How would military technology and tactics have developed if smokeless powder had never been invented?
How would military technology and tactics have developed if smokeless powder had never been invented?
Wouldn't this be extremely unlikely?
It would be unlikely because once any kind of actual chemical industry gets going they are going to start experimenting with compounds and eventually discover something that can be used to replace gunpowder that is better and smokeless. Delay it is possible but unlikely because many people across the industrialized parts of the world were looking into the problem. France, Britian, Austria, Russia, Germany, Italy, and America and others, were all trying to find a way to have smokeless powder for the obvious military advantage that it would offer so one of the people in those countries is bound to discover it eventually unless ASBs stop them.
Then say that the development of chemistry is delayed, maybe because some disease keeps the human population down, or because the 19th century sees a massive Plato craze and lots of geniuses who would have studied science do pure maths instead, or for some other reason.
Either of those two things would have much more influence then having no smokeless powder and the world would be unrecognizable because of those changes. Having less people changes military tactics and so does not having the metallurgy advances among other things that were developed by scientists in the 1800s.
I've been thinking about a POD for such a TL too. My best idea involves the fact that many smokeless powders require nitrate, and during the late 1800s to early 1900s the majority of the worlds fixed nitrogen came from northern Chile. So I'd like to find a way to complicate/end the export of those nitrates by messing with Chile's economy, government, or conflict over the land with Bolivia. Also most of the worlds growing population required fertilizer with fixed nitrogen to. So govt policies on the rationing of nitrates could affect the production of smokeless powders too.
Any ideas?
I've been thinking about a POD for such a TL too. My best idea involves the fact that many smokeless powders require nitrate, and during the late 1800s to early 1900s the majority of the worlds fixed nitrogen came from northern Chile. So I'd like to find a way to complicate/end the export of those nitrates by messing with Chile's economy, government, or conflict over the land with Bolivia. Also most of the worlds growing population required fertilizer with fixed nitrogen to. So govt policies on the rationing of nitrates could affect the production of smokeless powders too.
Any ideas?
The fixed nitrogen could be replaced by the Haber process or by using urine beds so the need could be met if it was really desperate. Especially if the access to niter deposits was restricted or stopped. By the later half of the 19th century it was known that it could be done using atmospheric nitrogen but the existing methods were inefficient. Until the haber process was perfected there was no good method to extract it from the atmosphere. Haber was not the only scientist working on it so even if he is stopped one of the others working on it would have the breakthrough eventually.