Could a society advance to steam technology before discovering gunpowder?

Not any major empire before the industrial revolution that's for fucking sure.

I remember hearing at one point that someone invented the treadmill crane some centuries before it came into major use but the empire he was in refused to use it because of how many construction workers it would have put out of a job, and hence make them quite upset at the inventer.

It'd be very odd because steam requires researching fuels

Hero's Steam Machine doesn't fucking work, it was a novelty toy that couldn't apply noticeable force.

So was the first nuclear reactor.

I doubt that, considering the proof of concept pile was used by Russia to produce energy in a place called Chernobyl

It's completely doable. There's Hero's steam toy, and the Romans had something that could've fit the bill with a couple more things. Here's the thing, for a technology to take off it has to be needed. Gunpowder fits the bill better than steam engines because cannon, lolz.

If you're in a society with a shortage of labor, such as a massive empire that has a distinct need for land transportation and a shortage of manpower, perhaps after a massive plague, then yeah, steam power will find its niche. Otherwise, there's no real need for steam engines for transportation, and without a need to replace manpower, no need for steam engines for doing so.

>russiana invented nukes
U wot?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

Part of the issue was that metallurgy at the time was shit so you couldn't make high-pressure vessels to make an actually useful engine. Gunpowder is easier to make by just combining found ingredients.

I just like air rifles.

Pretty, pretty air rifles.

Gunpowder doesn't work for whatever reason

Might be easier to say that a society discovered gunpowder then the government did not allow it to be used for military purposes, that's what happened in China.

Fireworks, yes; guns, no.

Societies develop in directions said society thinks is important. The problem is less with your steam engines and more with your airships. Societies focus on peaceful applications more in times of peace. Peace is assured by the society being relatively self-sufficient within its well-defended borders.

Airships are a means of travel, expansion, and with it the chance of encountering other societies that are hostile to those represented by the airship. Even if both societies are ostensibly one, the distance and difficult terrain that would require an airship would also give rise to colonial uprisings as the "central authority" grows out of touch with the distant colonies. "Gunpowder" might not exist, but guns and most of what you are trying to avoid by saying gunpowder was never "discovered" will still exist. There will still be anti-aircraft measures, perhaps not as effective as canons, but in a society where such things thus considered more important they will likely develop improvements to what they do have.

Sure, just have them use pneumatic guns. Worked so well for the Austrians that it triggered the fuck out of Napoleon. The need for stronger metals to contain ever increasing pressures can be applied to pressurizing steam as well.

Just look at china.
They got fireworks for 1000 years and never developed any canons.
The did eventually make firework missiles.
But no guns.

honestly, I can't fathom how gunpowder came BEFORE steam power.

All it would take is one person to notice:
>Hey the pot lid moved all on its own when the water boils. I wonder if I can recreate this only moving larger things

Gunpowder took mixing so many refined chemicals and even then it took until someone noticed "
>Hey I can shoot things like arrows with this if I put the black powder in an enclosed tube!

Wouldn't it be possible that the materials used to make gunpowder just didn't exist in nature? Or at least not in enough quantities to be practical?

My point steam power is quite simple at it's core.
Simpler than getting the idea of putting a bomb near you.

The fucking greeks did it.
Introduce any society where slavery isn't what drives the economy. And that supports innovation.

Well, the Greeks developed a proto steam-engine, hydraulics, and gear teeth without powder, so..

Thats actually the basis for this empire in a story I am writing. They advance though sublime and unintended means. They got rid of slavery to increase their population body, thus gaining more soldiers. As a result they developed industrial machines to double production before any other nation abolished slavery.

is this one?

>Wouldn't it be possible that the materials used to make gunpowder just didn't exist in nature? Or at least not in enough quantities to be practical?
Nope. Humans and animals shit/piss one, especially birdshit and human urine. Charcoal/coke is a basic requirement for the type of metallurgy required to get a pressure vessel, and has been independently developed by most societies since the Neolithic. And sulfur is retarded easy to come across anywhere there's vulcanism.

No, that's a revolving proto-Flintlock. you can see the pan covers on the outside of the cylinder. Airguns distinctively don't have an arm or hammer on the lock, and most are actually closer to a crossbow nut than a traditional "gunlock".

sheeit sorry

>Gunpowder is easier to make by just combining found ingredients.

You just have to find the ingredients. China discovered it and spread it all over the world- no other society developed it independently despite people having messed around with flammable stuff and charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur having existed throughout all of human history.

It's actually a lot stranger that our timeline discovered gunpowder before steam. Metallurgy advances naturally from the first time some caveman gets copper out of a rock, because you always want better materials for your crap. Steam should have been pretty easy to "Eureka!" but it took ages for some reason. We only discovered gunpowder because the ancient Chinese were literally retarded, and tried every possible thing to make an elixir of life.

An argument might be made that any human culture is going to put a lot of time and energy into figuring out how to avoid death, but I'm going to dismiss those arguments out of hand because they would prove me wrong.

The answer to avoiding having guns in a steam tech era is to simply make guns non viable.

Maybe the main cities of the setting that have developed steam tech have a thick miasma esque rain that invalidates outdoor combat that isn't within ten feet. Maybe the setting has magical trinkets that serve the comparable purpose of giving the untrained soldier a powerful killing tool.

A inaccurate metal ball isn't very powerful when you can just have a mage transform your soldier into a giant wolf as fast as a horse with hide as thick as steel.

>We only discovered gunpowder because the ancient Chinese were literally retarded, and tried every possible thing to make an elixir of life.
Honestly, considering some of the shit alchemists found in search of the exact same thing (and also a magic rock that would make gold), we would have gotten it eventually. In fact, there's some question as to whether the Europeans didn't independently invent or discover gunpowder or one of the sub-mixtures involved a couple decades before the news about it hit us from China. The problem is, it's damned hard to decode alchemical manuscripts. And we definitely found some useful fulminates (which would eventually become the primers in caplocks and cartridges) independently - one of the early alchemist's manuals actually uses a recipe for a quart of Mercury fulminate as a trap. The last instruction is to "pound it vigorously".

No worries, it's easy to lose yourself in all the detail on those early guns. Lethal airguns were also usually limited-production items; the Austrians were the only ones who adopted them on any large scale (and gave them up after a few years because of the logistical issues). There's not a lot of data on them to find, nor many examples in collections.

>want to make technology for life
>make ultimate weapon instead
typical

>Honestly, considering some of the shit alchemists found in search of the exact same thing (and also a magic rock that would make gold), we would have gotten it eventually.
Look up Berthold Schwarz on wikipedia.

neat

>It'd be very odd because steam requires researching fuels

"How do I burn things" isn't that advanced. Even the Romans mastered that bit of technology after all.

>Here's the thing, for a technology to take off it has to be needed.

Also the business model has to make switching a no-brainer.

>Might be easier to say that a society discovered gunpowder then the government did not allow it to be used for military purposes, that's what happened in China.

This is some dumb shit that has nothing to do with anything that happened IRL.

>Chernobyl was a proof of concept nuclear reactor
The fuck? You're five kinds of retarded.

The steam engine has been re-invented several times over, not just by Hero of Alexandria. A combination of several factors worked against the widespread use of steam power up until the likes of Boulton and Watt and Trevithick got in on the idea:

manual labour was adequate for societies needs until the point mining operations needed to be able to go deeper and deal with flooding issues that manpower alone couldn't solve

metallurgy wasn't advanced enough to reliably and cheaply construct vessels capable of withstanding the high pressures needed

Scientific method and the printing press were required to allow the dissemination of ideas necessary for knowledge of steam tech to become widely known.

> Not just having slave soldiers.

Way easier bro.

Doesn't this argue that it's actually harder to discover gunpowder, and that China just kind of got it by a fluke?

If it was easy, then it would have been found in multiple places in various stages.

IKR? The oldest written evidence of Gunpowder in China that we have dictates its use as weapons.

Slave armies don't actually work in real life.

>IKR? The oldest written evidence of Gunpowder in China that we have dictates its use as weapons.

...and yet the dude claims that the Chinese went NO GUNZ EVER, which was something that didn't happen. Nobody ever gave up on guns once they had them, not even the Japanese.

>Slave armies don't actually work in real life.

Tell that to the Spaniards who used plenty of armed slaves in their conquest of Mexico and South America, to the Ottomans, Iranians and pretty much every other islamic dynasty that had access to the Black Sea slave trade.

>one of the early alchemist's manuals actually uses a recipe for a quart of Mercury fulminate as a trap. The last instruction is to "pound it vigorously".

How did that work out for the Ottomans again?

As I recall the Janissaries figured out how important they were, revolted and had to be wiped out.

It illustrates how the history of technology isn't a linear progression of improving tech. Ideas pop up here and there throughout history, and the "good" ideas (defining "good" as we do, meaning, "the things we have now") only flourish and spread with the right combination of need, availability, and cost. It still took centuries of fiddling for various unknown Chinese developers to conceive of and create gunpowder weapons; it's only in hindsight that we conflate all that time and effort into a narrative like, "they invented gunpowder, and so then they made rockets and grenades and guns."

When the Industrial Revolution happened, it wasn't just because steam engines appeared, therefore Age of Steam. Entire technologies and industries had to be around at about the same time, in order to enhance one another.

The tricky part is figuring out that air is made of stuff, and that when you heat it you increase the. pressure of that stuff.

>he doesn't know that your lungs only exist to push out the poison miasma that would unbalance your humors

Maybe but there is a issue with that. The metallurgy that was needed to make steam engines was in part a by product of trying to improve cannon production. What would be the other thing to take its place in the drive to improve metallurgy? Steam can not be that thing because there is a minimum need level of quality in volume based metalworking before steam becomes useful.

Maybe building bridges?

And the Spanish weren't using "slave armies" in Mesoamerica; they were rival kingdoms and cities that allied with the Spaniards to fuck over the dominant empires in their regions.

>How did that work out for the Ottomans again?

They lasted longer than the USA has existed and they conquered parts of the world that had actual civilizations full of people who didn't die three months after you touched them.

So pretty well I'd say.

>And the Spanish weren't using "slave armies" in Mesoamerica;

user, the Spaniards had their African slaves fight alongside their masters all the fucking time. They weren't English, they treated them as yet another type of dependant rather than delorable Untermenschs. They even sent them off to do some more conquering on their own - we got documentations of slave units up to two hundred men strong. Cotez, in comparions, marched on the Aztec Empire with 500 men.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

I dunno user. There's practically zero historical precedent. Maybe you should google 'early steam power' to be sure? Please understand sarcasm.

2 ingredients can do it 100 parts saltpeter to 24 charcoal: good enough for a firelance or after basically running the place for how many generations?