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So it struck me, that up until the late 1800s, nothing about the gunpowder manufacturing process was greatly affected by other technological development. It was still pretty much a matter of fermenting stuff in piles, putting things in buckets, boiling stuff, evaporating the water off, and grinding stuff up. None of it requires any complicated equipment. Notably, none of it even requires metal tools. At a minimum, one needs to be able to make charcoal, to make watertight vessels that can be brought to a boil, and to be able to finely grind substances to a powder.
Fundamentally, I think gunpowder production could be done by a stone-age people, had they stumbled upon the recipe. Say, perhaps, while attempting to create a stronger form of jenkem, the tribe's shaman blows up the medicine hut, and after recreating the substance, the tribe takes to hunting mammoths with IEDs.
What kind of shenanigans could ancient people get up to with considerable access to gunpowder, but no metal?
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>>35135954
They did.
>The very earliest possible reference to gunpowder appeared in 142 AD during the Eastern Han dynasty, when the alchemist Wei Boyang wrote about a substance with the properties of gunpowder, and described a mixture of three powders that would "fly and dance" violently in his Cantong qi,
Recess is over. Get back to class.
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>>35135954
Ceramic grenades
>the key to using gun powder is the metal containing the gases, building pressure
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>>35135987
>Han Dynasty China
>Stone age
What
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>>35136095
So they had metal swords, big whoop. They still didn't have the concept of a canon yet.
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>>35136111
But it's not stone age, since they had fucking metal
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>>35136120
Which metal and gun powder were never combined. I know it triggers your autism, essentially the same thing. Also just because it was written about at that time doesn't mean that's when it was invented. It's just the "first record" thats in existence.
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>>35136111
>expecting a civilization to invent cannons before gunpowder
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>>35135954
Black powder burns more than it explodes. You can't "blow up the medecine hut" by accident with a small quantity of it in a pouch. Not sure they would understand that you can weaponize it. To obtain an explosion, you need to contain the gazes, so >>35135993
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>>35136464
>Expecting you to have reading comprehension
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>>35135954
>What kind of shenanigans could ancient people get up to with considerable access to gunpowder, but no metal?
Tree bombs.
Find an old tree trunk, hollow out the middle, plug it up with a rock and pile some rocks around the outside. Have some kind of long fuse to ignite it, and you've got a stone-age IED to blow shit up with.
I also remember this one Mythbusters episode where they made a cannon out of a huge log, but I think they used metal strengthening bands for that one.
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