

Come to think of, there's already a movie based around this concept, G.I.Samurai. It's about a unit of the Japanese SDF who get transported back to the Sengoku Jidai period who get trapped in the 1500s (for some reason) and fight Takeda Shingen. They get their asses kicked...

 

[civverguy]

Another factor is how good the soldiers are.

 

[cybrxkhan]

^Alexander the Great said:

"I fear an army of sheep led by a lion more than an army of lions led by a sheep."

 

[aronnax]

Lets think a little bigger

Lets think that a GREEK platoon of 40 tanks that get transported just right outside Constantinople in 1453.....

They would stand in a distance and begin shelling the Turks, panic would begin as division after division of Janissaries and Sipahis die and catch on fire. The soldiers would begin to rout and run away and a massive and uncoorodinated evacuation would proceed and people would get crushed fighting to get the hell out of there. Then the Greek and Latin defenders stare in total confused joy.

OR

Imagine if 20 modern English Jet planes equipped with bombs, missles and Napalm find themselves in the Hundreds Years War...

 

[Damnyankee]

Lets think a little bigger

Lets think that a GREEK platoon of 40 tanks that get transported just right outside Constantinople in 1453.....

They would stand in a distance and begin shelling the Turks, panic would begin as division after division of Janissaries and Sipahis die and catch on fire. The soldiers would begin to rout and run away and a massive and uncoorodinated evacuation would proceed and people would get crushed fighting to get the hell out of there. Then the Greek and Latin defenders stare in total confused joy.

OR

Imagine if 20 modern English Jet planes equipped with bombs, missles and Napalm find themselves in the Hundreds Years War...

Well, you would have to assume that the jet pilots were English and not Scottish, or Northern Irish, because if some were, those might just turn back and unleash their loads on London and English military forces.