[X] [LIBRARY] Back-fill
This.
Among other things, machine guns don't actually do anything to a typical target that a platoon or two worth of riflemen can't do to the same target, and at the time of their introduction there were a lot more than 1-2 platoons of riflemen in a given army per machine gun emplacement. Machine guns make some very real differences at the tactical level to details, but they're not the thing that really changes the game at the operational and higher level.
By contrast, breechloading artillery does something riflemen really can't do, namely slaughter infantrymen from several miles away at ranges where they cannot hope to retaliate or even capture the guns that are doing this to them. Because the gunners will unfailingly be shooting from behind a defending infantry screen with entrenchments, and you will never get through the infantry lines fast enough to catch up before those guns are limbered up and pulled away to do it to you all over again.
Eh. Machineguns give you a lot of concentrated fire, which makes charges pretty chancy, and are smaller targets. That's a big tactical change, and that'll echo through the whole force structure. With artillery, it's not so much breech loading as it's long range that really changes things, though the higher fire rate is important. But as with the machine gun, you could just have more in parallel to compensate for firing rate.
But both are missing the same underlying key: Mass production of munitions (and arms, but that's a lesser issue, because the dwarfs could built up to it over time). A machine gun relies on having a shitton of bullets to throw down range. So does replacing a machinegun with a bunch of dudes with rifles. And long range indirect fire also requires a ton of munition, because you're firing essentially blind beyond a vague 'thereabouts'.
And that mass production is an issue for the dwarfs, because it goes against their whole framework of production. If each shell is handcrafted, then you just won't have the ammunition for the sort of industrialized war that characterised WW1. And each shell will be so precious that throwing it blind doesn't make any sense, you have to make each count. A really quick estimate gives me something like 37 shells
per hit in WW1 (20 Million+20 mio wounded, and half of that is civillians, vs 1.5
Billion shells. Though the last number isn't something I would bet a lot on. It's huge regardless) Dwarfs cannot afford that level of waste. I don't know what the rate for bullets is, but it's pretty terrible too.
So based on that, we won't be seeing widespread WW1-style combat. Okri is talking about an elite unit for force projection. It's the equivalent of the Empire sending a bunch of wizards on pegasi to blast something.
One final note: Even if the dwarfs decided to embrace automised production (and dwarfs can change their mind, when pressed), then they
still can't produce enough ammo. They don't have the niter. Hell, they already can't make as much gunpowder as they want. IRL, it was a quite important ressource (there were
wars fought over this shit, pun gleefully intended), and you had only two places with significant amounts of it. The dwarfs don't have any. Now, you can do artificial production*, and it's what Germany did because they didn't have access either, but from what I've seen, the dwarfs just aren't at the level of chemical knowledge and industry where they can do this, or even know that it's possible at all.
*The Haber-Bosch Process is one of the unkown but critical bits that make the modern world possible. It's the reason we don't fight over bird shit anymore, and why people aren't starving all over the place (more than they already are), because it's how we make fertilizers and available sources would've been insufficient even in 1920. To this day, it makes up about 1% of the total energy consumption.
