Safeholdian firearms development

Hello, i'm a newcomer here that has just gotten through "Off Armageddon Reef" and I must say that I enjoyed the book. That said, I do have a comment to make involving the world presented. Specifically pertaining to the matter of gunpoweder weapons.

It is said that Gunpowder was developed in Harchong a little less than a century before the events of OAR, but when Nimue awakes ships are outfitted with cannons as their standard weapon and soldiers are armed with matchlock arquebuses and rifles. On earth the first instances of Gunpowder being used happened in Tang Dynasty china about 850 CE. Over the next century during period of civil war that lasted for 60 years, this was used in the first firearms which were to the effect of this...



...simple one shot bamboo tubes loaded with gunpowder and set off with a match. It took another 400 or so years of experimentation through intermediate steps like this...



...until you got something like this.



This design evolution was done by trial and error by people who did not have inquisitors with the proscriptions of Jwo-Jeng breathing down their neck.

My point is that guns seemed to evolve remarkably fast on Safehold even before Merlin made his appearance.


Zor

imperatorzor wrote:This design evolution was done by trial and error by people who did not have inquisitors with the proscriptions of Jwo-Jeng breathing down their neck.

My point is that guns seemed to evolve remarkably fast on Safehold even before Merlin made his appearance.


Zor

Welcome! Be careful for what will be spoilers for you on the forum, as we're several books ahead and will not offer restraint or spoiler warnings for anything more recent than the snippets for the next book, Hell's Foundations Quiver.

Safehold's general tech base is surprisingly advanced. In particular here, the metalworking industry pre-Merlin could be compared to that of Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Steam power faces relatively small technical hurdles, as pressure cooking (for instance) and sterilization with heat existed from the beginning. (Determining specific tolerances is something of an issue.) In effect, the tech base was pre-adapted to make considerable use of gunpowder.

That said, shipboard use of cannon is limited before Merlin. They're miserably slow to reload and unlikely to be decisive, so the galley - structurally unsuited to be a heavy gun platform - remains the primary warship and boarding the primary tactic. That boarding may get a little use of musketry and small anti-personnel cannons ("wolves" in Safehold parlance), but it's mostly a matter of melee weaponry, again on account of gunpowder weapons' inaccuracy and slow reloading.

Imperatorzor,

You are correct about how long it took on Earth, from the time gunpowder was invented in China to cannons in Europe. But I think the better comparison is the time it took from when gunpowder was introduced to Europe to the time when cannons were developed in Europe. We don't actually know when gunpowder was first invented on Safehold. It is likely that it was known for a long time before Harchong asked to be able to use it for digging canals. China never used gunpowder for anything like that, so Safehold was already well past China or early Europe by that time. From the use of gunpowder as construction explosive to the use in cannons is not that far.

SWM wrote:Imperatorzor,

You are correct about how long it took on Earth, from the time gunpowder was invented in China to cannons in Europe. But I think the better comparison is the time it took from when gunpowder was introduced to Europe to the time when cannons were developed in Europe. We don't actually know when gunpowder was first invented on Safehold. It is likely that it was known for a long time before Harchong asked to be able to use it for digging canals. China never used gunpowder for anything like that, so Safehold was already well past China or early Europe by that time. From the use of gunpowder as construction explosive to the use in cannons is not that far.

Not only that, sky rockets existed for a long time in China before gunpowder was used in cannons.

In contrast, rockets on Safehold were only just invented in the current war with no indication that the IDEA behind rockets existed anywhere at all beforehand. Meanwhile, gun technology had progressed as far as matchlocks.

Hey All and David and Tom

I'm waiting for someone to invent Gatling guns. I mean, seriously, those should be next after you have bolt action rifles. We developed those before we got automatics, and Safehold is getting close to even those...

So, David, Gatling was an inventive cuss... :}

Cheers!