An Alternate History Without Smokeless Powder

[Minuteman37]

So how would Firearms development and Warfare of changed in for whatever reason Smokeless powder wasn't ever developed?

[mlangsdorf]

Smokeless powder makes machine guns and heavy naval artillery viable.

With black powder, machine guns get too much junk in their barrels and generate smoke screens when fired for extended periods. Using black powder in WW1 would have reduced the power of defense somewhat, but probably not enough to make a real distance on the French front. There were awful sieges in Virginia in the US Civil War, and everyone involved was using black powder and didn't have machine guns or cartridge, breech loading, reciprocating carriage artillery.

Without black powder, you can't build high velocity naval guns. Battleships would be much less vulnerable to each other. Again, I don't think it would matter: battleships rarely fought, rarely fought each other, and were as likely to be killed by torpedoes as by gunfire. Though if no smokeless powder means no TNT, torpedoes would be less powerful... Still, the course of the the naval war in WW1 was determined by economic factors in the decade before the war, not in the tactical engagements at Dogger Bank and Jutland. Even if battleships would have needed to close within a mile of each other to penetrate each other's armor, the British had twice as many ship's and could afford to lose three ship's to sink two German ships if that was what it took to maintain the blockade.

Things might start to get weird post WW1. No smokeless powder might mean no rockets and missiles, as well as no high explosives, which means no atomic bombs (I think, not sure if you could do a gun design with black powder providing the push). I am not up to predicting the course of WW2 if everyone is using black powder weapons. Though again, the economic factors generally overrode the tactical factors, and a lack of smokeless powder doesn't make the Axis economies any better.

[whswhs]

I'd want to look more closely at the "for whatever reason". The specific thing that prevented it would make a difference. Smokeless powder seems to have been a natural outgrowth of the emergence of organic chemistry; perhaps you could delay the discovery that organic molecules could be synthesized in the laboratory? I don't think you could prevent it forever, as someone else would have done the first organic synthesis in a decade or two, but you could at least have smokeless powder emergence later. In the meantime, not having organic chemistry would have delayed colorfast dyes and some drugs.

[Purple Haze]

No smokeless powder mean no nitroglycerin, no nitrocellulose, no trinitrotoluene, but also no ammonium nitrate, no chemical fertilizers, no plastics, no petrochemical industry, basically a twentieth century that would be unrecognizable.

[PTTG]

Let's say that chemistry science is unchanged, but there's something weird in the atmosphere, in trace amounts, that has no effect except to make explosions produce large amounts of soot.

Side effect of that is, of course, that nuclear bombs have even worse consequences.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Let's say that chemistry science is unchanged, but there's something weird in the atmosphere, in trace amounts, that has no effect except to make explosions produce large amounts of soot.

Side effect of that is, of course, that nuclear bombs have even worse consequences.

That's more handwavy than I would ever use myself, but okay.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Purple Haze

No smokeless powder mean no nitroglycerin, no nitrocellulose, no trinitrotoluene, but also no ammonium nitrate, no chemical fertilizers, no plastics, no petrochemical industry, basically a twentieth century that would be unrecognizable.

If you don't have nitrates you don't have gunpowder either; potassium nitrate (saltpeter) is kind of important to gunpowder.

It's really hard to come up with a way to get past TL 5 and we don't get some form of smokeless powder, though it doesn't have to be nitrocellulose-based.

[Jonas]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Let's say that chemistry science is unchanged, but there's something weird in the atmosphere, in trace amounts, that has no effect except to make explosions produce large amounts of soot.

Side effect of that is, of course, that nuclear bombs have even worse consequences.

Considering the same thing that eliminates Smokeless Powder also eliminates (far as I know) the roots that lead to the high explosives needed to make nuclear weapons viable I don't think you'd need to worry about that. I think this might be akin to asking how to get to TL6 without say discovering Electricity and have just as radical an impact.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Let's say that chemistry science is unchanged, but there's something weird in the atmosphere, in trace amounts, that has no effect except to make explosions produce large amounts of soot.

Once you have cartridges, propellant is sealed, making atmospheric properties irrelevant.

[Minuteman37]

All tests done to stabilize Nitroglycerine either failed miserably with large explosions or the result was TOO stable for military applications.