I suppose you could say there was an element of "luck" and wonder what would have happened had Colt never gone aboard a ship, but it was still Colt's genius that allowed an existing technology to be adapted to solve or overcome an existing deficiency in firearms designs.
There is another way of looking at the right place/right time equation. Someone conceptualized the workings of the ship. Where did their idea originate? At some point the idea had to have come from something observed in the natural world and available to virtually everybody to observe and use as creative fodder. In a sense the world offers what the mind is prepared to find. (Like when you buy a new car and suddenly that kind of car seems to be everywhere because now your mind is attuned to seeing it). So the possibility is that some other observation would have led Colt to the same end solution or maybe a different solution once he was geared to “see” it.