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My world has automation but I do not want guns or explosives. Yet, there is oil, and internal combustion to drive cars. I'd simply like no guns, for the purposes of the story.

They can have knives and arrows, etc.

Might my world be missing some compound, say potassium nitrate, and would that be sufficient to preclude the development of guns and explosives? I have a hard time imagining an earth like world with human like people and no potassium nitrate (since it is a simple chemical involving the elements of life.)

(I also suspect they could come up with another way to make guns that did not involve gunpowder.)

Is there a way that a technological world could exist and not have the ability to make guns?

(I can always write a law preventing them, but I'd rather not.)

SFWriter
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  • "invent" as in "put into widespread use" or as in "have general idea and one more or less functional prototype"? – Mołot Oct 21 '17 at 21:14
  • I am aiming for the latter. Ideally, they cannot be created because the planet is missing something. – SFWriter Oct 21 '17 at 21:23
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    I'd say "not really" because we have so many ways to make things go boom. Sadly can't gather enough evidence to make it an answer, and this isn't an reality check anyway. And what about air pressure guns? We had at least one somewhat effective as anti-personell and hunting weapon. – Mołot Oct 21 '17 at 21:38
  • @Molot the air pressure gun is a good point. – SFWriter Oct 22 '17 at 17:51
  • I decided to add a moral component (genetically dictated) that prevents use of guns. But it's not detailed in this story. So far, no one seems concerned by the lack of guns. – SFWriter Aug 02 '18 at 02:28

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There are things you can do to make guns less likely but I fear they will emerge eventually. The key question is what basic age do you want it to be set in? If you can set the age in which your story is set as early as possible it would help.Here are a few possibilities:

Gun power ingredient problems
Potassium nitrate and sulphur might occur in more dilute forms and might be combined with other materials that were hard to separate out, delaying the invention of gunpowder.

Climate difficulties
Very wet climatic conditions might make the use of gunpowder impractical

Less inquisitive behaviour
If society is somehow arranged so as to make invention and discovery un welcome then gun powder might also be delayed

Poor metallurgy
If metals are less available or tend to arrive with a lot of impurities it might be difficult to create sufficiently robust gun barrels.

Slarty
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  • I would think that any civilisation capable on constructing the internal combustion engine with its metal cylinders, could produce a metal cylinder capable of acting as a gun barrel. – Sarriesfan Oct 21 '17 at 21:47
  • @Sarriesfan -- you have to realize that internal combustion engine cylinders can be made with much more metal around them than a gunbarrel. – Shalvenay Oct 22 '17 at 01:00
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    @Shalvenay I do, but earlier guns were made of cast iron that was not as strong as the steel available in the late Victorian era when the internal combustion engine was invented using that steel.If you can make an engine I would still mantain you could make a gun, it may need a more robust gun carriage than we are used to and weigh more but it would still be functional. – Sarriesfan Oct 22 '17 at 07:11
  • This may give me a way out though, it seems reasonable that a heavy and inconvenient gun could exist (because it should, logically, given the world) yet be so unwieldy that it is not carried around as a means of defence. – SFWriter Oct 22 '17 at 14:19
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    Asimov chose unavailability of metals as a major constrain upon his Foundation. – ohwilleke Oct 22 '17 at 15:01
  • @DPT you should get an answer from a proper gunsmith, I am not one or a metallurgist for what the actual properties would be. I do know enough to say it's difficult to say that guns cannot be constructed on metallurgical reasons if you have devices such as internal combustion engines. – Sarriesfan Oct 22 '17 at 17:47
  • If you can make bronze bells, you can make a cannon. In fact, they were made exactly the same way. You could also weld iron metal rods together to make a barrel. It runs a high risk of bursting, but it was done. – Keith Morrison Oct 24 '17 at 02:27
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Gasoline + air + spark = bomb.

Coal dust + air + spark = bomb.

Grain dust + air + spark = bomb.

Closed container + water + sufficient heat = bomb.

Fertilizer + diesel + energy = bomb.

Silver + ammonia = silver nitride = BOOM!

Nitric acid + wood = guncotton, etc and so on.

Compressed air + quick release valve + barrel + bullet = gun (Airguns were developed in the 16th Century, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition carried Girandoni air rifles.

If the world has chemistry and physics like ours, there's simply no way to prevent things from going boom, and then people finding out ways to make things go boom.

Keith Morrison
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  • You are right, however it should be possible to delay things by making the circumstances awkward. Gun power was the principle explosive used for centuries and was only adopted slowly. If potassium nitrate and sulphur were harder to extract and refine then it might well have slowed progress. I like the idea of a grain gun and I have heard of explosions caused by fine organic dust such as flour in a mill, but I fear it would not be practical weapon ;o) – Slarty Oct 24 '17 at 09:19
  • Sulphur is trivial to get, if the planet is like our with life like ours. Native sulfur is found (and mined) at hot springs and volcanoes. It is found in deposits where bacteria break down sulphide minerals. It's a very common element (10th most common in the universe). Potassium nitrate requires some knowledge, but is also relatively easy to extract, create, and/or purify. – Keith Morrison Oct 30 '17 at 15:05
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Yes: Your world has extreme atmospheric density. While this won't completely take out guns and explosives it will severely limit their power. Note that it will also lower the performance of internal combustion engines and eliminate any form of high speed flight. (No space program unless you launch from high altitude balloons.)

Loren Pechtel
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  • The amount of pressure necessary to contain an explosion would be so high that you're talking obscene levels that would be hostile to life as we know it. – Keith Morrison Oct 23 '17 at 02:32
  • @KeithMorrison There's nothing about pressure that's inherently a problem for life. We are adapted for a certain pressure but life lives in the deep sea without problems. There's no reason it couldn't live in much more pressure. – Loren Pechtel Oct 23 '17 at 04:54
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    Except higher pressure makes explosives more effective, not less. A denser atmosphere will cause shrapnel to lose power more quickly due to air resistance but the actual shockwave will travel further faster and carry more of its power before dissipating. To put it another way, an M67 grenade has an effective range of 15 meters in air; beyond that the fragments are slow enough to not cause significant injury and actual shockwave from the explosion would do you no harm at all. Be in a pool and someone drops a grenade in the other end and you could be killed by the shockwave. – Keith Morrison Oct 24 '17 at 02:36
  • Or consider an automobile: the explosion that occurs inside the cylinder of an average car with a 10:1 compression ratio takes place at a pressure of over 200 psi (equivalent to about 450 feet underwater). The operation of the engine depends on the fact the explosion is more efficient at higher pressure. – Keith Morrison Oct 24 '17 at 02:44
  • @KeithMorrison That isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to the pressure I'm thinking of. Looking through a list of explosives the highest detonation pressure I'm finding is 389 kbar. How much boom do you get if the ambient pressure is a megabar? – Loren Pechtel Oct 24 '17 at 02:46
  • The pressure on the surface of Venus is 93 bar. The pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench is 1 kilobar. The highest pressure in which a few bacteria have survived in an experiment is 16 kilobar. At 100 kilobar, water is still solid ice at up to 300 degrees C; at 1 megabar, water is still solid at temperatures (assuming the slope of my phase diagram stays constant) of over 1000 C. You aren't talking "atmosphere", you're talking "rock". See previous comment for "hostile to life as we know it". – Keith Morrison Oct 24 '17 at 16:11
  • @KeithMorrison I fully agree it's hostile to life as we know it. That doesn't mean life couldn't evolve for such an environment. – Loren Pechtel Oct 24 '17 at 17:11
  • Except that does match the criteria of the original question, so your statement is irrelevant. – Keith Morrison Oct 24 '17 at 18:12
  • @KeithMorrison I see nothing about the question that precludes high-pressure-adapted life. The chemistry would be somewhat different but the same fundamental forces would be at work. Life will be adapted to the pressure it evolves in. We see no ultra-high-pressure life on Earth because there's no such environment for it to live in. That doesn't mean you can't have such a world. This got me to thinking--could there be inhabited stars? (There are stars whose surface is of a temperature that's comfortable to us.) – Loren Pechtel Oct 25 '17 at 04:20
  • "They can have arrows". Projectile weapons are remarkably ineffective when they are trying to go through something that makes rock look like a liquid. As would be cars. Or movement in general. Using the approximation of the ideal gas law, pure hydrogen at a temperature of 0 C would have a density of nearly 89,000 kg/m^3. That's 4 times the density of osmium. – Keith Morrison Oct 25 '17 at 16:26
  • @KeithMorrison The ideal gas law doesn't work right at that kind of density--you'll need something else to figure out what it is. The whole point was to make fast movement impractical. I don't know exactly what pressure you need to limit explosives to what he wants, I was just showing that enough pressure would do it. – Loren Pechtel Oct 25 '17 at 23:38
  • Of course it doesn't work...because at those pressures a gas has long since become a solid. "Fast movement" doesn't become impractical, it becomes impossible. In the Earth's upper mantle, at far lower pressures (the pressure reaches 1 megabar just above the core) has "fast" movement of 20mm/year. – Keith Morrison Oct 26 '17 at 01:27
  • @KeithMorrison Gases won't turn into solids, they are above their critical point. – Loren Pechtel Oct 26 '17 at 03:45