If, say, saltpeter didn't exist, or was much harder to come by, what would that do to the development of firearms?
Are there other small but fundamental tweaks you could make to a world to stop guns from being invented, or perhaps made extremely rare? Not political or cultural changes, but hard facts about resource availability, or straight up existence of certain substances or even a world where very specific physical or chemical events necessary to the working of a gun simply don't take place (I imagine the flow on effects would be enormous)
Bonus points: can it be done and still have artillery, cannons, etc, in use?
As you moved forward in the future, what other solutions would crop up? What else would you have to remove to keep them out of your universe? What effects could that have? What impractical weaponry gets more tractions without firearms?
What would different settings do with guns? What would the Wild West look like? Was the Wild West only possible with guns? What about the Age of Sail? The Victorian Age, Gilded Age, WW1? Hell, even the last 50 years?
Failing any of that, I'll happily take pictures of people from settings who should have guns, but have grown up using other, older or stranger tools to compensate.
>>43568928
You have to make combustion chemically impossible, which means steam, wind, and solar are the means of power for technology.
>>43568928
Fuck me dead. Every time I wrote 'with guns' I fucking meant the goddamn opposite
WHAT WOULD THE WORLD LOOK LIKE **WITHOUT** GUNS
Never invent bells. You'll still have rockets and such, but you'll never get guns or canons.
You'd have to remove combustion and gas pressurization entirely.
Because anything that can combust or be pressurized can and will be used to launch projectiles.
The first functional air rifle was in the 1600s, and all it used was hand pumped pressure canisters.
>>43568948
>steam, wind
You can still have guns with Wind and Steam Power. They'd just be high powered airguns/pneumatic.
>>43568988
Rather, you'd just have to remove any container that might be able to hold that much pressure.
So, basically, get rid of metal working, and the only guns left would be blowguns.
>>43568988
>>43568995
Sure, that's fine, because that would still really limit their effectiveness, wouldn't it? It's not like you can carry a gun in your hand that's powered by steam and even a steam backpack would be unwieldy and untenable for most of history and STILL much weaker than a modern gun, right?
>>43568969
>Never invent bells
Why bells?
>>43568948
do u fucking know what happens if we don't have combustion? we can't COOK food. Yeah just skip the caveman developmental period and skip right to solar power, why didn't we think of that?!
>>43569057
Bellmaking and cannonmaking are basically the exact same process and can both be done in the same workshop using the same tools.
And early gunsmithing was just a scaled down version of that, still possible in the same workshop (With different tools).
>>43568928
Tower of God (Korean webcomic) made "the guns we know" impractical thanks to the existence of the "air" that fills the setting (a tower everyone's climbing for their own ends).
They later introduce weapons to mimic the guns we know, but they were made specifically for use in the "air" of the tower.
>>43569045
The Girandoni Air Rifle (also known as the "Windbüchse", literally "wind rifle" in German) was a weapon designed around 1779 by Tyrolian inventor Bartholomäus Girardoni.
It fired a .46 caliber ball at speeds comparable to modern .45 ACP rounds, from a 20 round magazine.
if you could come up with a reason why they couldn't use metal for ammo that might work
>>43568928
>Not wanting a setting with gold mines guarded by dragon merchants and their kobold lackeys who live in nearby boomtowns
>Not wanting a setting where a man with a gun can go head-to-head with a man with magic & shit
>Not wanting to play as a roving gang of desperadoes who use gun & blade to maximum effect
>Not wanting Native American elves and orcs fighting to defend their homelands
>Not wanting spellslingers having duels at high noon
>Not wanting to play as a sword-and-shotgun toting fighter, a quick-drawing rogue, a missionary cleric, or a wizard utilizing both ancient Amerindian totem magic and handy magic-infused weapons
>Not wanting to play Shadowrun 1800's editionShadowrun 1800's actually sounds cool...
>>43568928
You can do as some anons say in the thread, and have a setting where something makes gunpowder be unable to explode correctly. MtG has done it efore with goblin powder in the brother's war book, it was too volatile to be carried in considerable quantities, and the amber chronicles had a wolrd with a different set of physics entirely, so taking guns there make them stop working.
I personally like the idea of making the beings in the setting immune to guns in some sense. Maybe everyone is just that tough, so they are strong enough to cut each other with swords, but the gun is too weak to go through the skin.
You can also go the Dune way... they had personal force fields that inutilized most guns, and exploded with the force of a thousand suns if you used lasers, so even the shooter would die. Combat in dune was tricky because of that.
>>43568928
Loss of explosive charges would be required to remove firearms.
Loss of explosive charges means no cannons no roickets, not internal combustion engines ect ect
Leave that path alone. Modern world doesn't happen without pressurized explosions.
The real question is what could have happened instead so that such things never became an issue.
>>43569615
It is the slow thrust that kills.
>>43569789
MAGIC! as always is a viable answer to this.
>>43569598
I would play this in a heartbeat
>>43569598
Don't get me wrong, I want all that, I just want an excuse to have cowboys with bow and arrow and fucking swords and not being shot in the face by some drunk with a revolver
An excuse a bit less overused than 'they don't work near magic' or 'they're outlawed' or 'they just don't exist'
>>43569789
I was unclear in the OP, I wasn't interested in the total removal of firearms so much, the idea was ultimately about what was the least you could remove to greatly reduce the prominence of firearms, so other weapons could breathe. That's why my initial suggestion was 'maybe saltpeter is hard to get' and not 'heat doesn't exist', like some of the suggestions here.
>>43569598
The game style is called weird west, and tends to include things like Jonah hex and the villain from wild wild west.
So if you let your cynicism go away, it can be really fun. Personally I think it works better in 7th Sea, though.
>>43569962
Have you read "The Alloy of Law" it's part of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, that half of /tg/ hates. The magic system he includes in it doesn't negate guns, but does make them much less effective, as magic only affects metals. So to kill people who can use the different types of magic, they still use dueling canes, obsidian axes, stone tipped arrows, etc.just don't let your players be gunsmiths, cause then you'll have wonky shit like ceramic tipped bullets
>>43568928
>say, saltpeter didn't exist, or was much harder to come by
You would have to remove nitrogen or potasium from existence. Best of luck.
>>43569044
>>43569126
You can make a fully functional cannon out of a log, and shoot stone shot. Its been done since the Chinese discovered black powder
>>43570195
without potassium or nitrogen you have no people, or plants or fucking organic life because youve suddenly made proteins nonexistent
Lets avoid that shall we
>>43570329
Exactly. Thats all saltpeter is though.
without nitrogen, there wouldn't have been a big bang, or stars, or anything.
>>43569962
The existence of fire magic makes carrying around large amounts of gunpowder on your person somewhere between outright suicidal and merely moronic. There, done.
>>43570129
yeah but half of that book was still gunfights
>>43568952
We'd still be trebucheting shit, for starters.
And we wouldn't have cars, trains, motorboats, planes, or any other forms of transportation based on the Combustion engine (seeing as it was invented based on the same gas expansion principles as firearms).
Essentially, much of the chemical innovation that created black powder would have to be purged from history. The kind of chemistry that created black powder for guns also invented more powerful, cheaper, and safer to use explosives. Without that, much of our construction and landscaping abilities would be kneecapped.
Think of the transcontinental railroad. Know how history teachers and documentaries will wax tragic about how many senseless deaths took place as a result of its construction? Well, making your overworked, inexperienced, underpaid minority workers hit the mountain with picks until it's not in the way anymore--instead of periodically setting explosives, getting the fuck out of the way, and blowing parts of it up--is more likely to drastically increase your casualties than decrease them.
Essentially, if you want any technology this isn't hammers and pulleys and levers in your fantasy world, you need to replace Practical Chemistry with Practical Magic. Wherever explosive force was needed to develop a technology or complete a work you think your world needs, magic needs to have been the cause. After all, why invent something that shoots a hunk of metal out of a tube, when you can just throw magical projectiles with only the most basic of cantrips? It's your call though.
Honestly, you'd have less work ahead of you just letting guns be a thing.
>>43570358
You're gonna have to explain what the hell nitrogen has to do with the big bang and nuclear fusion, since as far as I'm aware it was WAY too hot for atoms to form at the time of the big bang and stars initially ran on hydrogen and helium isotopes.
>>43569057
Basically what
>>43569126
Said. Ultimately you'll never get past
>>43570279
Which are pretty limited.
>>43570702
I might be misremembering. Chemistry is not my strength.
Still can't have the universe without Nitrogen.
>>43570755
>Limited cannon vs no cannon
Its still an advantage as both strength of arms and psychological impact
>>43570279
>>43570755
Also, OP wants to keep cannons.
>>43570789
Then keep it at late bronze age Chinese tech. Problem solved. Log cannon, early rockets, and clay grenade/bombs, but no guns.
>>43570523
Yea, but OP said he didn't want to remove guns completely, just make them far less common. If magic like coinshots or lurchers isn't uncommon, especially among whatever factions the players are up against, they'll have reason to use both. After all, it's not really a western without the occasional gunfight, too.
This thread has me thinking about springs.
Thinking along OP's guidelines, crossbows, catapults, and other torsion-based technologies would be the driving force of the world.
Clockwork mechanisms, while often slapped onto the "Steampunk" genre, are actually a completely different technological field.
Fuck Steampunk, I want to see some Springpunk. Building a better mousetrap, crossbow and pocket watch for your convenience.
>>43570843
Namefag, I know what the Chinese had. That's why I recommended what I recommended. Removal of bells is the most appropriate course of action by the request of OP. It keeps artillery, canons, etc. and is the single minimum amount of technology that you can remove to prevent the development of guns.
I will, however, admit that I forgot about log cannons, thinking only in terms of post bell-making cannonry.
Anyway, point is, being stuck in bronze age, late or otherwise, is not the minimum required technology removed.
>>43569138
Explain more. I don't understand what you mean by introduce weapons to mimic the guns we know.
>>43570782
Hey Gropey, are you gonna have a new LARP thread soon?
>>43568928
This books series is essentially what you're looking for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emberverse_series
It deals with what you're asking, if it was suddenly taken away from us. Interestingly, it also has magic (of a sort)
>>43570965
Springpunk, is this a thing? I'm interested now. Next, you're going to tell me Rubberpunk is a thing
>>43569283
Note that Napoleon was so scared of them that he orders anyone found with one hanged immediately and the rifle destroyed.
+High rate of fire
+Large magazine
+Just as deadly as a normal rifle
+Quieter than a normal rifle
+Can carry multiple air canisters
-Decently fragile (considering it fires a metal slug at high speed)
-Hand pumping took 45 minutes
>>43568928
>What's the minimum amount of tech you'd have to delete to remove guns from history?
absolute minimum? delete guns.
boom.
>>43571594
That's the absolute maximum. The absolute minimum would be to just remove swords.
>>43571610
but if you remove swords, you're removing everything that that was invented because of swords existing, which is a lot more than if you just removed guns noamsayin?
In the absence of gunpowder, crossbows and air rifles would become rather high-tech, I would imagine. The age of the crossbow would probably not have ended, and poisons may have even become commonplace, depending on how these weapons are used in mass battle.
The pikeman's square would remain a force on the battlefield, as would the archer.
Steam cannons and combustion engines may become the driving force behind new anti-personnel and anti-vehicle field cannons. "Organ guns" (as they were called) would be steam-powered and would send volleys of arrows, bolts or lead and steel shot at the enemy.
>>43571966
High-tech Hwacha.
>>43571132
Technically, any widely used technology from any time period can be make "punk" if it is employed creatively within the setting.
Read Twig by Wildbow (writer of Worm). It's managed to be a pretty engaging web serial about a team of "Gifted Youngsters" in a 1920s era world I can only describe as Biopunk. Pic related.
>>43571051
In terms of "a device to launch piercing projectiles".
Then again, it was only relegated for use in a tournament where getting shot with a specific bullet either disqualifies you or promotes you to the next level. It had the appearance of a revolver, too.
In a sense, guns as portable piercing projectile launchers became obsolete for the setting.
>>43572256
What do they use to fight in place of guns? It sounds like the world would be heavily nerfed without guns.
>>43571386
What a faggot.
I wish he was actually as short as he is meme'd to be.
>>43568928
The god creator of the universe destroys all guns he notices.
>because they are the only weapons that can harm him.
>>43572953
God is weak to high speed projectiles?
>>43572968
Isn't everything?
>>43572953
>literal batgod
This thread has me thinking of some setting building I did for guns. I was inspired by a mad Amish scientist irl and set the game in north Texas, punctuated with tiny towns. Zombie outbreak knocked out the big cities, cue gun nuts and revolutionaries using this time to have shoot outs with big guvment and in a decade there was a gun shortage.
So, the republic of Amarillo used the resources it had and made a bunch of scrap metal launching blunderbusses for the soul purpose of shredding zombies and under armored raiders. They were powered using CNG and propane tanks. The new government also made them needlessly complicated and hard to maintain due to some gunsmith lobbying and the simple fact that if it took training to use them, savages couldn't easily pick them up after raids and if they did, it wouldn't last long.
>>43573150
Tell me, are you from texas?
>>43568928
Pneumatic weapons may sound funny, but they would be the way to go. There were rifles and cannons based on compressed air. They had their advantages (lack of noise, smoke and light) and problems (more complicated to make and maintain).
WW1 would resemble the opening scene of that Mutant Chronicles movie.
Pic is a real-life pneumatic cannon, "dynamite gun"
>>43571132
I believe the name for the genre is clockpunk, so it's another misuse of the -punk suffix, it's usually set at late renaissance era ascetic and tech is based on the ideas of renaissance inventors like Da Vinci, like his clockwork robot.
Assassins' Creed 2 & brotherhood are usually considered examples of clockpunk
Not much. The Chinese knew about gunpowder and its explosive properties for hundreds of years before they developed proper firearms. It's possible you just have a world-case where the "tube + ball + explosion" equation never clicked.
>>43574995
No but I worked in the pan handle for a year.
>>43581481
It shows.
Amarillo would never be able to become a seperate entity.
West texas is only useful because of oil and because the land hasn't been destroyed by over farming cotton. Yet.
It would be far more likely for the big 3 (Dallas, houston and san antonio) to become their own nations at thet time. I'd say houston. They're dumb enough to put guns and propane that close together.
And even dallas is a stretch.
So know that. The rest looks fine to me.
>>43569121
Actually you can just cook food in a hemisherical mirror using sunlight.
>>43583947
And how do you plan to make a mirror without fire? Serious question, pretty sure most mirrors require smelting metals.
>>43584006
fair point
>>43568928
I don't think it's possible to do at all.
The concept of a gun can be seen in something as simple as a dart pipe. Even if gunpowder didn't exist, as >>43568948 said, we'd just use some other method to get a bolt or bullet through a tube. Steam guns are a thing, as are air pressure guns.
>>43584006
Actually, you can arrange reflective objects (shiny flat stones?) in a wooden or clay array. A parabolic cooker does not need to use a seamless mirror, nor does it necessarily need perfect reflective surfaces.
Reliable 'Repeating' firearms require good metallurgy to make parts that can withstand high temperatures and pressures, and good chemistry to make smokeless and nonresidual gunpowder. Even so, in this day and age we take for granted our MASSIVE industrial complexes that make firearms affordable for most people.
Making a setting completely devoid of guns would be hard, but it wouldn't take much technological backtracking to get to a point where guns weren't overpowered.
A good historical period to take into consideration is the Napoleonic Era, where firearms were prevalent enough to be carried by every french dragoon, yet they were limited to single-shot use (and jammed a lot, and fell apart alot) so soldiers used sabers, bayonets, and pikes. (Plus, Napoleon's genius with artillery was basically the reason he was so successful)
In the century before the Napoleonic Wars guns existed as playthings of the wealthy and educated only, because they were hard to make, inaccurate, and unreliable.
Now, if you want a setting more modern that doesn't have lots of guns: maybe try an alternate history with more 'peace'.
Something that DID happen around the time of the Industrial Revolution was a very public and very real fear of "Industrialized War". Some very serious political movements across the planet sprung up to prevent the onset of an Industrialized War at any cost. You had vocal politicos like C.Wright Mills warning of the dangers of something he called 'The Military Industrial Complex'.
Of course, we know how this all ends in OUR world: We had several industrialized wars, we nearly destroyed our planet a couple of times. It really was as dangerous and horrible as those old crackpots always said it was. But life goes on (or for many people it doesn't).
Perhaps in YOUR setting, people's fears of an industrialized war prevents war (for at least a few more decades than it did for us).
>>43585436
>In the century before the Napoleonic Wars guns existed as playthings of the wealthy and educated only
>What is pike and shot
I don't know why you think a technological, or chemical solution is needed. There are many advancements throughout history that were not achieved because oh peoples opinions on them.
The ancient greeks didn't evolve parts of algebra because they thought irrational numbers from square roots were heretical.
The Chinese didn't discover and colonize America because they believed in isolationism.
Even the personal computer was delayed, because Atari saw the first Apple PC and thought it wasn't marketable.
Peoples beliefs mean a lot, especially in warfare. because how you conduct yourself when murdering other people says a lot about your culture. In medieval combat, knights used to be captured and traded like playing pieces. Isn't that insane from some view points? why not kill your enemies best warriors? why give them back, EVER?
Armies used to suspend combat in recognition of certain holidays. Why not attack your enemy when he least expects it? George Washington did after the crossing of the Delaware river, attacking his enemy the day after Christmas. And employed many other "guerrilla" tactics which were considered dishonorable and revolutionary.
Even in the modern day, dispite thier effectiveness, certain weapons, like poison gas, and nuclear missiles, are not used because using them would be cowardly, villainous, or too destructive.
It is much more practical to say "Guns got invented, people hate guns because they are dishonorable and require no skill. Almost no one uses them, unless the want the contempt of all their peers." then it does to say something like salt-peter or steam power doesn't exist.
Cannons can still be used because they take a team of men, with great skill to use, and are reserved for assaulting structures, or against infantry in open warfare.
Well, it may not remove guns entirely, but the concept of rifled barrels was not something that was immediately obvious, and could have been overlooked for centuries, if not millennia.
