What is the Minimum Requirement for "Smokeless Powder"

Basically, what sort of discoveries and inventions would be needed for Smokeless Powder to be developed and manufactured on a large scale? It's something that I have been wondering since such a development would be a great leap in warfare, but I've never really figured out the background to such developments.
 
You need nitrocellulose. That requires nitrogen (e.g. ammonia) and cellulose (wood fibre), along with tight quality control.
 
Chemical industry that is capable of producing large amounts of nitric acid.

After you start using percussion caps for ignition you might be able to tinker with gunpowder formula to reduce smoke, but at that point you are probably able to manufacture nitrocellulose anyway.

EDIT

In practice, the lead chamber process to industrially produce sulfuric acid. And a source of nitrates, but you need potassium nitrate for black powder anyway. And someone needs to actually invent nitrocellulose, of course.
 
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If you have the ability to manufacture large amounts of nitric acid, you probably have the ability to make it reasonably pure. And the problem with nitrocellulose manufacture is not so much impurities but the (pure) acid residue; it needs to be washed very, _very_ thoroughly.

EDIT

All right, even if you made pure nitrocellulose it is probably going to occassionally blow up to your face in use until you figure out some additives to stablilize it.
 
That's funny, I wanted to figure out in another post how to get a society that has enough advanced chemistry to make smokeless powder, but not one come up with the minie ball.

Actually, given that the two are only OTL 30 years apart, one involves chemistry, and the other clearly does not, maybe it's doable (as opposed to making solid state electronics of the 1970s quality come before the combustion engine which is pre 1900...)

As for the OP, yeah, it's nitric acid and nitrocellulose that's the key.
 
If you're trying to do smokeless powder while still using muzzle loaders or cap and ball breech loaders you get a lot of dead and maimed inventers. Even today with modern replicas made of much better steel than was available in the 19th century they blow up when loaded with smokeless powder.
 
That shouldn't really be a problem. You can reduce the amount of propellant to reduce gas volume, and use larger grains to slow down burn rate. Or possibly put in some additives to make it burn slower, but this may interfere with that whole "smokeless" part.

Anyway, the process to produce sulfuric acid tends to inherently result in pure product as does manufacturing nitric acid by distilling nitrates with sulfuric acid. Nitrocellulose is still a pain to store, though, and hilarity will regularly ensue until people learn to deal with it.
 
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