You are to make the greatest possible gear for medieval combat using modern day technology. That means no guns (we are still talking sword and arrow etc fighting) but modern materials and engineering are allowed.
I'd enlist the alchemists to help make a bunch of crazy pyrotechnics. I'm sure they could use their fancy flasks and beakers to somehow make nitroglycerine or TNT, maybe make land mine type stuff. If you shot a bunch of arrows with lit fuse dynamites affixed into the shield wall on the front of a phalanx, I bet when they started going off the troops would break rank and scatter in bewilderment and fear as the front liners got turned to giblets. The rest of them would probably be next to deaf after the blasts, unable to hear commands shouted. Of course you would teach your archers to wear some beefy as ear plugs.
I would also use chili peppers of all things. I'd have the townsfolk secure the hottest damn peppers they could source from the Silk Road trade routes, and grow a plantation of chilis. For weeks, people would be brewing up cauldrons of red atomic ichor for me. We would collect all the spicy gravy and make little handheld devices that had a tense spring or two, maybe some steampunk cogs and gears, that when triggered, would blast a very strong spray of blinding, searing pain right into an enemy's face.
All the arrows in my army would be dipped in shit sauce at a nearby latrine before use to cause grisly infected wounds. "Hey guys, there's little tiny entities you can't see that are bad for you in turds. If we can get turds indside their skin they will have a very bad day."
I'd import a bunch of elephants and have a war elephant legion. On each one, one driver in a full suit of heavy armor, then a little turret on the elephant's back with one turd archer and one dynamite archer.
You can bet your ass I'd be trying to figure out how to make a crossbow minigun. There has to be a way. Maybe the bolts feeding into the device on a leather belt, like some modern machine guns. You could build some kind of pillbox nest with one guy operating it, cogs and gears everywhere, some source of tension, maybe horse-drawn line or something. Or Use gravity somehow? Maybe a big boulder tied up in a rope nest suspended like 30 feet off the ground by the tension rope, each bolt on the feed belt that is fired slowly lowers the boulder to earth a few inches at a time. I can't even imagine the terror of a squad of enemy pikemen coming up to your castle to find themselves facing three or four crossbow bunkers each pumping out like 6 or 7 bolts a second and can keep firing for 500+ shots each.
You also want to send an expedition to South America to get some coca. Grow a coca plantation for your troops so they have a bit of a superhuman edge in the fight. You know, that X-factor so they really pop on the battlefield.
The following users say it would be alright if the author of this
post didn't die in a fire!
