The other thing to take care of has to be Sam Hughes as Minister of Militia and Defence, a quick search suggest he was somewhat of a disaster when it came to the purchase and supply of equipment for the armed forces. Once things start getting political and people staking their reputations on a rifle it becomes much harder to get criticism of it accepted and changes made. Best I can come up with off the top of my head is the Mounties turn it down and go back to their Lee-Metfords, the testing process happens and turns up a number of faults, Hughes tries to quietly bury the report but then a copy gets leaked to a newspaper and suddenly it becomes "results from the preliminary test", "well of course a few minor adjustments have to be made" and "never expected it to be perfect on the very first development batch" etc.
Well previous post gave a PoD on introducing a reliable version of the wapon and then petered out.
This thread is to share thoughts on how a reliable Ross Rifle would affect the grand scheme of things.
Ah, I see.
To be honest not much. Even a totally reliable, (by which I mean as reliable as any of the rifles used on the battlefield of WW1), Ross doesn't offer any real advantage over the SMLE. In fact it's still not as good a weapon as it's longer, heavier and has a smaller magazine capacity.
The only real change I can see a reliable Ross Rifle causing is giving Canada a nice little small arms industry in the early 20th Century. I don't doubt someone would buy the things for their army and that might give the Canadians an incentive to develop and use more home grown weapons, like say the Huot.