How do I justify musket warfare in a scifi setting (complete with space travel and even rare nanomachines)? I'm talking muskets, cannons, early mortars, early rocket artillery, cavalry, etc (Napoleonic warfare, basically).
I'm thinking the ships-of-the-line will be replaced by some kind of pseudo-realistic airship that can travel through space somehow (pulling an early pulp scifi "you can totally breathe in space like normal" setting) but move painfully slowly in atmo so as to keep line battles viable. Maybe the muskets are like slow-charging versions of Eve Online's hybrid turrets that, while inaccurate, are the only things that can penetrate some advanced personal shielding people use? Maybe throw in plasma-edged bayonets as well. I don't know how to make anything else fit, though (like a way to replicate early rocket artillery).
Anybody have any neat ideas?
SciFi Musketry
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Pic related is what I'm thinking for the space ships/slow moving air ships. Handwavium materials abound. I'm thinking maybe they could travel along currents that lead from planet to planet (like Space 1889).
I'm not familiar with Spelljammer, but it looks like it might have some stuff I might want to steal.
Technology develops in different ways. I mean think what would happen to our own world if we went one way or another with advancements.
Just make it so that repeaters and automatics were never thought of or explored in warfare.
>How do I justify musket warfare in a scifi setting
You really can't. For one loose gunpowder wouldn't work in space without oxygen, two there'd be absolutely no reason to use muskets over modern firearms
>are the only things that can penetrate some advanced personal shielding people use?
If you could achieve that with a musketball, you could achieve it with a modern cartridge.
If you want a reason why people use muskets in space, you basically have to ignore all logic and make it a magical sci-fi setting or whatever to explain away why people are using such inferior technology.
For Napoleonic warfare to occur several things are necessary.
1. A lack of significant useful cover (perhaps due to surveillance ships?) this discourages using guerilla tactics.
2. Honor cultures, they value discipline, chivalry, and pride more than life and are willing to commit to massed lines.
3.Multiple warring states so that war is constant and people are desensitized to death.
For the sci-fi elements to stick you need a few more things.
1. Fantastic personal shielding that only slow charging weapons (Laser muskets) can punch through.
2. Nobility & Treaties, these give you a reason not to use advanced missiles. The nobles of your world, and by extension, their dwellings, should be protected by strict, Geneva convention style, rules of engagement to prevent mutually assured destruction, thus the use of early rocketry, just enough to damage a ship or kill soldiers, but not enough to nuke cities.
That work?
The muskets are like Mass Effect one guns in that they dont need to reload, only to cool down. This makes them incredibly useful in conflicts where troops may be away from supply lines out in deep space. While other types may be more effective they're maintenance hogs, so the relatively simple musket type the average soldier can fix and never needs to restock is preferable.
You could also make them adjustable phaser style weapons, with settings all the way from boarding actions where you dont want to damage a ship to punching through personal sheilding, with an increasing cooldown time as it gets more powerful.
I didn't say anything about gunpowder. Something like Eve Online's "hybrid" weaponry ("blasters," specifically) is what I'm thinking. Basically, it's a projectile propelled by charged energy.
"Hybrid ammunition consists of a metal round that contains an ionized plasma of some description - iron, uranium, tungsten, even antimatter. Blasters work by extracting the plasma from the hybrid round, holding it in a cyclotron, and firing it at the enemy. The plasma dissipates quickly, but does significant damage on impact. In game terms, this translates to blasters being very damaging weapons with a very short range."
I figure they would take 15 to 20 seconds to charge a capacitor between shots and the scifi unobtanium or mythril or whatever the barrel would be made of would have to be pretty solid to handle the stresses, thus necessitating muzzle loading instead of allowing the weakpoints of beach loading (not too dissimilar to the reasons why muzzle loading weapons were used in the real world).
The "honorable combat" angle is something to think about along with some kind of "space Geneva convention" that mandates things, thanks.
Treasure planet. Or have an explicit 18th century aesthetic.
At some point, a sufficiently appealing aesthetic will allow "just because" to be a suitable justification.
There is nothing wrong with having a suitable amount of handwavium to things.
just play steampunk like the disgusting nerd you are
That sounds horribly ineffective and makes you wonder why they don't just use railguns instead.
>thus necessitating muzzle loading instead of allowing the weakpoints of beach loading (not too dissimilar to the reasons why muzzle loading weapons were used in the real world)
Nigga you wut? Muzzle loaders are significantly less suitable to handle higher pressures than pretty much every rifle that came after it, hell, using modern smokeless powder in a muzzleloader could cause it to destroy itself after a single shot.
This
Hell, if you just wave it off with "that's just the aesthetic" people will just shrug and accept it, if you try to come up with logic for it people will just keep asking questions that can't be answered because the logic is fundamentally flawed and it'll just confuse the players because it makes no sense.
That's because 1. Metallurgy was more advanced by the 1840s when smokeless powder was developed, and 2. Early guns designed to use smokeless powder were reinforced to handle it. Assuming identical materials, there is no way a breechloader with all its extra moving parts is going to be structurally stronger than a muzzleloader.
>there is no way a breechloader with all its extra moving parts is going to be structurally stronger than a muzzleloader
Perhaps but we've had semi-automatic rifles that can handle anti-tank rounds since WW2, there's very little reason to make man portable firearms that fire shots with such absolutely fucking ridiculous pressures they would necessitate a muzzle loading design, hell, the recoil on something that stupidly over pressured would probably break your arm.
Incredibly strong personal shields (stored in awesome Napoleonic hats) mean that only the strongest handheld weaponry can get through. These weapons are single shot due to the immense pressures which act upon the chamber whenever they fire. Voila, laser muskets and a reason for ridiculously ostentatious hats.
Could always just go with the "nobody ever bothered inventing repeating firearms for some reason" angle.
I do like fancy hats.
hats are the best part of the napoleonic wars
The weapons needed to breach personal shields are heavy and slow firing.
Alternatively, just say that's the aesthetic.
I don’t see any reason black powder wouldn’t work in space. Flintlock and matchlocks wouldn’t work, but caplocks should work fine.
If he means actually outside in space, it would need some kind of source of oxygen in with the powder for it to actually work. This is a "you can breathe just fine in space" setting anyway, though.
maybe the people were in the era of tech that muskets were but were suddenly contacted by an advanced alien race and adapted their muskets to use alien tech
Black powder contains its own oxidizer.
That's a good one I hadn't thought of. Humanity uplifted during the equivalent of the late 1700s or early 1800s and proceeding to blast shit with muskets. I like it.
I remember a thread on /k/ that got me thinking about a similar idea. Someone mentioned the idea of needing to degauss railgun or coilguns after firing to ensure optimal performance. So you'd run a degaussing rod down your barrel every shot, ala reloading a musket. Boom, sci-fi musketry (sorta)
I'll be damned
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I liked that short story where earth is invaded by an advanced space faring civilization but they never progressed further than muskets for small arms technology. Forgot what it was called.
So far the only viable setting explanation beside "muh aesthetic" is heavy charge times needed to pierce shielding. Honestly i like that, but if you want another explanation, I'll take a crack.
Soldiers, due to the slow speed of spacing vessels, and the difficulty of moving large amounts of troops and supplies, are typically part of a small garrison loyal to the nobility (local space duke or king). The tech used to produce their weapons is almost always under the direct control of the highest noble (king or emperor), to keep control over their vassals.
The fact that weapons tech is slow to ship, along with the techs needed to maintain it, means that the soldiers must rely on proven, low maintenance weapons. These weapons have a long charge up, drawing limited amounts of power to reduce strain on components. Once the charge is complete, the weapon can discharge it as a blast of plasma, able to punch through all but the heaviest of body armors and personal shielding.
There was shit tons of guerilla activity.
What made Napoleonic tactics a neccesary were three factors.
1. Lack of command and control equipment meaning that your extension of command was how far a horse could gallop, maybe flag signals, music (on a large battlefield) and yelling.
2. Ineffectiveness and expense of accurate ranged fire.
3. Lack of knowledge and expensive cost on how to train troops to maintain cohesion and morale when in looser formations en masse.
This isn’t muskets, but I’ve wanted to try this for a space-western and the idea could be used for your idea as well.
The gist of it is that laser weapons, rather than siphon a fraction of the energy off of a power cell for each shot, dump everything into one huge blast, totally draining the battery but producing truly destructive beams. Rapid-fire laser weapons simply do not exist—in my setting, it was due to lack of supplies and modern factories, but for your setting, the explanation could range from “armor’s so good you NEED fuckhuge blasts to pierce anything” to “cooling tech sucks, so rapid-fire is already a bad idea”—and musketeers have bandoliers of A-cells to keep them in the fight. Everything after that is aesthetics.
Why not just make subsonic cartridge fired guns than?
Again, there's never going to be a logical explanation for this shit so don't even bother and just say "that's the aesthetic"
>So far the only viable setting explanation beside "muh aesthetic" is heavy charge times needed to pierce shielding
But that also makes little sense to make them muzzle loaders, you could easily just make them magazine fed but have a charge time before you can fire, making them muzzle loaders would just mean you might not have a shot ready by the time the guns charged and basically waste time doing something completely unnecessary.
Ships in space move at speeds of double digit percentages of c meaning that no matter how fast the projectile launched may be moving at, it will need to be even faster than a ship travelling at a significant percentage of the speed of light, which necessitates the use of laser weaponry when attempting any form of long range combat between warships. This may not be the case when engaging in close combat, since the current lore seems to imply that laser weaponry requires a militarily significant amount of time to load and recharge after each shot and in addition the equipment necessary to install laser weaponry may be heavy enough that a smaller fighter ship may not be capable of carrying it.
1 is easy enough to get around by saying battlefields are jammed to high hell
Consider the Legend of the Galactic heroes approach to warfare by treating it like 18th century naval warfare.
Main lasers are on the front, and ships must be roughly facing forward to fight effectively, most large ships are equipped with shields that must be overwhelmed before the ship can be destroyed, the battlefield is composed of anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of ships manned by thousands of men each and each battle is comprised of a narrator discussing the tactics while showing clips of these behemoth ships being damaged, exploding, their interiors going up in flames and the men inside dying slowly and painfully.
At the end the narrator will announce how many died on each side and the repercussions this would have on the galaxy at large, it was a good series.
I played in an Only War game that was actually inspired by OPs pic. Our home world was pretty much Napoleonic era in tech before being absorbed into the Imperium. The tech infusion resulted in a sort of quasi-steampunk setting. Our particular regiment was based on Sharpe's Rifles and we all used hot-shot laslocks. It was pretty comfy.
>kinda like LoGHs ships having most of their firepower located at the front, meaning the ships are like giant guns in space - having to face directly their targets
>but also like the idea of space ships having rows upon rows of weapons on their flanks so that they fire broadside like 18th century warships
TORN
Man portable railguns
Or metalstoem rounds, you fill the barrel full of bullets & then fire them all in one go. Then reload like a musket
>completely unnecessary
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But yeah, its basically got to be a mix of huge shields in fancy hats and for some reason or another mass firing slow reload weapons in ranks is the only way through that. So the shields overlap to create more protection ths requiring formtions and can only be overcome by... plot-D-vice overload so everyone has to fire at the same time when a guy yells 'fire'.
You can still call it scifi if you really want, but its about as soft as mayo. Looks cool though.
How are you going to deal with land based vehicles? What about aircraft?
Garbage!
The Ferguson Rifle was in service during the American War of Independence.
It was a breech loading rifled weapon, and, like all rifles of the time, had to cope with higher pressures than smoothbores using similar loadings SIMPLY BECAUSE THE TIGHTER FIT OF THE PROJECTILE IN THE BARREL MEANT LESS ENERGY WAS WASTED! .
Rant over, the reason they were withdrawn from service after Colonel Ferguson's death was the internal politics of the British Army, not for any failings of the design, although they did cost more than the contemporary muzzle-loading Baker rifles, which continued in use until the introduction of percussion fired weapons.
1. Jamming
2. Weapons that can penetrate personal shielding have hella kickback
3. Make the setting technically post apocalyptic and say the knowledge was lost and it explains the mix of medieval and high tech.
Yes, that was still old black powder. Smoothbore muskets can fit tight-fitting ball and still put lead downrange without issue. The reason they didn't back then was due to fouling and reloading speed.
You could easily make a modern day muzzle-loaded rifle that could take modern powder loads. Like, super easily. Hell, you could go down to your hardware store right now and you can buy a couple pieces of pipe and a nail and piece together a fucking shotgun.
But if you still think a system with more moving weakpoints is stronger than one that's basically a solid capped tube, I don't know what to tell you.
Look up the movie treasure planet. Has pretty much everything you've just described.
turrets my dude. You can have both on different kinds of ships or have both styles used on the same ship as different tactics.
If the culture was spawned from generational ships, they could have lost a lot of technology that wasn't present in the ships. If they were sent out by some utopian peacenik society, there may have even been an effort to wipe out 'savage' technologies.
Coming at the problem from the opposite angle, maybe Earth was invaded by really shitty aliens, they got slaughtered or epidemiced and now you have a bunch of spaceships laying around?
Regression of technology to counter rampant electronic warfare. You don't need to spend $90k every trip making sure your men's guns don't have back doors to your airlock controls or shipping manifests. This might work a little better for Western style repeaters or bolt actions than straight muskets, but it's a reason to even have them.
Fun fact; in the UK to get around the handgun ban, they convert modern revolvers to muzzleloaders using modern pistol powders and bullets.
There's a type of machine gun called "metal storm" it has the fastest rate of fire possible because of electrically ignutibg primers. But so far its all muzzleloading. Also I have single shot gauss rifles in my space setting because they fucking rip anything to shreds in one hit and it's cheaper just to manufacture a rail and a breach than a rail and a magazine that doesn't interfere with the rail. Basically you'll just have to use some level of bullshittery but that should be fine.
It's your setting! Whatever you say goes! Let the players come up with the justification.
Personal deflectors are cheep and common, as a result conventional firearms are totally useless.
However, plasma baced weaponry can easily bipass most deflectors, but theirs a catch.
The reactors needed to charge and fire plasma bursts are very unstable when big and the cost for reasonably stable ones is highly disproportional.
Smaller reactors are however reasonably priced, but both big and small can't be fired in quick succession, as it risks destabilizing the reactor. In order to avoid meltdowns, most plasma weapons come with pre built in fiering locks, that limmited the fiering rate of the guns to about 3/min. Of course more expensive guns made for elite troops tend to have shorter cooldowns, indeed it's whispered that the elite gaurds of not! Space Prussia can fire 5 or 6 times a minute.
Radio and other long and short distance communication is faulty as well, with low power jamers being cheep and plentiful. More powerful radio towers still work, but they are too big to reasonably transfer to the battlefield, and as such, soldiers are organized into fiering lines for convenience, just as they were in the past.
And there you go, musket based combat is enforced with big plasmas guns acting as cannons. Gun line style combat is back because troop commanding is once agian a one+ man affair. And generals are back on the battlefields to boot.
Read Harry Turtledove's 'The Road Not Taken.'
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Hyperdrive tech is a simple affair that human physics never discovered because whatever reason we just never thought the right way about physics. Most races discover it around the age of sail, so the invasion fleet shows up at earth with Napoleonic tech and gets promptly blasted to hell by every 21st century wartime horror imaginable.
In your setting, just have human discover the hyperdrive like anyone else