Is the discovery of gunpowder a logical consequence or could even an advanced civilization (like 17th century...

The formula for gunpowder is relatively simple. Smokeless powder also isn't very complex if you know chemistry, for that matter.

So like other people have said you'd have to have people pitifully ignorant of sciences not to figure it out.

I imagine it'd turn up eventually, by sheer force of luck, curiosity and imagination. The very moment somebody discovers that you can mix stuff together to get new stuff, somebody will wonder what happens if you mix this and that. And what happens if you heat it up/light it on fire, because that's the second instinct most people have once they discover something.
In fact, I'm willing to bet that quite a lot of people discovered gunpowder, but most of them decided "Well, that shit stinks and just made a lot of smoke and noise, it's bloody useless", until somebody had the idea to apply it for something.

There is the possibility that the necessary materials for explosives just aren't around, I guess. Namely Sulfur, I'd say. The problem is that that shit is abundant on Earth, so you might need to come up for a reason as to why it's just not available in the setting.

>only china discovered gunpowder, and only by accident
>no other country ever discovered gunpowder
>europe only got into gunpowder after being introduced to it by traders
they might eventually discover it, but it is entirely possible to miss out on its discovery for a very long time
its hard to imagine where we might have went without it, since it has been a huge part of history since the renaissance, but it certainly isnt a stretch to imagine a world without gunpowder

Basically this. But also, even if you never get actual gunpowder, you're still going to converge on some weapon that's gun-like. The basic formula of [pressure + tube + pellet = shooty thing] is possible (and fairly obvious) as soon as you have a way to reliably create pressure. That pressure source doesn't have to be gunpowder, it can be another chemical reactant, pre-compressed gas, etc.

>17th century people couldn't discover gunpowder
Historians found references to gunpowder from 142 AD, and other incendiary mixtures were around long before.

Also people were making gunpowder weapons long before the 1600s.

>inb4 gunpowder=muskets

A teenager that doesn't understand that in order to build a functioning spaceship you need to first be able to engineer very large pressure vessels and airlocks as well as to be able to maintain a breathable atmosphere for weeks at a time as well as sufficiently good structural engineering that you can build ships capable of supporting their own weight when landed. These things require an equivalent to an 1800s level of technology at least.

Even if they had a different path of technological development they would still need to develop those capabilities.

A setting where Hell is a very real place and it's very dangerous, and it's the only place to find sulfur, so if you want gunpowder you literally have to wade into hell.

What if the ancient chinese had invented nitrocellulose instead?

Which is why only demonic forces can field firearms in large numbers, due to their easy access to sulfur.

Hell, we had mostly functional lethal air rifles by the 1700s.

Fact is, launching kinetic projectiles is always going to be an idea people have because it's the easiest way to damage folk at range. Once you have dissemination of ideas and large scale industry/learning you're going to start getting stuff that will at the very least behave like guns.

youtube.com/watch?v=2dZLeEUE940
Completely functional, actually.

Functional as in functional logistically. They could make them and they could kill people, but they were expensive and delicate to the point where they only gave them to a few specially selected soldiers.

Of course, if they were standing alone without firearms to switch to, those problems would be addressed and probably overcome pretty quickly.

Could you skip gunpowder and jump straight to smokeless powder?

>Implying gunpowder technology isn't being suppressed by the big air gun manufacturers

Yes.

Yes, they're completely unrelated chemically.

The three 'bases' to smokeless powder are nitrocellulose, nitroglycerine, and nitroguanidine.

All of which basically involve exposing material to nitric acid. It is definitely not trivial to discover and refine the use of nitric acid, and you also need other chemicals like sulfuric acid to make it all work. Nitrocellulose is also the material most early film was made out of- early film canisters were basically bombs and had to be treated as such.

Now, there is a legitimate question as to whether these, once discovered, would actually have been used as they are, in self contained cases to send projectiles through a rifled barrel, if black powder had not already established those technologies. I can see an argument that their use as explosives, which is almost inevitable to see, would occur without them actually being viewed seriously as propellants. Which could lead to much greater usage of spring propelled explosive launchers, like the PIAT: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIAT

It would be a very different style of war, that's for sure- you couldn't very well have pike formations once the infantrymen can carry bombs, but you still wouldn't have any ranged weapons better than crossbows otherwise.

The same could largely be said of black powder. So now it's basically up to chance circumstance whether it occurs to someone to use it as propellant. In the same way it took a little bit for people to figure it out with black powder.

It would be interesting to see how far they get before realizing that though.

Maybe far enough to start using rockets instead? Gyrojets for everyone. Maybe repeating crossbows with gyrojet type rounds, to counteract the slow initial acceleration?

That's the funny thing about these hypotheticals. If you wait long enough without discovering tab A can be tucked into slot B, a completely different technology will be discovered to reach the same end.

And it's worth remembering that batteries, magnets, electrical wire and therefore motors have all been theoretically possible to discover and assemble since early civilization- we just, well, didn't do it. It's not that farfetched to think of technologies that are absolutely ubiquitous having been neglected in the same way.

The argument in that clip is so ridiculously reductionistic. China had glass by 200Bc and glasses as such were only invented in europe around 1300AD.

But saltpeter is only found in Heaven.