This anon gets it. Air guns ftw. They're already available in legal full auto without an SOT and supressed.
I have zero knowledge about air guns. But my intuition is that armor would have quickly make it Louis and Clark’s air gun obsolete. So we would be back to hand to hand combat. But once electricity is discovered, and better canister materials are developed, the idea might reemerge. Whether or not Gauss cannon’s are invented is up in the air, but my guess would be that they would be utilized for fortifications defense or assault. Gauss cannon’s on tanks would be fun to imagine though.
Flamethrowers were invented to solve a particular problem. That being trench warfare and bunkers. It’s useless against castle or stone fort walls. So that’s why it was never developed during the Prussian or Civil War. So in this hypothetical where everyone is still using swords and spears, and trench is not a thing…how would you see it being utilized?
>Flamethrowers were invented to solve a particular problem. That being trench warfare and bunkers. It’s useless against castle or stone fort walls. So that’s why it was never developed during the Prussian or Civil War.
Oh yeah sure, totally unheard of as anti boat or fortified position incendiary device in say late antiquity/early middle age...
In the medieval times (as guns are medieval technology) men were using firearms to launch burning "arrows" or darts.
There exists several designs of Byzantine "sprayers", like a child's super soaker, made to throw flamable liquid over an enemy.
Similar pump sprayers were used as niche weapons at other times in history, by other cultures.
Clearly, the idea of using a weapon to "throw" fire was not novel in the 1900s, and didn't actually need the gun to exist in parallel.
The evolution of the pump sprayer was actually pushed forward by non military fields: Cleaning/pesticide, liquid transport (think gasoline), fire-fighting, even perfuming. So there would be spray pumps, no matter what, and I'm sure someone, at some point, would have turned a sprayer on an enemy, or noticed that a gas pump was extremely dangerous around fire, the battle tactics of the Byzantines aside.
In your world of the extreme dominance of dense heavy infantry, the flamethrower would be a MORE appealing idea, I suspect we'd see more attempts at a primitive pump-guns even in the renaissance, if anything.
The only reason that flamethrowers weren't more common in history is that sourcing fuel and reliably igniting it were actually quite difficult, relative to today, and the gun was a supreme alternative for most applications.
flamethowers are at their most effective when used against fortifications, because they suck all the oxygen out of enclosed spaces in addition to setting everything ablaze
Roasting the sword and spear guys before they close into you. Flamethrowers would probably be even more popular because they're the closest thing to a sustained-fire weapon that isn't a total meme like the repeating crossbow.
>it was never developed during the Prussian or Civil War.
Think anon, they had guns for those. A flamethrower's max range restricts its ability to be used against people who can simply shoot its operator from far off, rendering it mainly a tactical weapon. >It’s useless against castle or stone fort walls. >in this hypothetical where everyone is still using swords and spears, and trench is not a thing…how would you see it being utilized?
How it was actually utilized. Picrel was used by the Byzantines for naval engagements and on the battlefield. It wasn't widely used after them because they kept the recipe for Greek Fire a secret. So secretive that we still don't know what the frick it actually was. Assuming the knowledge of how to make it spread, we'd have seen more of these around. The range of a flamethrower is really fricking great when you have a bunch of dudes trying to stab you. Can't close the gap if you're being turned into a well done cut of man meat.
It would be interesting to see how fire shapes the battlefield and the average soldier's kit in a world without gunpowder. Warfare would almost certainly become far more horrific as well, everything just burned away for miles on a battlefield.
My dude, fossil fuels weren't nearly as developed in the Prussian/Civil War as they were in WW1. We had better technology to spew firey liquid later on.
Average level 4 plate stops just about everything out there in regard to small arms (with very few exceptions that are not the norm). And there's technically level 5 armor out there as of the moment that can stop even those unique AP rounds.
So if armor didn't make firearms obsolete, I don't see why armor would make airguns obsolete since it's impractical to create a full bodysuit for every soldier. Not to mention simply from a civilian/leo perspective, airguns would be used for home defense and policing. Lastly airguns today can shoot a 45 caliber projectile at 1000fps which is pretty much on par with a firearm shooting a 45acp bullet. Guns would be bulkier though that's for sure. Not too much CCW I'd think with the exception of one or two shots out of a small canister
There's a matter of scale.
The comparison between modern bullets and modern armor is not apt, because of the relative difference of weight in armor to stop them. There are very few, if any, man portable bullet firing airguns today that could penetrate even the most basic Kevlar armor, and would likewise probably struggle with good quality plate armor + Gambeson, or worse, Plate, Chain, and Gambeson. Early airguns, the type that actually existed in history, would be functionally useless against armored infantry, and would need to be scaled up massively to be effective for things besides shooting civilians or animals.
That isnt to say that air powered weapons wouldnt be used, see
A modern crossbow with a draw weight of under 150 pounds is as powerful as an old steel arbalest with a draw of 1000 pounds. Logically, a modern style bow with a draw of 1000 pounds or more could be made, with a proportionally higher power.
While obviously inferior to gunpower as a power source, crossbows could still be used to penetrate armor (or force your enemy to wear more armor in the case of smaller crossbows, slowing down their army as a whole), they could also throw explosives of other kinds.
A 1000 pound modern crossbow shot would be more armor penetrative than the Musket by a substantial margin thanks to it's sectional density and hardened construction, though obviously more expensive and slower to fire.
[...]
Air cannons have excelled greatly since those days. The top speed a man portable air cannon has reached is around 1700fps, with a very small bullet of course, but that can be scaled up for larger scale weapons, meaning you could absolutely have airguns the size and strength of cannons, which would be absolutely vital for dealing with any kind of even primitive armored vehicle. As another point, a large single shot spear throwing airgun carried by a man was able to (just barely) penetrate a 6mm steel plate with a BN hardness of 450-550 using only a simple steel center punch as a head and an aluminum body, which you cannot armor an entire man with due to weight, and really wasn't a common hardness of mass produced steel until the last forty years or so. A line of men with such weapons, with stronger bolt shafts and harder tips, might drop their number in plate armored adversaries before having to engage in a Melee, a massive advantage.
The existence of airguns or crossbows of lower power would need no greater explanation than "they're extremely effective against people who cant produce plate armor, and they're the best hunting implements".
A modern crossbow with a draw weight of under 150 pounds is as powerful as an old steel arbalest with a draw of 1000 pounds. Logically, a modern style bow with a draw of 1000 pounds or more could be made, with a proportionally higher power.
While obviously inferior to gunpower as a power source, crossbows could still be used to penetrate armor (or force your enemy to wear more armor in the case of smaller crossbows, slowing down their army as a whole), they could also throw explosives of other kinds.
A 1000 pound modern crossbow shot would be more armor penetrative than the Musket by a substantial margin thanks to it's sectional density and hardened construction, though obviously more expensive and slower to fire.
[...]
[...]
I have zero knowledge about air guns. But my intuition is that armor would have quickly make it Louis and Clark’s air gun obsolete. So we would be back to hand to hand combat. But once electricity is discovered, and better canister materials are developed, the idea might reemerge. Whether or not Gauss cannon’s are invented is up in the air, but my guess would be that they would be utilized for fortifications defense or assault. Gauss cannon’s on tanks would be fun to imagine though.
Air cannons have excelled greatly since those days. The top speed a man portable air cannon has reached is around 1700fps, with a very small bullet of course, but that can be scaled up for larger scale weapons, meaning you could absolutely have airguns the size and strength of cannons, which would be absolutely vital for dealing with any kind of even primitive armored vehicle. As another point, a large single shot spear throwing airgun carried by a man was able to (just barely) penetrate a 6mm steel plate with a BN hardness of 450-550 using only a simple steel center punch as a head and an aluminum body, which you cannot armor an entire man with due to weight, and really wasn't a common hardness of mass produced steel until the last forty years or so. A line of men with such weapons, with stronger bolt shafts and harder tips, might drop their number in plate armored adversaries before having to engage in a Melee, a massive advantage.
The existence of airguns or crossbows of lower power would need no greater explanation than "they're extremely effective against people who cant produce plate armor, and they're the best hunting implements".
Let's see: I assume you mean that *any chemical reaction that leads to an explosion is not present;
Then we'd still have flamethrowers, and very sophisticated mechanical firing devices like cross bows, that are possibly electrically cranked.
Electricity in general would play a big role - tasers but bigger.
Swords would still suck.
Not to mention vacuum weapons and bombs can frick you up just because of air pressure and shields won't defend against your lungs and brain from imploding.
I’ve only seen the first Dune movie, but can someone explain to me what the point of shields on ships are if munitions can still past through them?
When the Harkonnen’s attacked, they blew up all of the Atreides’ ships and the shields on them seemed to do frick all against the (what looked like) high explosive shells that were hitting them. It just slowed them down enough to pass through the shield and they still went off when they made contact.
The harkonnen bombs only worked because they attacked by surprise while the atreides ships were static. The type of guided missile needed to defeat a shielded and moving target would have a much smaller payload and thus be less effective.
TLDR using heavy artillery on static targets is higly effective.
The bombs the Harkonnens used were specifically designed to pierce shields by slowing down. Those bombs, and the slow-pellet guns (one is fired at Duncan Idaho and Paul wields another when they get ambushed by Fremen), use suspensors to slowly hover through shields.
>I’ve only seen the first Dune movie, but can someone explain to me what the point of shields on ships are if munitions can still past through them?
Did you notice those munitions slowed down before passing through the shields? and it took a second or two?
Imagine trying that with a moving ship, maybe even with point defense guns. Pretty low success rate I imagine.
The point is that Villeneuve just put a bunch of shit in the movie that didn't make sense with the premise.
There's literally no other explanation: shields make sense in the books; movie added things that stopped them making sense
I think Frank Herbert just didn't take the time to think through the plot holes with his Holzman shield because technology and how they actually apply with IRL physics wasn't central themes. The fact that troop numbers could only be deployed in limited amounts due to spacing guilds cost would realistically always place a numerically and logistically superior defender in the advantage. This is kinda glossed over or infered that every "warrior" in the Dune universe are fricking superhuman by our standards.
shields in dune stop fast moving objects but they're also airtight, which saved the baron from duke leto's gas attack, but it also means shields have to be periodically turned off so the user can breathe
shields also work both ways, so if you're firing out of a shield it has to be turned off, and there's a delay as it turns back on and charges up, which is what Paul and Chani exploited with the rocket launcher in dune 2
slow moving projectiles can get through the shield, which is why in melee combat the swords are slowed as they enter the shield to bypass it, then rotate and slice with a pulling motion across arteries. poison darts are also used, but they're basically mini self guided rockets that shoot at the shield user, decelerate, and push through the shield
shields are used universally except for on Arrakis because the shields attract sandworms
lasguns, which is why the fremen had such success with them as the harkonnens couldn't use shields
the only place on Arrakis shields could be used was arakeen because of the shield wall (a mountain range, nothing to do with the tech) which prevented sandworms from accessing the polar basin. because the harkonnens and sardaukar could use shields in there, the fremen were at a disadvantage because they didn't have shields.
atomics overload shields but Paul couldn't use them on human targets directly because of the convention which - if broken - would result in every other great house nuking Paul back. as long as he doesn't use atomics on human targets the great houses won't use atomics on him and the fremen.
so he used them on the shield wall mountains to break it, allowing his worms access to arakeen and also disabling the harkonnen and sardaukar shields, and circumventing the convention
The lack of explosives in civilization would have a profound on warfare than simply there being no guns. Consider what it means without the combustion engine — industrialization would be frozen from the steam engine until the electric motor. That means your army is on horses and wagon trains and it would look more like a medieval army. In today’s age electric-powered vehicles would have replaced wagons — but since there’s no ranged weapon more energetic than a crossbow they don’t need to be armored. Warfare would be trying to assault the enemy position through crossbow fire to get into melee with cavalry on electric bikes. The shield wall will be the main defensive system with high-end materials being hard to deal with.
The same as gunpowder warfare but with crossbows. Everything would revolve around flinging projectiles as fast as possible because the laws of physics rule warfare.
Gas is impractical because it's subject to wind and therefore a WMD no matter how you slice it. If you can't control who your weapon kills, the weapon is immoral by default.
Lasers are radiation weapons and Dune has them. They cause nuclear explosions on contact with the shield.
>Unpredictable gas weapons
That's cause we don't develop them. What's stopping me from shooting a paintball gun at a shield wearer with gas pellets filled with nerve agents? He has to breathe so it'll bypass even if the pellet splats on the shield.
I'm referring more to contaminate weaponry eather than directed.
So you're saying regarding the ethical aspects in Dune that I would be committing a war crime or heresy if I bring pic related to the battle just to frick with shield frickers?
>Unpredictable gas weapons
That's cause we don't develop them. What's stopping me from shooting a paintball gun at a shield wearer with gas pellets filled with nerve agents? He has to breathe so it'll bypass even if the pellet splats on the shield.
I'm referring more to contaminate weaponry eather than directed.
So you're saying regarding the ethical aspects in Dune that I would be committing a war crime or heresy if I bring pic related to the battle just to frick with shield frickers?
Gas is impractical because it's subject to wind and therefore a WMD no matter how you slice it. If you can't control who your weapon kills, the weapon is immoral by default.
Lasers are radiation weapons and Dune has them. They cause nuclear explosions on contact with the shield.
Arent Gas weapons common in Dune?
The very first book (and all film versions) feature a poison weapon the size of a tooth that kills an entire room full of people.
It would look like a monster truck show crossed with a riot.
Internal combustion engines would still be discovered, and people would eventually build things resembling tanks. These would devastate infantry/cavalry armies as they could just drive into and disrupt enemy formations.
For a long time, the arms race would be about building bigger, stonger tanks. Instead of guns they would attack with arrows or just simpy driving into the enemy. With internal combustion engines available though, people would also discover Molotov coctails, so there would be flamable liquid based anti-tank weapons. Flame-based weapons (basically Greek Fire) could also be attached to tanks though, and aircraft can also drop firebombs. Apart from anti-tank weapons, infantry would mostly use bows and swords/spears, and would only fight in formation if they knew aircraft and vehicles aren't around.
Also, with no gunpowder, castles would still be very effective. In sieges, attackers would use miliarized verions of bulldozers, wrecking balls etc.
Joerg Sprave would be in place of John Moses Browning and the chinese would seethe about we wuz automatic crossbows an shiet instead of we wuz gunpowder n shiet.
swoosh swoosh clink clink clink bonk gaughhh shhhhling
>Let me show you it's features
lancer drones instead of lancet drones
This anon gets it. Air guns ftw. They're already available in legal full auto without an SOT and supressed.
I have zero knowledge about air guns. But my intuition is that armor would have quickly make it Louis and Clark’s air gun obsolete. So we would be back to hand to hand combat. But once electricity is discovered, and better canister materials are developed, the idea might reemerge. Whether or not Gauss cannon’s are invented is up in the air, but my guess would be that they would be utilized for fortifications defense or assault. Gauss cannon’s on tanks would be fun to imagine though.
Flamethrowers would render most armor irrelevent.
Flamethrowers were invented to solve a particular problem. That being trench warfare and bunkers. It’s useless against castle or stone fort walls. So that’s why it was never developed during the Prussian or Civil War. So in this hypothetical where everyone is still using swords and spears, and trench is not a thing…how would you see it being utilized?
They would be invented to solve the problem of armored infantry square
>Flamethrowers were invented to solve a particular problem. That being trench warfare and bunkers. It’s useless against castle or stone fort walls. So that’s why it was never developed during the Prussian or Civil War.
Oh yeah sure, totally unheard of as anti boat or fortified position incendiary device in say late antiquity/early middle age...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire
In the medieval times (as guns are medieval technology) men were using firearms to launch burning "arrows" or darts.
There exists several designs of Byzantine "sprayers", like a child's super soaker, made to throw flamable liquid over an enemy.
Similar pump sprayers were used as niche weapons at other times in history, by other cultures.
Clearly, the idea of using a weapon to "throw" fire was not novel in the 1900s, and didn't actually need the gun to exist in parallel.
The evolution of the pump sprayer was actually pushed forward by non military fields: Cleaning/pesticide, liquid transport (think gasoline), fire-fighting, even perfuming. So there would be spray pumps, no matter what, and I'm sure someone, at some point, would have turned a sprayer on an enemy, or noticed that a gas pump was extremely dangerous around fire, the battle tactics of the Byzantines aside.
In your world of the extreme dominance of dense heavy infantry, the flamethrower would be a MORE appealing idea, I suspect we'd see more attempts at a primitive pump-guns even in the renaissance, if anything.
The only reason that flamethrowers weren't more common in history is that sourcing fuel and reliably igniting it were actually quite difficult, relative to today, and the gun was a supreme alternative for most applications.
flamethowers are at their most effective when used against fortifications, because they suck all the oxygen out of enclosed spaces in addition to setting everything ablaze
Roasting the sword and spear guys before they close into you. Flamethrowers would probably be even more popular because they're the closest thing to a sustained-fire weapon that isn't a total meme like the repeating crossbow.
>it was never developed during the Prussian or Civil War.
Think anon, they had guns for those. A flamethrower's max range restricts its ability to be used against people who can simply shoot its operator from far off, rendering it mainly a tactical weapon.
>It’s useless against castle or stone fort walls.
>in this hypothetical where everyone is still using swords and spears, and trench is not a thing…how would you see it being utilized?
How it was actually utilized. Picrel was used by the Byzantines for naval engagements and on the battlefield. It wasn't widely used after them because they kept the recipe for Greek Fire a secret. So secretive that we still don't know what the frick it actually was. Assuming the knowledge of how to make it spread, we'd have seen more of these around. The range of a flamethrower is really fricking great when you have a bunch of dudes trying to stab you. Can't close the gap if you're being turned into a well done cut of man meat.
It would be interesting to see how fire shapes the battlefield and the average soldier's kit in a world without gunpowder. Warfare would almost certainly become far more horrific as well, everything just burned away for miles on a battlefield.
My dude, fossil fuels weren't nearly as developed in the Prussian/Civil War as they were in WW1. We had better technology to spew firey liquid later on.
Average level 4 plate stops just about everything out there in regard to small arms (with very few exceptions that are not the norm). And there's technically level 5 armor out there as of the moment that can stop even those unique AP rounds.
So if armor didn't make firearms obsolete, I don't see why armor would make airguns obsolete since it's impractical to create a full bodysuit for every soldier. Not to mention simply from a civilian/leo perspective, airguns would be used for home defense and policing. Lastly airguns today can shoot a 45 caliber projectile at 1000fps which is pretty much on par with a firearm shooting a 45acp bullet. Guns would be bulkier though that's for sure. Not too much CCW I'd think with the exception of one or two shots out of a small canister
There's a matter of scale.
The comparison between modern bullets and modern armor is not apt, because of the relative difference of weight in armor to stop them. There are very few, if any, man portable bullet firing airguns today that could penetrate even the most basic Kevlar armor, and would likewise probably struggle with good quality plate armor + Gambeson, or worse, Plate, Chain, and Gambeson. Early airguns, the type that actually existed in history, would be functionally useless against armored infantry, and would need to be scaled up massively to be effective for things besides shooting civilians or animals.
That isnt to say that air powered weapons wouldnt be used, see
only that the specific comparison doesn't work.
A modern crossbow with a draw weight of under 150 pounds is as powerful as an old steel arbalest with a draw of 1000 pounds. Logically, a modern style bow with a draw of 1000 pounds or more could be made, with a proportionally higher power.
While obviously inferior to gunpower as a power source, crossbows could still be used to penetrate armor (or force your enemy to wear more armor in the case of smaller crossbows, slowing down their army as a whole), they could also throw explosives of other kinds.
A 1000 pound modern crossbow shot would be more armor penetrative than the Musket by a substantial margin thanks to it's sectional density and hardened construction, though obviously more expensive and slower to fire.
Air cannons have excelled greatly since those days. The top speed a man portable air cannon has reached is around 1700fps, with a very small bullet of course, but that can be scaled up for larger scale weapons, meaning you could absolutely have airguns the size and strength of cannons, which would be absolutely vital for dealing with any kind of even primitive armored vehicle. As another point, a large single shot spear throwing airgun carried by a man was able to (just barely) penetrate a 6mm steel plate with a BN hardness of 450-550 using only a simple steel center punch as a head and an aluminum body, which you cannot armor an entire man with due to weight, and really wasn't a common hardness of mass produced steel until the last forty years or so. A line of men with such weapons, with stronger bolt shafts and harder tips, might drop their number in plate armored adversaries before having to engage in a Melee, a massive advantage.
The existence of airguns or crossbows of lower power would need no greater explanation than "they're extremely effective against people who cant produce plate armor, and they're the best hunting implements".
Let's see: I assume you mean that *any chemical reaction that leads to an explosion is not present;
Then we'd still have flamethrowers, and very sophisticated mechanical firing devices like cross bows, that are possibly electrically cranked.
Electricity in general would play a big role - tasers but bigger.
Swords would still suck.
Someone else would invent it.
Here is a gun that doesn't use gunpowder.
you just use some other sort of propellant..
light gas guns would work just fine for anything bigger than a personal gun
So whats the next extension, what if combustion doesn't exist?
Yall homies are forgetting chemical, biological and atomic weapons
I think chemical weapons, flamethrowers, and crossbows would be the meta
there would be tanks, but they would launch acid globes at each other and grapple with dozer blades
Why wouldn't the tanks just launch bombs at each other with compressed air? A shaped Charge doesn't need velocity or gunpowder.
Not to mention vacuum weapons and bombs can frick you up just because of air pressure and shields won't defend against your lungs and brain from imploding.
I thought he was talking about the OP not about dune.
The OP just said "no guns".
Probably pneumatic weapons or some kind of arbalest that winds itself.
I don't think we would be using melee still in any circumstances.
I’ve only seen the first Dune movie, but can someone explain to me what the point of shields on ships are if munitions can still past through them?
When the Harkonnen’s attacked, they blew up all of the Atreides’ ships and the shields on them seemed to do frick all against the (what looked like) high explosive shells that were hitting them. It just slowed them down enough to pass through the shield and they still went off when they made contact.
The harkonnen bombs only worked because they attacked by surprise while the atreides ships were static. The type of guided missile needed to defeat a shielded and moving target would have a much smaller payload and thus be less effective.
TLDR using heavy artillery on static targets is higly effective.
The bombs the Harkonnens used were specifically designed to pierce shields by slowing down. Those bombs, and the slow-pellet guns (one is fired at Duncan Idaho and Paul wields another when they get ambushed by Fremen), use suspensors to slowly hover through shields.
>I’ve only seen the first Dune movie, but can someone explain to me what the point of shields on ships are if munitions can still past through them?
Did you notice those munitions slowed down before passing through the shields? and it took a second or two?
Imagine trying that with a moving ship, maybe even with point defense guns. Pretty low success rate I imagine.
The point is that Villeneuve just put a bunch of shit in the movie that didn't make sense with the premise.
There's literally no other explanation: shields make sense in the books; movie added things that stopped them making sense
But the bombs literally worked around the exact book shield mechanics you fricking sperg.
I think Frank Herbert just didn't take the time to think through the plot holes with his Holzman shield because technology and how they actually apply with IRL physics wasn't central themes. The fact that troop numbers could only be deployed in limited amounts due to spacing guilds cost would realistically always place a numerically and logistically superior defender in the advantage. This is kinda glossed over or infered that every "warrior" in the Dune universe are fricking superhuman by our standards.
fair enough, I'm just saying that specific thing is copacetic.
shields in dune stop fast moving objects but they're also airtight, which saved the baron from duke leto's gas attack, but it also means shields have to be periodically turned off so the user can breathe
shields also work both ways, so if you're firing out of a shield it has to be turned off, and there's a delay as it turns back on and charges up, which is what Paul and Chani exploited with the rocket launcher in dune 2
slow moving projectiles can get through the shield, which is why in melee combat the swords are slowed as they enter the shield to bypass it, then rotate and slice with a pulling motion across arteries. poison darts are also used, but they're basically mini self guided rockets that shoot at the shield user, decelerate, and push through the shield
shields are used universally except for on Arrakis because the shields attract sandworms
lasguns, which is why the fremen had such success with them as the harkonnens couldn't use shields
the only place on Arrakis shields could be used was arakeen because of the shield wall (a mountain range, nothing to do with the tech) which prevented sandworms from accessing the polar basin. because the harkonnens and sardaukar could use shields in there, the fremen were at a disadvantage because they didn't have shields.
atomics overload shields but Paul couldn't use them on human targets directly because of the convention which - if broken - would result in every other great house nuking Paul back. as long as he doesn't use atomics on human targets the great houses won't use atomics on him and the fremen.
so he used them on the shield wall mountains to break it, allowing his worms access to arakeen and also disabling the harkonnen and sardaukar shields, and circumventing the convention
The lack of explosives in civilization would have a profound on warfare than simply there being no guns. Consider what it means without the combustion engine — industrialization would be frozen from the steam engine until the electric motor. That means your army is on horses and wagon trains and it would look more like a medieval army. In today’s age electric-powered vehicles would have replaced wagons — but since there’s no ranged weapon more energetic than a crossbow they don’t need to be armored. Warfare would be trying to assault the enemy position through crossbow fire to get into melee with cavalry on electric bikes. The shield wall will be the main defensive system with high-end materials being hard to deal with.
he said gunpowder not gasses numnuts. Flamethrowers and air guns would be king
Probably a whole lot less gay.
Imagine modern warfare, but basically everything is conducted at Melee range, like in Dune.
Would be crazy awesome.
Turbohomosexual.
The same as gunpowder warfare but with crossbows. Everything would revolve around flinging projectiles as fast as possible because the laws of physics rule warfare.
Dune shields suck ass because there's no reason for anyone not using gas or radiation weapons to bypass Holtzman shields.
Gas is impractical because it's subject to wind and therefore a WMD no matter how you slice it. If you can't control who your weapon kills, the weapon is immoral by default.
Lasers are radiation weapons and Dune has them. They cause nuclear explosions on contact with the shield.
>Unpredictable gas weapons
That's cause we don't develop them. What's stopping me from shooting a paintball gun at a shield wearer with gas pellets filled with nerve agents? He has to breathe so it'll bypass even if the pellet splats on the shield.
I'm referring more to contaminate weaponry eather than directed.
So you're saying regarding the ethical aspects in Dune that I would be committing a war crime or heresy if I bring pic related to the battle just to frick with shield frickers?
Arent Gas weapons common in Dune?
The very first book (and all film versions) feature a poison weapon the size of a tooth that kills an entire room full of people.
flame throwers?
It would look like a monster truck show crossed with a riot.
Internal combustion engines would still be discovered, and people would eventually build things resembling tanks. These would devastate infantry/cavalry armies as they could just drive into and disrupt enemy formations.
For a long time, the arms race would be about building bigger, stonger tanks. Instead of guns they would attack with arrows or just simpy driving into the enemy. With internal combustion engines available though, people would also discover Molotov coctails, so there would be flamable liquid based anti-tank weapons. Flame-based weapons (basically Greek Fire) could also be attached to tanks though, and aircraft can also drop firebombs. Apart from anti-tank weapons, infantry would mostly use bows and swords/spears, and would only fight in formation if they knew aircraft and vehicles aren't around.
Also, with no gunpowder, castles would still be very effective. In sieges, attackers would use miliarized verions of bulldozers, wrecking balls etc.
Joerg Sprave would be in place of John Moses Browning and the chinese would seethe about we wuz automatic crossbows an shiet instead of we wuz gunpowder n shiet.