Quote:
Originally Posted by DangerousThing
Q: Why isn't black powder used? It isn't as efficient as modern gunpowder, but it's easy to make and the ingredients are needed for human life.
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Smokeless powders are if anything even less fussy about ingredients. If you have saltpetre (needed for black powder) you can make nitric acid, and then you need either wood pulp, or cotton, or any other plant fibre, or animal fat, or basically any other organic feedstock. And since about 1900 we've been making nitrates out of air.
An Earthlike world in which the ingredients for propellants are scarce is perhaps something you have to just not think about too hard.