[lukan]

My physic courses have been a while, but I would argue with "F = ma" alone, you won't get far, when you want to build high pressure machines and model them before. You do need calculus for that. And quite a bit more I would think.

[Jensson]

F = ma leads to calculus was my point, and that is the starting point if you want to think about pressure etc. Once you have F = ma the rest of physics happened pretty fast, getting to F = ma took millennia, getting from there to exploring most of classical physics took a century.

I got a degree in engineering physics, I have a fairly good idea what kind of physics and math is used for machines and structures. Without the concept of force that Newton invented basically all useful calculations are beyond you, so all machines before then were made via rules of thumb as the math wasn't useful. But when you have the concept of force many of the easy things like how to calculate structural integrity or treating pressure as a field of force isn't that far away.

Then you can start designing machines where you know the components will hold without testing, since you have done the calculations. That is what enables complex machines with many parts.