Earlier Guns

What if gunpowder had been discovered earlier? Lets assume it still gets applied to military applications (rockets, then cannons, then handcannons, then proper guns). What effect would this be likely to produce? Obviously, metallurgy would have to advance quite alot, but I figure with the demand there... After all, invention can be the mother of necessity sometimes... ;)

Interesting times to consider:

1) During the rise of the Persian Empire
2) During Alexander's conquests and the Succesor States.
3) During the Punic Wars
4) During the period that Rome was conquering the Greek states. Lots of innovation during that period...
5) During Justinian's time
6) During the Arab expansion

I'm sure there's plenty of Eastern centered possibilities, but I'm more familiar with the Western wars, so they're the one's I suggested.
 
Looks familiar

Haven't we done this before--not too long ago?

I am going to recycle my thoughts--that some of grenade would appeal to the Romans, esp. when they were still facing Hellenistic armies employing the phalanx. Sending grenadiers out ahead of the legion would break up the phalanx and then the legion would have them for supper.
 
I don't know if you can get guns any earlier, but two very simple ideas could have been done earlier. The flintlock ignition is a pretty simple idea that could have replaced matchlocks and wheellocks way earlier than it did OTL... what if it had come to dominate warfare around 1500 or so? Another simple idea is the Minie ball, which nearly doubled the range of the average infantry weapon by allowing everyone to use rifles instead of smoothbores. I'm not sure when rifling came about, but minie balls could have appeared soon after. Both flintlocks and minie balls are simple things that just required the serendipity of someone to think of them... both could have come into being way earlier than they did. Think of Napoleonic warfare with rifles and minie balls.. or the ARW fought with them.....
 
David Howery said:
I don't know if you can get guns any earlier, but two very simple ideas could have been done earlier. The flintlock ignition is a pretty simple idea that could have replaced matchlocks and wheellocks way earlier than it did OTL... what if it had come to dominate warfare around 1500 or so? Another simple idea is the Minie ball, which nearly doubled the range of the average infantry weapon by allowing everyone to use rifles instead of smoothbores. I'm not sure when rifling came about, but minie balls could have appeared soon after. Both flintlocks and minie balls are simple things that just required the serendipity of someone to think of them... both could have come into being way earlier than they did. Think of Napoleonic warfare with rifles and minie balls.. or the ARW fought with them.....

Rifling is found in weapons surviving from the mid-15th century, though limited to smallarms. The principle of spin-stabilisation is understood even earlier, possibly as early as the later Roman Empire (though definitely by the 13th century).

In a Roman ATL I posited that Roman experiments firing spin-stabilised darts with centrally mounted lead weights lead to the development of minie-ball technology. It's a long shot, of course, but it could have happened.
 
There is one element in this debate that is often overlooked. Until the muskets of the 19th century, personal firearms were often inferior to other projectile weapons (especially the longbow and composite bow). The main reason for their adoption in the west was that the two western bows (longbow and crossbow) needed a lot of training - muskets are comparatively simple, allowing the use of mass fire as all the soldiers could be armed with them. More so after the socket bayonet was introduced thus making the pike obsolete. Also, unlike the Middle Eastern and Central Asian armies, Western armies comprised mostly infantry. Muskets would be of limited use to a Mongol Horde.

It was also this simplicity that delayed the widespread use of rifles and minie style bullets. Loading a muzzle loading rifle takes longer than loading a smoothbore - the Britsh rifleman used to act like medieval crossbowmen - a loader and a firer, not really suitable for massed ranks. Napoleon would not even arm his armies with rifles. In European warfare rate of fire mattered more than accuracy.

Also, the rifling of a barrel was an expensive process - especially prior to the Industrial Revolution. This was another brake on their introduction, only a rich country with a well developed industrial base could afford it.
 
rifles were harder to load with round balls... but the minie ball was specifically designed to get around this. Just as with a smoothbore, the minie ball is a lot smaller than the bore, so it's easy to load, but the cone shape expands in the barrel when fired, so it grips the rifling grooves... thus, the best of both worlds. Once the minie ball was developed, the rifle and minie ball dominated warfare until cartridges were created; the ACW was fought almost entirely with these. The minie ball is a simple idea that could have come about a lot earlier.. just no one thought of it...
 
David Howery said:
the minie ball is a lot smaller than the bore, so it's easy to load, but the cone shape expands in the barrel when fired, so it grips the rifling grooves.

Actually, conical bullets had been used at various times in certain specialized arms for centuries. The innovation of the Minie ball was not the conical shape, but the fact that it has a hollow base. The expanding gas from the exploded powder charge causes this hollow base to flare outwards, and thus the bullet grips the rifling. In fact, early Minie balls had little clay thimbles inserted into this hollow base to make sure the hollow base flared out as it was supposed to do, but it was found that the expanding gas sometimes forced the thimble clean through the bullet, leaving the bullet stuck in the barrel. Further experimentation found that the thimble was not actually necessary, and it was omitted.
 
A faster development of Rockets may have aborted the development of Cannons. A Rocket with a impact gernade warhead...
 
DuQuense said:
A faster development of Rockets may have aborted the development of Cannons. A Rocket with a impact gernade warhead...

No most likly they wouldn`t have. Colonel Boxer (Brit arty) once stated even if rockets would have been invented before cannons we would have thought tube arty a wonderfull improvement.

A really decent unguided arty rocket will have to wait until smokeless powder makes it`s entrence to the killing fields. Even then the bigger rockets have to wait till someone invents a matrix to hold the powder in place, since the largest diameter cordite string is 3 inches. With black powder a rocket is simply too inacurate to be of much use. It is also quite dangerous in larger packed amounts.

An impact fuse, especially a really safe one for rockets, isn`t as easy as it seems. Not only to you have to have knowledge of certain chemicals (fulminate of mercury for example-and if you have that percussion caps are around the corner)-but you have to be able to build a safing mechanism which works even if the acceleration by a missile is far lower than that of an arty shell. I don`t see all of these indrigents appear before 1900 or so.
Then there is another use for the early cannons that rockets cannot provide. At short ranges "cannister" (i.e. a shotgun shell for cannons) rounds were used to break up attacks. Imagine 12 pounds of musket balls coming your way at 50 meters-not good.

Also rockets of that time would likly be unable to tear down the wall of old style fortesses.
 
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