"If gunpowder didn't exist, how would wars be fought?" Topic

What if the chemical reaction that causes gunpowder to explode somehow never existed? Would soldiers today still wear plate armour and fire bows?

Or would war have developed in a different direction?

I think bows, arrows, lances, swords, and armor-then development of magnetic bullet guns or something like that. Cheers.
Peter x

I think it would end up with--Your Longbowmen are better than our Longbowmen type arguements…….With big blocks of pikes to defeat any cavalry attacks…

If gunpowder didn't work, wars would be fought with . . . STEAM!!!

THE WORLD CAN BE SAVED WITH STEAM!

Nerf
We used to have some fights with Nerf. And snowballs. Lots of snowballs.

I'm sorry, but is gunpowder the only explosive known to man? My guess is we'd have simply used some other chemical combination to get essentially the same weapons.

Gunpowder doesn't explode. Gun power burns, rapidly, and it's the vast increase in combustion gases from the gunpowder burning that pushes the bullet down the barrel. If the chemical reaction that causes gun power to burn didn't exist, then we are back to bashing each other with rocks, because we don't have fire.

Primer, such as fulminate of mercury, does explode, either from being struck or by electricity. Primer is used to ignite gunpowder. You could see a place where the chemical reaction that causes primer to explode doesn't exist, which puts use back to the age of flintlocks.

Hmmmm… Different physics, eh?
Or perhaps there is no oxygen in the atmosphere.

I'd say either magic or Radium Rays.

Regards, the Gorb

Compressed air.

Actually, Disney replaced black powder with compressed air in all their Florida fireworks displays.

The launch system, that is.

I was thinking compressed air….propelling large quantities of flammable material.

And I do like this steam idea.

The big thing about gunpowder, as opposed to compressed air and steam, is that it was relatively cheap, easy to transport and made a weapon that could be used with a minimum of training. Being able to train more men in less time with the trade off of less accuracy leads to larger armies and off we go down that particular path. I don't see that with compressed air or steam. Can't even have an atomic bomb without explosives. So I guess the Swiss Landsknechts would rule the world and we would all eat chocolate.

No Oxygen in the atomsphere; we'd have bigger problems than our guns not working.

A distinction between black powder and modern gun powder should be made. (BTW, gunpowder is not a chemical compound but a physical compound that is really a very fast burn, not an explosion, at least by today's standards.) In the 19th. century smokeless powder was an immensely profound, perhaps unforseen invention. It enabled the creation of the true contained cartrage. By this, one could load rapidly, and also minimize the fowling inharent in black powder. Then, with those problems solved, one could then devise a way to use the recoil of the fast "burn" of the powder to fire and load successive rounds…hence, the birth of the machine gun. That was the main reason the Great War was fought very differently then the wars of the 19th. centuries and led to horrible casulties and stalemate. I would rank smokeless gun powder up there with the printing press, and soap in terms of the most profound inventions.

ilodic.

The basic non-existance of a chemical reaction is a bit much for me to hang my hat on.

However, I expect that if otherwise we were somehow still able to burn fires and make steel, my own opinion is that the real heart of the military revolution is around the organization of capitol and trained (as opposed to born and raised to arms) manpower. The shift of the well-born soldier from knight and warrior to officer would still have happened and while the technology would be very different from what actually happened, the social shifts would have been the same.

It's not the armour or the bows that matter, it's the social relationship between soldier and employer.

monkees lots of monkees

Children with machine guns V.S. knights in armour from afar?

ilodic.

Mankind would find a way, using rocks and sticks if nothing else was handy.

Dan

"monkees lots of monkees"

Fired from giant crossbows or from catapults? Please be more precise.

What if the chemical reaction that causes gunpowder to explode somehow never existed?

Then there would be no oxidation or reduction reactions, and life would cease to exist.

It is much easier to suppose that the secret of compounding gunpowder was kept secret, or that it was just used in fireworks. THAT makes much more sense.
Gunpowder is not simply a matter of throwing charoal, saltpetre and sulfur in a bag and shaking it up. there are proportions to figure out, milling procedures to make it useable, and finally (or firstly) one needs someone to mix them all together in the first place AND in the right proportions to make it work.
It is by no means certain that the "secret" will be discovered at all. Use that.

This sounds like SM Stirling's "Dies the Fire", when for some reason gun powder and gasoline suddenly don't work due to a bizarre atmospheric change – in those books, warfare goes back to medieval times pretty quick – spears, longbows, etc.

I do think that, further to John's and other comments, that if the atmosphere changed that much lack of gunpoweder would be the least of our problems

How about the development of wall bashing artillery? The development of trebuchets? The FAT version, for instance.
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Line troops might be still be using modern compound crossbows. Armor may not have disappeared. What would it start to look like? European armor reached a very high level of quality before gunpowder made it impractical. Could it have been developed farther besides improvement in materials?

Fortifications? Would they have stuck with (improved) castle design? The trace italienne would have been impractial because of its scale.

This is probably a cop out, but lots of things oxidize in ways that produce a rapidly expanding gas. So if you couldn't manufacture cartridges with tiny tanks of highly compressed air, and if steam projectile launchers never get small enough for small arms, you burn phosphorus or some hydrocarbon, and you get the same effect.

Worse, a liquid propellant might give you automatic weapons a century earlier. Gasoline, kerosene, acetylene, something pumped into a chamber through a little carburetor, drop in a ball, ignite, repeat, no cartridge to eject, and its easier to feed balls than cartridges. Yes, it sounds clunky, but look at the early repeating firearms; they, too, had way to many moving parts for their own good.

But I'm talking through my hat.

My point is lots of things burn fast enough to be gunpowder, so history develops the same way.

But that's not the discussion you wanted, was it?

Bows and crossbows were very effective. They're basically springs. You'd end up with a very impressive evolution of spring-variant ranged weapons, mimicking gunpowder's power and ease of use. The longbow's secret and weakness was the untold hours of training that made it effective. Muskets outnumbered more effective rifles for over a hundred years because it was so easy to train for the former (one day, in some cases), and so long for the latter.

Another possibility for the low-training ranged killing machine might be a fire-projector. Flamethrowers don't require high technology, and the only thing keeping them from dominating the battlefield is that people tend to shoot the operator. I don't think anyone's going to run up and spear him.

Andrew

Lessee.. assuming
1. any gunpowder or other self-contained propellant has not been invented,
2. that some other propelling system is required to give "distance" to a hand-held weapon system

You have the following choices
* Human muscle = spear / simple or compound bow
* Spring wood / steel = crossbows. slow but effective
* steam (a from of compressed air) = too bulky
* compressed air = hmmm..

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If you allow for rocket fuel (liquid or solid) then your troops would be firing gyrojets. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet

Failing that, magnetically launched projectiles (think rail guns, but much smaller) during the Victorian period.

Wyatt

Don't forget that there are quite high-powered pellet guns that use simple spring cocking, or the more powerful compressed air guns (you know the ones, more pumps for more power).

Air guns could easily be made for both hunting and war if there was a market for them.

And the spearguns they use in diving are lethal enough as well, just much slower loading. (what was that great BOND underwater battle in, Thunderball?)

Wouldn't the lack of gunpowder mean that a lot of other chemistry would be missing? You'd have no real recourse to extract nitrates from compost heaps -- what would you use it for? If you're fertilising fields, just dump the poo on the field. And from that line of chemistry you get all sorts of interesting compounds.

You'd miss out on all the exciting sulphur based chemistry because people wouldn't be playing with that either; sulphur would just be an annoyingly smelling rock.

Weren't several dyes the off-spring from explosives research? If you didn't know explosives could exist, you wouldn't be trying to find new ones, so you wouldn't have those dyes.

The discovery of nitro-cellulose was made by accident rather than evolution from gunpowder -- but still relies on having nitric acid available, which in turn relies on nitrate chemistry.

The glib answer – they woulkd have used cordite instead;-)

Assuming that we don't have weapons with any sort of chemical propellant at all…..

Air weapons become more feasible as engineering tolerances improve, as do rail gun type weapons.

I guess we wouldn't have any rockets, but if were are allowed internal combustion engines or jet fans then you could have cruise missile type weapons as well. Not sure what their warheads would consist of without explosives though, chemical weapons, nukes?

I guess ray guns of some sort, although the only practical ones would be high powered lasers and even then how do we power them?

I'm afraid the 'no gunpowder' thing raises so many questions as to what else might/might not work that it is very hard to answer this sensibly.

link

I'm personally partial to 'sticks and stones, cause they break bones'…..

but throwing giant SQUID at the opposing forces only seems to work at ice-hockey rinks…(banned by International WarCRIMES accords of course)….

No OXYGEN in the atmosphere? HAH! that is only a problem for mammalian air-breathing bipedal humanoids….if you're underwater…gills work just FINE…now if there was NO water…then there would be 'issues'….(no atmosphere with no water makes a 'good moonscape'….)

also…what about peroxide and water using a bit of silver 'mesh'…didn't some chap invent 'glass guns' using poison darts propelled by steam from the chemical reaction between silver mesh/peroxide and water????

or just keep throwing rocks…..lots and lots of rocks…(or attorneys…or cockroach slingshots could work…?)

Air weapons. They were used for centuries, they would still be.
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Saying gunpowder "doesn't work' is absurd. It's better to simply say that no one discovered/invented it.

"no oxygen" in the atmosphere would solve the problem of war all together though.

air.guns.20megsfree.com

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Given time the air rifle might have made a difference in warfare. Better production methods would have come along and recharging methods would have improved. Perhaps a replaceable canister similar to the CO2 cartridge for pellet guns. Rate of fire would have been right up there with modern weapons. Imagine a Nappy battle with guns firing as rapidly as an M1 or AK. Had it happened that weaponry had taken a turn toward air instead of gunpowder, it is possible that modern tactics would have developed much earlier.

Seems I recall a Sherlock Holmes story in which Colonel Sebastian Moran uses an air rifle to assassinate people.

To carry the possibilities of air guns a little further: it isn't common with modern spring-piston air guns but back when large-caliber spring-piston guns were more common, lubricating oil would occasionally get into the cylinder and very occasionally the compression of air by the piston would ignite the oil, causing the gun to fire with considerably more force than the compressed air alone could produce. The process is referred to in modern times as 'dieseling', for obvious reasons.

A few attempts were made to design an air gun that could produce this effect on a regular and controllable basis but spring-piston air guns have tended to be hobbyists' weapons and kids' toys so not much effort was put into them. I suspect that if gunpowder weren't around to provide a more convenient propellant, there might be more research in this direction.

LT

Well, after the next world war, those remaining will fight with sticks and rocks.

I don't see why. The world is awash with guns, we'll go on using those until the ammo runs out, then switch to black powder rifles and muskets.

Haven't you seen Mad Max?

We'd be using Laser's just like in Star Wars- such weapons appear to no more effective than 16thC gunpower weapons!

I think without gunpowder the concept of firearms might not have developed at all. Gunpowder was first used in canon before being reproduced in a smaller scale. Firearms are just mini canons. The Balista was reproduced in smaller scale as the crossbow. There would have been continued development of the crossbow I think. Its similar in range and rate of fire to early guns. It can pierce heavy armour at range and requires little training in its use. Armour might have declined in use as the crossbow developed.
Todays modern battlefield would lack any explosives. It might resemble an Napoleonic engagement with crossbow armed troops in colourful uniforms. Swords strapped to their belts. Large torsion powered artillery.

A private company is developing a Variable speed rifle for the US Army right now. It does not use any gunpowder but uses a hydrogen/air mixture to propellel the projectile. Dial up the hydrogen/air ratio and you have the equivalent of high power rounds, dial down the ratio and load rubber bullets and now you have a non-lethal crowd control weapon.

I think we are assumming to some extent that life/society would be similar, e.g. computers, space ships, etc. minus the gun powder. The gun, specifically the smokeless powder has shaped the world in so many ways, that some of these alternative being proposed would not have come to fruition simply because the very nature of warfare with the presence of the gun/artillery has changed the world forever in ways be cannot even begin to explain. Maybe some great unknown inventor might have been shot, died, instead of just stabbed, and lived and changed the world. Simply taking gunpowder out of the equation lends itself to a profound butterfly effect.

ilodic.

Beer chugging competitions followed by sauerkraut gorging binges topped off with fresh french bread chasers.The sheer explosive force unleashed could change the world…..hey maybe thats Obama,s plan.

<<….dial down the ratio and load rubber bullets and now you have a non-lethal crowd control weapon.>>

Or "forget" to dial down the ratio and………..

Two thoughts.

One – more effort might have gone into alternative forms of warfare, eg biological or chemical, such as poisoning water supplies to major conurbations.

Two – (relating to earlier comments about human society evolving in a different way) continued reliance on hand-to-hand and closer-ranged missile weapons would have led to a world dominated by the most numerous races/nations – or, dare one say it, maybe religions? It was gunpowder that put the Europeans on top in the Americas, and (at least in part) helped contain and repel the Islamic invasions of Europe. The slave trade might have happened the other way round (it almost did anyway). And the Scots would now rule England (hang on – Blair, Brown, Darling, Browne, Reid, Falconer, Martin……).

Well, let's just assume a 'no making things go bang to propel a bullet'. No liquid propellants, no alternate chemicals, etc. We'll also leave out rockets. We'll just assume it's never occurred to anyone, or that there's some flaw in the workings of physics involved to prevent it..

Ok.. let's see.. Random brainstorming goodness:

Crossbows in use, probably for quite some time. Might still be popular today. Possibility of elastic 'Hawaiian Sling' type guns launching steel shafts?

High-power springs come into play, let's call it the 1700s, allowing for a powerful first volley, but long reload time requiring cart-drawn equipment? ooh.. What about pre-compacted springs the size of soda cans, carried as cartidges'? Speeds up reloads.

Air power possible for Napoleonic players.

Airplane combat very different. No dogfights, fighters mainly for use in scouting and defending against bombers, with a great deal of precision required or low fire rate/low ammunition weapons. Things like dragging a length of chain into an opponent's propeller, perhaps. If we assume no explosives at all, then we're left with attacks via firebombs, which could be nasty. Planes used mainly to air-drop paratroopers into position?

Tanks would be ungodly in their power. Very little way to destroy one if you can't blow it up, and it has the carrying capacity for an air compressor or other mechanism for powering weapons. Trick comes when opposing tanks meet. Best way to defeat a tank would be to hit it with a flamethrower or the like and hope for the best.

Compressed air weapons, not just BB guns and pellet rifles--have been around. In the HERESGESCHICHTLICHES Museum in Vienna there are two WWI Austrian compressed air mortars. HaT's WWI Austrain heavy weapons include one of these. Also Lewis and Clark had an air gun with them [I think it was Lewis's idea, and got shot in the seat of his pants with it IIRC.]
But consider spring powered weapons like the PIAT.
Then of course there are rubber powered weapons like spear guns.
People are inventive and will always find a way to take their adversaries out.
Natokina.

"If gunpowder didn't exist, how would wars be fought?"

like this:
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Air rifles have already been mentioned, as have liquid propellants. What about some kind of of crazy clockwork/mechanical/compressed air/PSB powered repeater crossbow like the one in Van Helsing? What about Tesla's Teleforce projectors?

Maybe we would use "Corbamite" !!

There really wouldn't be much difference. The technical problem is to transmit linear energy to something hard that will fly through the air. The early methods were to increase the mechanical advantage of the human body (spear-throwers) or store human strength in sinew/bent wood/bent metal (bow, crossbow, slingshot, catapult), gravity (trenchart) or rotory kinetic energy (sling) until it was released. If you have eliminated simple chemical reactions (reduction:oxidation chemical reactions, which include any "burning"), the obvious one is pneumatic. Air guns can be quite powerful. A single pump cycle 0.177mm pellet airgun easily kills a small animal like a squirrel at 25 feet. I see no reason why a larger air storage cylinder, if loaded by a crank system like some types of crossbows couldn't work against troops at 50 yards. It would require better machining and materials than an 18th century musket. Electrical and magnetic weapons (rail guns) are presently too bulky for man-carried weapons.