Imagine a low fantasy setting. No magic

Winged Hussars were still a thing during world war 1 so i imagine without the threat of gunpowder cavalry would still be a big threat on the battlefield.

Forgot to metion that elephants, if they exist, would be the supreme weapon on the battlefield, as they were until cannons.

Gas / steam guns
magnetic guns
rockets
i dont think much will change. armies would be less numerous and more professional as weapons would probably be too complex and expansive to just give peasants rifles and let them go to war

The lack of explosive powder holds us back on mining and construction a lot. Obviously it nixes mortars and bombards too. But we'll probably figure out a way to fill shells with greek fire or burning pitch or other shit. White phosphorous maybe.

Well it will mean the professional warrior class will remain in charge at least, which will nix modern republicanism. We'll see more Oligarchies, Feudal societies, and Militant Republics (Service Guarantees Citizenship!)

Horses are cowardly animals. You have to train them a lot to have any notion of bravery.

>rockets
No black powder remember?

Though we may eventually develop chemical explosives not derived from gunpowder

fuck off Lindy

Please, Elephants have been a meme since the Punic wars. Rome QUICKLY figured out ways to dunk all over elephant cavalry.

armor would still be a big deal. two handed armor piercing weapons would dominate the battlefield. crossbows would become the standard ranged weapon probably. That or all warfare will be based on the work of Joerg Sprave.

Naw not really
Elephants were more a shock thing, effective ways of countering them were deiced in early antiquity, and they're temperamental animals

Which is why they were bred so, and valued as much as they were
Heavy cavalry charging infantry didn't even go out of date so long ago though

It wouldn't develop.
Gunpowder was a lynch pin in multiple industries before heavy machinery and modern chemistry and two of its ingredients are also fertilizer/used in leatherworking. If you simply make these unavailable, you've just raped agriculture and mining to the point civilization as we know it would never have existed.

If the materials exist but they dont bond to make gun powder, that'd mean chemistry doesnt work, which means you get no alloy metals, you get no forged metals at all because they'd remain too soft to use for anything, Im going to assume you see where I'm going with this.

>No black powder remember?
oil and benzin are still allowed
I know, I'm a faggot

>you've just raped agriculture and mining to the point civilization as we know it would never have existed.

That's hardly true. Just because gunpowder doesn't become fissible doesn't mean nitre loses it's qualities for leatherwork and farming. You are totally right about industry and mining though, we would never progress very far beyond the Iron age

>If the materials exist but they dont bond to make gun powder, that'd mean chemistry doesnt work

This is just a little too pedantic for Op's obviously flimsy set up, suspension of disbelief my friend.

Op says no magic, that's not true. Obviously the only magic is all tied up in 'gunpowder don't work'. THAT is the fantasy element.

No thats fine, I theorized cannon shells filled with similar material Any rockets would have to be hueg or fired by air compression though.

It isn't pedantic, if chemistry doesn't work for one thing, that'd mean chemistry doesn't work at all mate. The way chemistry works, is basically that it applies the same everywhere.

Also the first point you attacked, you kind of didn't read at all. I said if he made the materials unavailable, i.e. there is no nitre to use for farming (because it doesn't exist because op is scared of firearms)

He didn't say they were unavailable, just that they didn't work for gunpowder because reasons

>if chemistry doesn't work for one thing, that'd mean chemistry doesn't work at all mate
Magic. The same thing is true of physics, but we don't bitch about that.

The awful truth is ops world is actually HIGH magic, high fantasy. It's just bound up in fucking with chemistry and physics. That's the way I can accept the premise.

>The awful truth is ops world is actually HIGH magic, high fantasy
This. You need God actively intervening to stop gunpowder working while keeping rest the same.

Your premise is shit, OP. And he have those threads at least once per week. It's tiresome at this point. Kindly - fuck off

>Magic
Wasn't the setting devoid of magic?

That is actually a very interesting ides. Why has God intervened personally in order to stop gunpowder form happening?

A personal hypothesis: God´s main objective is to allow humanity to progress to a higher state of existence and reunite with the perfection that himself embodies. He is just blocking a path that could slow or derail the process.

I wish i could enjoy such a poorly thought out excuse for a setting. I honestly do.

Alas, I can't. I can understand why it'd be desired for some(no accounting for shit taste though.) But such a flimsy reasoning that amounts to an autist dm that hates guns and explosives having to say 'god stepped off his pearly throne to say fuck gunpowder' just to masturbate over castles and knights, rather than AT LEAST put effort into his fantastical masturbation.

OP said it was devoid of magic, yes. Which would imply what i'd said here, was true.

OP only said it's impossible to create gunpowder, he didn't say it wasn't impossible to create Nitroglycerin. Also, machinery would have to do more.

You would get a pulp scifi story in which everyone uses some kind of ray gun or not!Gunpowder, think pic related.

Op here. I forgot something.

>Would we still invent guns, cannons or something similar?

RADIUM MUH NIGGA

Read "There will be dragons" Future society has stagnated and become lotus eaters due to nano-tech doing everything. Then the ruling council has a civil war and takes away all the power being generated, dropping everyone down to the iron age. Here, the main AI in charge of making sure the world doesn't blow up takes away all kinetic energy generated above a certain threshold. Gunpowder explosions end before they can effect anything, but forges still work.

My setting is a post technological medieval setting where humanity forgot what gunpowder was and now they're stuck in technological stagnation since many problems are already solved by certain remains of ancient technology.
So they're stuck with dart guns, intricate arbalests and short blades, since the wide majority of combats happen in close quarters.

>How would war and the military develop instead?
Crossbows and ballistae and melee would probably stick around for a bit longer, until some weapon developer made more breakthroughs in what we would consider to be unorthodox fields. Air rifles, chemical weapons, war engines, etc.

Yes.

Absolutely yes.

/thread

If it's just black powder specifically that doesn't work then sure, sooner or later someone would figure out a different, suitably exciting chemical to do the same thing. All you need is something that reacts rapidly, creating some heat and a lot of gas, and a reliable way to make it start reacting when you want it to.

Modern day smokeless gun powder for example is chemically completely different from black powder.

If nothing of the sort works then there's still air guns, which saw some military use in the late 18th and early 19th century.

So it's SM Stirling's Change.

Pike and shit with xbows is obvious.

Eventually (with better metallurgy) hydraulically pumped siege engines for artillery - imagine steel-leaved ballistae firing clusters of steel rebar darts. That will punch through any plate harness.

Concrete also makes building castles easier and faster...and a lot bigger.

Overall, the defensive side of war gains most, then artillery.

>Warfare is dominated by pike formations with crossbows (akin to a Tercio) heavy cavalry with long spears (see hussars) and probably classical mongol archer cavalry.
>Actually i would say that sufficiently advanced crossbows would do the same effect that early gunpowder.

This is correct, actually. 16th century Sweden, for instance, fielded extremely missile-troop heavy armies. Not because it was effective, mind you, but because they couldn't convince their levies to bring pikes in sufficient numbers.

Then everything changed when Gustav II came around.

And by missile troops I mean it was (generally -
it differed from company to company) split pretty evenly between arquebus' and crossbows early on.

A tiny fraction only brought melee weapons.

When we fight, we first use bullets;
When the bullets are gone we use bayonets;
When the bayonets are dull, we use the rifle barrel;
When this is broken, we use our fists;
When our fists are broken, we bite.

knights countered archers, whether on horses or otherwise, unless the horse archers have been trained in the ancient techniques of stutter-stepping

source: Age of Empires 2

Railguns

> It's another "Dies the Fire wat do?" Episode.

The rules will get more and more asinine as the thread goes on.

What's the fantasy part?

You mean longbows user, the beginning of long bows was the ending of knights.

Chemical explosives can't exist for inexplicable reasons, yet the basic chemistry that allows life to exist is somehow the same.

Okay, but how is it fantasy? I can't answer your question unless I know what exists in your world that doesn't exist in ours.

>That's an interesting idea, but it's not plausible in the slightest
It's impossible to make gunpowder.

It's fantasy because that premise is itself so fantastic that it requires the continuous intervention of God.

We would use liquid propellant.

>And it is impossible to create gunpowder
There is no life because without the ability to make gunpowder, biological life is incapable of evolving in the first place or growing beyond that point.

Air rifles.
Next?

What if it was impossible to make an internal combustion engine?

It really wasn't patay illustrated that knights could stomp the shit out of longbowmen even when badly outnumbered.

>No magic
>Impossible to create gunpowder

Mutually exclusive. Either there is a very trace amount of magic that affects the development of gun powder or the technology used in gun powder works.

This is why low fantasy is shit.

Wars and killing existed long before gunpowder mate. We didn't just randomly start killing each other once guns and cannons came about.

Pikes.
And now the Swiss and the Scots battle for world domination, congratulation

the earliest air rifles were filled with HANDPUMPS.

We would have invented something like gunpowder, but with different ingredients

elephants would get spooked mid-charge and instead of trampling enemies they whip around and trample their guys trying to get away