what would a world without gunpowder actually existing look like? let's say their "high middle ages" was 500 years ago. would armour develop more than when it was at its peak? what would castles look like?
would cars transport knights in shining armour to battle? would cars ramming people be the dominant form of warfare?
there are explosives which one can use in place of gunpowder, presumably one of them would have been used more widely instead, guns may have been less effective as a result but I can't imagine it's by enough to cause major historical changes
this.
What sort of explosives? How would the development of guns adapt to it?
It would work the same as it did IRL, only later/slower in initial phase.
Nitration is perfectly possible to conduct with your late medieval "chemistry" knowledge, the tricky part is the right proportion of things. In fact this would make guns much more dangerous, as it's not sensitive to moisture and it's smokeless once fired, so you could remain hidden after firing (which is impossible with black powder)
Also you could have something like a chainsaw in its a handheld gas engine and it somehow converts that torque into launching metal beads. Basically a gun with a pull start. Bottom line is..you'll end up with guns.
Steam guns
Stuff like the girandoni air rifle would show up eventually, and without any viable alternative such technology would advance more. IRL, a CO2 powered rifle can potentially reach the same power as the lower-end of practical firearms and even basic compressed air guns can reach lethal velocities (Although they're still less powerful than things like .22 firearms). Compressed gas power would end up being king. Artillery and fixed position guns probably would be steam powered.
>what would castles look like?
Like they did before gunpowder
Barring parallel development of not-gunpowder cellulose stuff, electrical crossbows, rockets, atomic energy, chemical weapons, biological stuff, etc. Projectile weapons have always been a thing and you can make them more powerful without needing gunpowder, for siege applications there are plenty of high order explosives that aren't derived from knowlege of gunpowder.
The problem with that is whether even high powered air rifles could punch through the kind of armour that would be developed before CO2 containers.
Like real firearms, they'd have to start big and work down. You start with some kind of compressed air cannon and eventually miniaturize it. It probably would take longer to actually develop that way, but with pressure vessels and gasses being more important, there would be more effort towards developing them.
Probably the English Longbow model would get more traction, the main issue with it was that it required a relatively stable nation (an island nation with few neighbours definitely helps with that) as well as the fact it relies heavily on yew wood (though I have a feeling that over time alternative methods could be found).
Real firearms though have significantly better and easier to work with propellant, the primary thing of course being the fact that gun powder can easily be put in a small, self contained cartridge and actually work better than loading a loose bullet down a barrel with powder in it and then adding a separate percussion cap, there's no real way you can do that with compressed air.
Except the crossbow is better.
The famous Spanish Tercio evolved from units of pikemen, crossbowmen, and swordsmen. In our history the crossbowmen were replaced by arquebusiers and later a mix of arquebusiers and musketeers, while the swordsmen were ditched in favour of moar pike. Without gunpowder, probably just get a world stuck at the crossbow and pike formation stage, possibly keeping the swordsmen.
This thing holds 20 balls and its internal air reservoir has enough pressure for 30 shots at useful pressure.
It was built in the late 1700s and used by the Austrian army and some other groups and individuals. The reason it didn't continue to see work and improvements was mostly the logistics of pressure vessels.
Oh, and its air reservoir is actually the butt of the rifle, which is replaceable, and austrian soldiers had 3 of in their standard kit, all fully charged.
Probably blue and green, from far enough away.
This woman looks like she's stabbing the knight through his visor with her flower. Does she have a blade hidden in it? Is she the best assassin?
Has /k/ been by to tell us that life as we know it wouldn't work without gunpowder and that gunpowder is the most important invention in history and that gunpowder revolutionized mining and manufacturing and that gunpowder is made of basic fundamental elements and that if gunpowder doesn't work than all of chemistry doesn't work and terrestrial life falls apart? And that basically, a world without gunpowder is dumb and you're dumb and man has been using gunpowder since the dawn of time?
Gunpowder.
>Does she have a blade hidden in it
It's not a blade, it's a thorn, obviously.
Poison I guess. Smell this flower, you die.
She totally looks like an assassin.
the english longbow was fucking garbage tho, mongols had better and smaller compound bows
>N-NANI
That wasn't the picture I intended to send. Please ignore it.
no
There's no shortage of explosive compounds if you have a chemistry advanced enough.
Say, an alchemist lets cotton fall into nitric acid by accident, and then sees that the result is very good for kindling. More experimentation follows, and eventually the alchemists stumbles into the proper proportions to make the treated cotton very explosive.
Then fire weapons are a thing once again, without gunpowder being involved at all.
...
nej
How do you set up a setting such that heavy, dedicated melee weapons (polearms, warhammers, swords, etc) remain tactically relevant primary weapons for many soldiers even as ranged weapons become more advanced?
Her smug smile, the knight's realization that something is wrong, the background guard's shock... yes, she does.
>The "flower girls"
>In the Velian republics, this name is an euphemism for, not ladies of the knight as foreigners often guess, but contract killers. The flower girl gang itself is said to be a myth, but it still inspires enough fear, even now, that its name has made its way in criminal (and political) slang.
>It is said that the flower girl order was founded by an humble gardener who just so happened to be a very patient spy and assassin. She was so taken by her cover, however, that she started weaponizing it, growing special varieties of roses for her masters to admire.
>She came to be loved and respected in the palace for which she had worked for years.
>Until one day, her master decided it was time.
>She then presented a new variety of flower to her masters, who were so smitten by it they asked her to fill their bedroom with its beautiful blooms.
>Of course, that particular variety had been grown to be a perfect and subtle poison.
>Both its torns and its perfume were able to drive any living being to death in a matter of a few hours. The rose itself deteriorated fast, making it impossible to pinpoint it as the source of the poisonings.
>And so the gardener slowly poisoned all of her masters, until only their young heir remained, and he was taken under the wing of a kindly uncle, one who had been particularly admirative of the gardener's work...
>But as soon as that happened, she had disappeared, knowing her employer would see her as a final loose end.
>During the following decades, from time to time, an orphan girl would disappear from the streets, and reappear a bit later as a flower girl, distributing her smiles and roses to the nobles visiting the city.
Inhuman physiology of world inhabitants. If people do not die to a couple of punctures, and you actually need to deal serious amount of damage to the body to stop your opponent, weapons like arrows won't be that effective. Same goes for some dedicated armor piercing weapons like rondel daggers or war picks.
>Hurrr durr I do not understand battlefield doctrine.
A Welsh longbow was used to fire a massive arrow like a mini siege engine in huge volleys.
The Mongol bow was used at smaller ranges in much less numbers.
And it was shit. The air canisters vented unintentionally, took another man to pump them so the shooter can focus on firing the weapon and in most cases it fails to land a fatal hits at a proper range, due to the rather lightweight projectile, quick loss of kinetic energy and sometimes just not enough pressure. Meaning it had to be close and given that it was issued to light infantry it gave a below average performance on the field.
It was a good concept, but at execution it faltered. still if you are gonna use it for a fantasy setting, knock yourself out.
Good shooting small game though.
The point is that they had self-contained, replaceable air flask powered guns in real life. In a setting where gunpowder cannot be made for some reason, that technology is less and less likely to fall by the wayside. A low powered air gun is better than no gun at all, and will eventually lead into better designs for lack of alternatives.
Though it probably won't go into mass production as hard as gunpowder weapons did. At least not for a long time. High-powered designs probably will stay costly and rare for a pretty long time, until ways to cheapen their production would be found. Industrialisation should do the trick but before that hard to say.
I would imagine that material sciences would have intensified their research into leverage / elasticity ranged weapons, like longbows and crossbows, and perfected them for military use, which could probably have been quite formidable.
I mean, with our current understanding of materials and power-stroke and such, a modern hunting crossbow can be hand-loaded and still impart roughly the same kinetic energy as a 6-700 pound, winch-cranked 14th century military crossbow, with far superior range and precision.
That's some shit right there.
If we WANTED to build military-grade crossbows for piercing metal armor with the tech we have now, I'm sure we could.
>The Mongol bow was used at smaller ranges in much less numbers.
>Smaller range
Probably true, although like you said that's due to doctrinal difference.
> Less number
In concentrated volley aimed at certain area/enemy unit, maybe.
Mongol had proportionally much more archers (almost 100%), so instead of concentrated arrow volleys launched by some specific units in an army, entire battlefield would be covered by Mongol arrows, figuratively speaking.