No smokeless powder for rifles

The Enfield Martini .402 was one of the very best black powder single shots military rifles ever. It is a fascinating 'whatif' had smokeless powder not been introduced. The modern history of solid fuel rocketry gives us some idea of the routes that designers were already going down to control pressure and duration of burn when smokeless powder made it all irrelevant.

All sorts of weird ideas were being explored to control black powder fouling in ever smaller bores. Water injection, bullets ejecting lubricant out of holes and gelatine wads were just some of the saner ones. Better control of the burning and better attention to detail in black powder making were more plausible.

How might ammunition have progressed since the 1880's if smokeless powder failed to work in guns?
 
I could see a much smaller use of sniping. Not much use in wearing a Ghillie suit and carefully picking your spot if a billowing cloud of smoke gives your position away.

Conversely a greater use of controlled volley firing could be used as rapid fire would soon mean smoke blinded troops.
 
To prevent smokeless powder you have to totally destroy the chemical industry. Which probably means requiring a collapse of Western European civilization (Americas included).
 
yeah, first efforts were with guncotton, then experiments to slow the burnrate and less sensitive from its nitroglycerine base.
 
To prevent smokeless powder you have to totally destroy the chemical industry. Which probably means requiring a collapse of Western European civilization (Americas included).

Exactly with any kind of industrial production of dyes and chemicals you will eventually get smokeless powder because many of the chemists in the industrial powers were searching for this.
 
I just got the image of an MG-42 firing off a couple hundred rounds with old-timey powder...

Though Maxim's first guns he built for European powers were all BP cartridges until the French, where he had to do slight modifications to work with the different recoil pulse of the new smokeless rounds
 
Heavy artillery will have a problem in getting modern ranges as the sheer mass of large BP charges means that they will be far heavier and less mobile. Maybe rocket assisted shells would be more common. Or even rockets themselves be more popular?
 
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