Would it be possible to have a land with limited ressources for gunpowder?

[Thrawn4]

Hi there.
So I am tinkering with a setting idea and I was wondering whether it would be realistic to make gunpowder available, but limit the available ressources, so that not everybody is rushing to build
Apparently you need Potassium nitrate and Sulfur, so maybe I could just state that it is difficult to come by? I am not even sure how many ways there are to harvest/mine those ressources.

Edit: Or whether it is even realistic to say "No Potassium nitrate here"

[Knaight]

Not only would it be possible, it was the historical norm*. One of the raw materials that was usually involved in gunpowder production was bat guano, and it was a strategic resource that people fought over and which was excavated en mass. It turns out that it's the nitrate more than anything that limited production, and that bat guano was effectively necessary once production ramped up to colonial era levels. WWI Germany even came very close to running out of gunpowder because of losing access to and using up guano reserves - at which point the Haber process was developed, switching the nitrate source over to atmospheric nitrogen and a few other more limited reactants that still vastly exceeded gunpowder needs.

*Technically it's still the case, in that all resources are limited, but concerns like running out over the course of one war are a thing of the past.

[factotum]

Note that the other main ingredient (sulphur, aka biblical brimstone) is widely available, and it would be very unlikely to have a setting where that isn't available.

However, surely the easiest way to limit gunpowder availability is to have it not having been invented in your timeline?

[TheManicMonocle]

You could also have a social constraint. Suppose there's a gunmakers guild who jealously guards the secret to gun powder and only they make guns? They don't have the man power to mass produce the guns so they're limited.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Sulfur isn't really needed for gunpowder. I'm sure it offers some advantages, but the stuff works pretty well with just charcoal for fuel.

Which leaves the potassium nitrate, the oxygen containing component. This can be made not just from guano, but from most kinds of excrement including human. It is however much harder to produce a relatively pure version of the stuff than it is for the other two ingredients. If you want gunpowder to really be limited I'd say the best way is to limit the purification technology available. Make sure they really do need certain types of **** deposits. It might be either that or replace gunpowder with a functionally similar but chemically different fantasy compound, because charcoal is kind of easy to come by.

[Frozen_Feet]

You can create resources for gunpowder from burned wood and dead bodies if you know how. The key part being "if you know how". If only one formula of gunpowder production is known, a civilization might be limited to mineral saltpeter mined from a specific source. That's how it was in my setting. (No large flocks of cave-dwelling bats existed on that continent.)

[Manga Shoggoth]

Edit: Or whether it is even realistic to say "No Potassium nitrate here"

There's such a thing as nitre beds, which produce nitrates from urine. If I recall correctly in Napoleonic times they used to do simillar things with animal manure as well (looking for deposits in barns).

It isn't realistic to say "no nitrates", but you could limit the supply because people are ... reluctant ... to assist in the making of supply. Again, I think Napoleon had to pass laws to make people comply.

[Khedrac]

It isn't realistic to say "no nitrates", but you could limit the supply because people are ... reluctant ... to assist in the making of supply. Again, I think Napoleon had to pass laws to make people comply.

More tot he point may be what the English did to get potassium nitrate at that time (because we had no other suitable supplies). I won't give the details as I think that may sail too close to politics, but you can easily look it up.

More feasible is what was said earlier about limiting the knowledge of how to make either gunpowder or potassium nitrate. What you can be assured of, is that everyone without the knowledge will be frantically trying to get it!

[Brother Oni]

Sulfur isn't really needed for gunpowder. I'm sure it offers some advantages, but the stuff works pretty well with just charcoal for fuel.

Looking it up, in black powder, sulphur is a key ingredient as it both provides fuel and lowers the ignition temperature.
Without looking into the chemistry further, it could be the difference between gunpowder being a practical weapon and an expensive novelty of little military use.

Looking into the composition of various black powders, the lowest ratio was 10% sulphur, used for cannon and rockets as they needed a comparatively slow burning powder compared to muskets (which went as high as 16%). Blasting powder for mining operations was ~30% sulphur, but that was unsuitable for weaponry as it burnt too quick.

You can create resources for gunpowder from burned wood and dead bodies if you know how. The key part being "if you know how". If only one formula of gunpowder production is known, a civilization might be limited to mineral saltpeter mined from a specific source. That's how it was in my setting. (No large flocks of cave-dwelling bats existed on that continent.)

Indeed. I remember reading somewhere of a jealously guarded gunpowder recipe from pre-Sengoku era Japan which involved earth from under a torii gate of a particular temple, presumably because the soil had one of the key ingredient for gunpowder.

[Gnoman]

While there are many ways to get saltpeter, all of the alternatives to guano (which built massive saltpeter deposits over centuries) are sharply limited. Gunpowder manufacture in the colonies during the American Revolution, for example, was never anything close to enough to fight the war, entirely due to saltpeter shortages.

[wumpus]

You would also need to be technologically limited. Germany needed access to South American guano to continue WWI (nobody imagined they would need that much powder. The Russians *knew* they were short before it happened but figured "it would be decided by lance and sabre anyway, so don't bother".

The Germans *did* know how to make guncotton, and thus the war dragged ever on.

Had I been in charge of Union troops, I'd have tried to arrange inventing* the battle of Verdun (basically an artillery duel, regardless of what videogames might portray) and use up the Confederacy's powder. But it sounds like the powers that were had no intention of raising the necessary taxes for such, but didn't have any problem drafting poor sods to die instead.

* it would involve slowly dragging naval cannon from DC to Richmond, probably building a train to do it (or repairing the previous tracks that the Confederacy would have to rip up). The technology of the time certainly favored the defender, if not quite so much as WWI.

[Gnoman]

You would also need to be technologically limited. Germany needed access to South American guano to continue WWI (nobody imagined they would need that much powder.

That sounds extremely dubious, as guano was only useful in the production of black powder. Blackpowder weapons would have been only slightly less useful than pikes to the armies of 1914, as the smokeless powders developed in the late 19th century were vastly superior in every way.

[factotum]

That sounds extremely dubious, as guano was only useful in the production of black powder. Blackpowder weapons would have been only slightly less useful than pikes to the armies of 1914, as the smokeless powders developed in the late 19th century were vastly superior in every way.

Some of those smokeless powders also used potassium nitrate, though, so needing a steady source of bat guano in 1914 isn't completely beyond the bounds of possibility.

[Knaight]

That sounds extremely dubious, as guano was only useful in the production of black powder. Blackpowder weapons would have been only slightly less useful than pikes to the armies of 1914, as the smokeless powders developed in the late 19th century were vastly superior in every way.

Smokeless powders still need nitrogen (it's a rare explosive that doesn't, although there are a few ways to make them happen by doing disgusting things to bond angles), and prior to the development of the Haber process bat guano was a good source of nitrogen in general.

[Gnoman]

My understanding was that the nitric acid used in smokeless powder manufacture was from a completely different mineral source, but on further research I somehow mixed up ammonium nitrate and potassium nitrate as the source of said acid.

[gomipile]

More tot he point may be what the English did to get potassium nitrate at that time (because we had no other suitable supplies). I won't give the details as I think that may sail too close to politics, but you can easily look it up.

I did some "easily" constructed Google searches and didn't see anything about the English getting their niter in a different manner to others during the Napoleonic era. I'm fairly familiar with the technical specifics of several historical methods of niter acquisition, production, and refining, and I have absolutely no idea what you are referring to in this paragraph.

[Rockphed]

I did some "easily" constructed Google searches and didn't see anything about the English getting their niter in a different manner to others during the Napoleonic era. I'm fairly familiar with the technical specifics of several historical methods of niter acquisition, production, and refining, and I have absolutely no idea what you are referring to in this paragraph.

There was a nasty rumor propagated that the English were getting their phosphorus by raiding catacombs, but I'm pretty sure it was just a nasty rumor invented by their enemies. They actually got their fertilizer by claiming otherwise barren rocks that sea birds liked to nest/congregate on and then mining all the guano.

[Khedrac]

I did some "easily" constructed Google searches and didn't see anything about the English getting their niter in a different manner to others during the Napoleonic era. I'm fairly familiar with the technical specifics of several historical methods of niter acquisition, production, and refining, and I have absolutely no idea what you are referring to in this paragraph.

There was a nasty rumor propagated that the English were getting their phosphorus by raiding catacombs, but I'm pretty sure it was just a nasty rumor invented by their enemies. They actually got their fertilizer by claiming otherwise barren rocks that sea birds liked to nest/congregate on and then mining all the guano.

Trying not to cross into politics...

We empowered officials with quite far reaching powers to seize animal (including human) waste and to "mine" land that had been enriched by such waste. So it's not so much the sources, ans what the government did to get its supply from them (which is politics so I am not going to say any more).

[gomipile]

Trying not to cross into politics...

We empowered officials with quite far reaching powers to seize animal (including human) waste and to "mine" land that had been enriched by such waste. So it's not so much the sources, ans what the government did to get its supply from them (which is politics so I am not going to say any more).

Ah. Thanks.


Well, let's apply that in reverse to the OP. One could imagine a fictional world where there is a cultural prohibition on digging up past cesspits within a certain number of years, etc.

[Keltest]

So, heres something I don't see brought up often. Its your world, right? Just change the chemical makeup of gunpowder. Its not actually made the same way it is in the real world, its alchemy, or some other (pseudo)science. Maybe you need to harvest the toxic powder of some rare mushroom as an ingredient. Maybe you need to be a master of fire magic. Maybe its a gift from the god of gratuitous explosions.

A bonus feature of this is that you don't have people who think theyre clever trying to reproduce it from what they know of real gunpowder.

[Rockphed]

So, heres something I don't see brought up often. Its your world, right? Just change the chemical makeup of gunpowder. Its not actually made the same way it is in the real world, its alchemy, or some other (pseudo)science. Maybe you need to harvest the toxic powder of some rare mushroom as an ingredient. Maybe you need to be a master of fire magic. Maybe its a gift from the god of gratuitous explosions.

A bonus feature of this is that you don't have people who think theyre clever trying to reproduce it from what they know of real gunpowder.

Oh, people who use the knowledge of real world gunpowder to try to create gunpowder get very, very effective gunpowder as a gift from the God of Gratuitous Explosions. It promptly blows up in their faces. The harder they try to perfect the recipe, the more of his attention they receive and the more it explodes in their faces. After about a week, they are either dead or are gifted with a barrel of perfectly normal gunpowder and a note warning them about the risks of experimenting in powers beyond their ken. If they continue to experiment, all their attempts are duds.

[factotum]

So, heres something I don't see brought up often. Its your world, right? Just change the chemical makeup of gunpowder.

That would work provided you have a setup like "The Chronicles of Amber", where it's explicitly a multiverse where the laws of physics change slightly in between each world. The protagonist of that takes over a world by making guns on Earth using a propellant in the bullets that is actually inert here, but which works fine as an explosive on the destination plane.

[gomipile]

Sulfur gives blackpowder a lower ignition temperature and faster burn rate, allowing it to explode without confinement. This makes simple locks such as the flintlock possible. It also allows faster fuses to be made.

So, you could have a world with a much thicker crust and little or no volcanic activity, where most surface sulfur deposits have long since been eroded and diluted into the environment.

Someone might eventually figure out that a charcoal/niter mix can be used in the chamber of a firearm, with a very small amount of sulfur bearing gunpowder in a primer/ fuse at the touch hole capable of igniting it.