An Alternate History Without Smokeless Powder

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

We're talking a world were there waren't any child labor laws, and just browsing through the history of smokeless powder I'm seeing a comical number of setbacks do to factories/labs being exploded.

Probably smaller than the number of people who blew themselves up developing traditional gunpowder, we just have worse records.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

The needle gun was something else, but there were certainly a couple of military air-rifles kicking about in the C19. Girandoni springs to mind as a manufacturer...

Yes. For ships and possibly tanks, there's also the idea of a compressed-steam gun, or an engine-powered air-compressor. Much cleaner than black powder, but no chemical explosive until your shell gets to the target.

Electrical weapons are also a possibility, but it will take time for the tech to get there (railguns are hard due to wear on the rails, though coilguns might be workable).

Nuclear reactors will still happen, even if the atomic bomb doesn't happen until later (a gun-type bomb using a one-shot railgun and really good capacitors should be possible, for example), so shipboard atomic matter piles may occur around the same period as OTL.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Yes. For ships and possibly tanks, there's also the idea of a compressed-steam gun, or an engine-powered air-compressor. Much cleaner than black powder, but no chemical explosive until your shell gets to the target.

There was a historical dynamite firing cannon that worked on compressed air if that helps.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

There was a historical dynamite firing cannon that worked on compressed air if that helps.

It did not compete well with normal artillery. With the pressure (1,000 to 2,500 psi) obtainable at the end of the nineteenth century, the guns were smoothbores. The shells of the three 15" dynamite guns on the USS Vesuvius had spiral vanes to make the shells rotate after they left the gun, but this did not work well, and the guns were short-ranged and inaccurate.

They were useful for bombarding places that had nothing to shoot back with, and were surprising to their targets, because firing was quiet, but Vesuvius' dynamite guns were removed after their use in the Spanish-American War.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by johndallman

It did not compete well with normal artillery.

Except in power. Those 15" dynamite gun shells were 50% explosive by weight instead of the usual 10% for HE.

There was a short window of time in which nitroglycerin and dynamite could be made but shock-insensitive HE could not but I have trouble seeing it last long enough for all the bugs in compressed air artillery to be worked out.