Speaking of "superweapons," what is the deal with gunpowder, exactly?
Mix the right proportions of suitable carbon powder, suitable sulfur powder, and suitable saltpeter powder, and you've got gunpowder. Having learned that I got on for decades assuming that, as the post on the Maure implies, it's mainly just a matter of knowing the secret. In that post, all the Europeans have to do is sell the "secret formula" to the Maure and they can make their own powder--in fact the formula can leak and their rivals are making it too, on secondhand information.
But then I learned a bit more US history, then I encountered any number of threads here at AH asserting that a suitable form of saltpeter in particular is a scarce and easily monopolized resource. Any number of threads with people claiming that for instance if the USA went to war with Britain in the latter half of the 19th century (say in the 1870s or '80s) we'd be brought to our knees because the British had gotten control of the major saltpeter sources (guano mines, on the South American Pacific coast, mostly) and we'd soon run out of gunpowder. The Germans supposedly risked a similar dire fate until they invented the Haber process, and then, some say, still suffered OTL from having enough nitrates either for waging the war or for fertilizing the fields for food, but not both.
As for the US history--the proximate cause, the spark to the powder as it were, of the outbreak of sustained violence between British Regulars and the Massachussets rebel/patriots was the "Powder Plot" of Governor/General Gage. Gage hoped to preempt the colonials ability to create serious unrest by seizing the New England powder stores. This is what the Battle of Lexington was all about.
And that implies that gunpowder is not something a small Colonial village on the frontier could just whip up for themselves as needed. There were apparently far fewer powder mills in all of British North America than there were colonies!
Reading up on it some more, it seemed the Continental Congress was well aware they faced a crisis on this score and took measures to encourage American production of powder, involving harvesting saltpeter from stables and the like. But on the whole the results were quite unimpressive--something like 10 percent, maybe a fifth, of all the gunpowder fired by the Americans in the Revolutionary War was American-made, the rest either exhausted stocks existing before the war or was imported, mainly from France as part of the alliance, or in some cases its fabrication was completed here but from foreign-bought materials.
So, this might not disprove that small villages could in principle create powder as needed for their own uses, if they had a suitable source of sulfur--because carbon can generally be obtained by partially burning almost anything into charcoal, and saltpeter as a byproduct of the urine of domestic animals (or people I suppose!
) But in real life, it seems people rarely if ever actually do that. In the age of gunpowder weapons, powder was apparently Big Business. Quite aside from the question of getting raw materials of suitable quality, milling gunpowder is as one might expect a rather fussy and risky business; accidental explosions were not uncommon. Expertise and a concentration of capital resources seem to have been much favored in practice, to the point that entire nations went without their own domestic mills and imported powder through international trade. It could be that had push come to shove, the American rebels might indeed have managed to scrounge up their own powder from domestic sources--but as long as they had the option open of simply buying it ready made from overseas, that was by far the economically sensible option, and despite the existential threat hanging over them this is what they did.
So--Maure with gunpowder. It's a very cool idea and I'd like to see it justified. Are there any OTL examples of peoples of a comparable technical level and population density managing the feat of homemade gunpowder like that? Or even peoples considerably more advanced yet normally considered decisively less advanced than the Europeans? Did the various trade-route empires of the Sahel for instance make their own powder, or did they buy it from either Islamic or Western merchants (or both of course?)
I suppose the apparent contradiction can be resolved with considerations of scale--that a small scale of local production of gunpowder was done for local use, for hunting and the like. But when it became a matter of serious war the masses required soon exceed the capability of such domestic production and to produce powder on a really large scale was a capital-intensive business, involving requirements to import large quantities of easily processed guano and so forth, and that's where gunpowder appears as a matter of global business.
So the fact that General Gage thought he could nip New Englander rebellion in the bud might not imply that in seizing the colonial powder houses, he was going to completely deprive these colonies of all powder whatsoever, but only tip the balance so that only the British Regulars would have stocks on a scale suitable for arming regiments or firing cannon; the backwoodsmen might still be able to make powder for hunting, but the eastern coastal populations, facing those regiments when they had only the powder they normally needed for day to day hunting, would be daunted. Similarly I suppose the Germans pre-Haber could have managed to create some gunpowder for their weapons but not on the scale the Entente, with access to South American guano, could, and so would reconsider the whole war idea, or surrender if this problem became apparent only later.
But perhaps the Maure, who had only small numbers of guns after all, could get by with the small quantities they could make, assuming no large European power showed up to fight them with a serious arsenal--and between their reputation as tough nuts to crack when there were easier pickings around, and their great distance from European centers of power (Antipodia itself being just beginning its development, and the DEI (I forget, is that still in Dutch hands?) already being rather far away, as is China) mean that risk is remote. They are dealing with slave raiders and whatever arms a whaling ship or the like might carry; on that scale the Maure can compete.
So is that it?
