gunpowder

The premise of this what if/POD is essentially picking up the discovery of gun powder and putting it over here, here being somewhere in the Americas, while the Han Dynasty scholars who accidentally burnt their lab down just don't happen to stumble on the invention. This was inspired by the fact...

One of the most impactful Chinese inventions was that of gunpowder. It changed the face of warfare forever, arguably even more profoundly than the discovery of how to work iron, and the world would be unrecognizable without it. But I don't think it necessarily had to have been developed in...

Assume gunpowder is invented, studied, improved-upon and refined in prehistory, what would be the large-scale implications of such a discovery on culture, religion, warfare, superstition, traditions, etc? How would this affect the rise and fall of certain empires or peoplegroups in this...

Around here Roman or Greek gunpowder threads are an irregular but popular subject. But what if the nation that invented black powder had managed to do so several centuries earlier? Specifically, I was thinking during the 3rd or 4th centuries after the collapse of the Han, the warring kingdoms...

Alright so for this topic the basis is that blackpowder is never discovered in 11th century Song China. No one else in China is able to find or properly record it for quite some time, and when they do it just doesn't spread to the west. Now assuming first that the Mongols show up on schedule...

The idea of Rome discovering gunpowder has been touted before, largely on YouTube to be honest. It's the sort of thing that would revolutionize warfare no matter what, and has been used in numerous atls to save rome. But what if the Eastern Roman Empire discovered the secrets of gunpowder under...

Otl, gunpowder was discovered independently in the byzantine empire, and in contemporary china, most dating the difference by only 70 years, in favor of China. In any case, the Byzantines were in dire straits, and Alexios Kommenos ordered as much development of the explosive powder into weapons...

At the beginning of the gunpowder age, it seemed there was a huge variety of different applications. Over time, muskets and cannon became clearly the most effective uses of gunpowder, with Mysorean/Congreve style iron rockets as potential runners up, alongside mining under walls. What other...

How early could gunpowder have been invented?

IOTL, despite the rapid rise of gunpowder weaponry and China being its inventor and early pioneers, the bow and arrow were still seen in equal measure as much as gunpowder weapons were, your challenge is to create a scenario where the Ming dynasty has guns and cannons play a bigger role in their...

OOC (out of character for those who are new): DB means 'double-blind' where we ask a question which actually occurred in our timeline (OTL) from the perspective of someone in another TL where this happened differently. Anyway, gunpowder was thought to have been accidentally developed by the...

How likely is it that other places might independently develop gunpowder?

Repost from Writer's forum Hello. I am PrefectofTrebizond. Back in February, I posted a thread in Before 1900 called ‘The Philanthropenos Restoration.’ Over time, I stopped updating it, and forgetting my email password and having no recovery ability was the final nail in the coffin. I’m...

I was reading a translation of Ta'rīkh Al-Sūdān by the seventeenth-century Timbuktu scholar 'Abd al-Raḥmān al-Sa'dī recently and I was kinda intrigued by the historian's description of Askia Dawud, who ruled from 1549 to 1582. In the text and at least partially corroborated from what little I...

In 850 AD, a Chinese alchemist discovered gunpowder while trying to form life-extending elixirs. What if he didn't discover gunpowder, and just made a useless mixture instead?

Pretty self explanatory, how early could major Chinese inventions have reasonably gotten to Europe? Who would link the two civilizations?

With My Own New TL, where Arabs invent the gunpowder first, then second, the Umayyads overrun France and Italy, and thanks to who's discussed al-Andalus, Islamic France, and Islamic Italy on these forums over the years for leaving behind a massive body of discussion to trawl through over the...

With a POD after 1400, have the Mamluks become a "gunpowder empire" akin to the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals historically and conquer large swathes of the Middle East and North Africa. Bonus points if you have this hypothetical Mamluk "gunpowder empire" conquer the Ottomans as opposed to what...

So, in the early modern middle east and northern India, three states (the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals) were able to quickly adopt and establish local monopolies over gunpowder, and as a result were able to become vast space filling empires. Your mission, should you choose to accept...

The idea of exploding your gunpowder inside of a metal tube to propel a small piece of metal at your enemy is not exactly the most obvious way to use it. The most obvious use of gunpowder, and the one that the Chinese used for centuries, was rocketry and flame-throwers. I believe that if Europe...