Reasons why one nation may have firearms but another doesn't?

I'm developing a fantasy setting where there are several nations and cultures and they're each slightly off from each other in terms of technological advancement. The most notable difference is with the antagonist nation, which for plot reasons is the most advanced nation: they have steampunk-style tech like airships, crude armored tanks, and guns, and they use large machinery to strip-mine their land for minerals.

Their opponent is a monarchical wannabe-utopia with a tech advancement roughly on par with our late 1800s, at most.

My thought regarding guns is: they exist, but they're rare (or the ammo, or something about them that makes them infeasible for widespread use). When guns are seen, they're typically in the form of large rudimentary machine guns mounted on the antagonists' tanks, naval vessels, or airships.

But, like... why would guns be so scarce? My initial thought was that an ingredient in gunpowder is rare and so ammunition is expensive/scarce, but that doesn't really hold up after researching it - charcoal is just burned wood, sulfur is essential for life, and potassium nitrate can be made artificially.

Is there any way I can reasonably justify this somehow?

 

Perhaps a reason unrelated to materials? A religious or cultural proscription.

In Frank Herbert's DUNE, in the distant past, humans made robot servants/laborers that turn on their masters (standard trope) and that kicks off the Butlarian Jihad that squeezes technology as we know it out of existence, and gives rise to very different - mostly biological, chemically enhanced - ways to achieve what computers and A.I. would have achieved had they been allowed to continue.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

- Orange Catholic Bible, DUNE-iverse. ​

Perhaps something in that tradition?

 

I'm confused - the protagonist is 1800s, the antagonist is steampunk?

They had guns in the 1800s.

Are you saying that *neither* nation has guns?

 

It's a fantasy setting, so it's hard to explain. There really aren't any easy analogies between tech advancement in our timeline and this one, because they're different worlds with different needs for different tech. Guns haven't been as much of a priority until recently. And the antagonist isn't exactly "steampunk" in its traditional sense either, that's just sort of the vibe I'm going for with their tech.
Basically, your confusion could be resolved by the story itself, but it would derail the thread to get into all of that here. What's relevant is the antagonist has guns, but they're big, bulky, rapid-firing "back-you-up-when-things-go-sideways" weapons mounted on large vehicles (rather than personal firearms being issued to individuals like in our timeline).

That's along the lines of what I was initially thinking, it would make it so that they could have some decent stockpiles of ammunition to use sparingly, but not enough to arm their entire military with personal firearms - and the antagonist having control over resources would make it so that firearms are a less feasible option to other nations.

What stopped me from using that explanation is that nitrates can be artificially produced, but maybe the answer to my question is simple - they just haven't figured it out yet? Could that work? From what I'm finding from a quick skim of Wikipedia, potassium nitrate wasn't made artificially until the American Civil War, and wasn't produced on industrial scale until just before the First World War. So maybe my initial explanation will work after all?

I just don't want it to seem too "hand-wavey", but maybe I'm overestimating how much readers scrutinize (it is fantasy, after all).

 

Don't have the guns powered by gunpowder - have them powered by an extremely rare substance only available in the antagonist nation, that generates explosions too large to be contained in a small hand weapon - and therefore, they only use *tiny* amounts in their cannons, like a drop or something.

 

I think your solution could be in 'under what circumstances did these people decide to attempt to mix these weird ingredients together'! China had gunpowder before the western world because alchemists were interested in mixing all sorts of things together and seeing what happened. Could you have a situation where one country had some BIG part of their culture that involved experimentation and combining materials, whereas the other just didn't?

I mean, the first person to discover that lighting funpowder on fire was probably a dangerous idea probably didn't live to tell anybody about it. Maybe one country bothered to repeat the experiment while the other was like "Woah there friends, that looks like a bad time. Maybe we won't do that again."

 

That is totally characteristic of my antagonist nation! Their whole economy is based on the mining and export of all kinds of various minerals and metals, many of which they found their own uses for. The fact that they're the most technologically advanced in their world can only be explained by one thing - science, of course! And what is science but experimentation? So yeah, it's totally in-character for this nation to place more of a cultural emphasis on research and experimentation than others.

Also a decent idea!

I think there's enough here to mix into a multifaceted-yet-still-simple explanation: their gunpowder uses a rare mineral as an oxidizer, which the antagonist nation controls most of the supply of; and they're the first to develop such weaponry because of their interest in science; such weapons are fairly new and haven't proliferated yet.

Thanks for the help, everyone! (additional ideas still welcome though, of course)

 

I usually don't like religious reasons for a ban on technology, especially guns. It's just unfeasible to self-inflict yourself with a such a dire weakness. The Prussians were utterly crushed at Jena-Auerstedt due to outdated light infantry doctrine; the British fusiliers were dominated by the French for two decades because the French strapped musket muzzles instead of screwing them. When such tiny differences can lift an Empire to conquer a continent, how would you reason for a completely asymmetric war? Unless you /do/ make it an asymmetric war and work off those examples from history.

I don't really know of a historical example for a prominent ban on technology other than the famous crossbow case which came a thousand years after crossbows became widespread & was largely ignored even by the mercenaries the very Pope hired.

The very earliest instances of guns on battlefield were late 13th and 14th century cannons. They weren't favoured at the time as they were volatile and liable to explode; you could build on this. Perhaps the reason guns are used by one army and not the other is because the gun-using army has a doctrine/setup where they don't care for self-inflicted casualties through gun mishaps, or where they take expensive measures to protect their men.

Another idea could be to provide a very cheap way of protecting yourself against bullets. Crossbows could have spread like guns, however, a crossbow bolt you can deflect with a shield or a munitions armour whereas a musket strikes through both. Thus, as crossbows spread, personal protection increased parallel. Guns toppled this balance. You can and people /did/ craft armour very much capable of deflecting gun shots, but they were expensive and full sets were only afforded by royalty (yet the most important protective parts /were/ armored up until the 1st world war. Helmet & chestplate that is - see cuirassiers and carabiniers).

If you create a cheap way to deflect gunfire, you can have the non-gun-using nation arm itself with it (as well as the steampunk nation) and make it simply a crossbow situation where one can fair perfectly fine completely without guns.

 

Ah, understood. When you ask this question in your own thread that you start, I'll be sure to skip that proffer.

 

From the mid-1600s to 1854, Japan enacted the sakoku, or "closed country" policy, which banned all contact with outsiders (bar a few Chinese and Dutch traders). As a result, when Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853, he found the Japanese with technology that was two centuries old.

 

Could there be some kind of political reason? Number of craftsmen. Money for infrastructure.

It's got to take a little while for a country in the 1800s to modernize, right? How many decades did it take Japan? I really don't know. But it seems like there must be a lag between the ruler's will to adopt a new technology like firearms, and it getting done--bringing in craftsman, gathering capital, training people, building factories, getting political will and interest, and so on. eh?

 

Approximately 1 1/2 decades. By the time of the Boshin War in 1868, the Japanese had a conscript army equipped with Minié rifles, American handguns, English cannon and (a small number of) Gatling guns.

 

If that's the case, it seems like OP could figure out what Japan had going for it that allowed them to modernize at that speed, and assuming that it is indeed a fast speed (because it sounds like it) OP could give his fictional country some social or economic ill that drags it out beyond what Japan managed.

 

Naomasa has hit a key point here: I don't think (could be wrong) that those were locally produced guns, and they certainly were of foreign design even if the Japanese had already gotten around to copying them. And like Japan, China pursued an isolationist policy at key points in history (the Industrial Revolution) that kept them in the "sharp and pointy" era of warfare right until the ships with the funny square sails showed up with holds full of this stuff that made you feel really nice if you smoked it.

If your society is a monarchical wannabe utopia there are plenty of opportunities to be squandered technologically. Perhaps a past monarch was assassinated by someone with a gun (or a bomb) and the production and possession of gunpowder was outlawed in the kingdom?

 

I like it. Yeah, maybe the queen and her military advisors see the situation differently - both know the nation must advance, but while her advisors and generals point to the opponent's military and insist "we must keep up", the queen points to the opponent's mining and manufacturing industries and its economic influence and insists, "we must keep up". And because it's a monarchy, they try it the queen's way first - until that eventually goes badly for them, when the opposing nation comes to take *their* resources and the protagonist nation finds itself outmatched, and that's right about where my story begins.

 

That was not a bar on technology, though. There's ample evidence from the isolation era that the Japanese were actively disassembling, inspecting and re-creating European technology. I do believe it was a key period before their swift adaptation of European ideals & technology. In that sense, Japan's story serves as an example in support of what I stated - while they were technologically impaired, they caught up to European powers in less than a century and adapted. It's what I expect would happen. And bear in mind Japan's unusual case of almost complete isolation from Europe beforehands; I doubt the case could repeat with neighbouring or nearby countries.

However.

Japan brings up /another/ point that I missed, which was the technologically asymmetrical invasion of Korea in 1592. From a historical perspective it seems like the Japanese forgot to press the "Naval tech" button for a millennium, arranging squadrons of fortified wooden/paper rafts with no doctrine against an experienced fleet of gunships.

The point to note there is that Japan did not have any major naval interactions forever at that point. Instead, they had centuries of land warfare between their Daimos - This development /focused/ their attention in technology and while they fielded a wholly capable (and efficient) land army, their navy was ridiculously abysmal. Come on, where in history was one side counting 100+ sunken battleship while the other went "Yeah, well - Su fell into the water from that ship and Woon was shot on the other. So I guess six casualties in total?"

Trailing back to my Napoleonic example, it could as well be stated that the British failures in the coalition wars and the Peninsular war (don't let anyone tell you otherwise; British intervention was miserable during the wars) can be attributed to their growing complacent with naval superiority and forgoing land doctrine/technology. The prime British advantage was their rifle production (which was developed for sharpshooters on ships; like the French one that killed Nelson), which is pretty much the only thing they had for them on land. One specific issue was that the British traveled around on foot like if they were on ships. EG, secondary officers of the British army carried more luggage and furniture with them than Napoleon's imperial court as a whole.

Also throwing in the fact Prussians didn't fight major wars between the 7 years war and the Napoleonic wars and failed to develop an inch; their reinforcements formed into a beautiful, ornate and geometrically perfect grand formation while the French shot at them from a potato field in Jena. By the time they formed up they lost 1/5 their men. Mind however, that this was temporary and they took Japanese-tier measures to study warfare and catch up by 1814. They actually conducted some of the earliest statistical studies of warfare, including a mass measurement of all contemporary muskets and their approximate accuracy.

TL/DR; you could also consider a different development of technology where the non-gunpowder side had no historical need to fight gunpowder land battles; EG - was limited to ensuring naval superiority.

 

What I'm wondering about the OP (purely from curiosity) is how the relatively advanced nation ever felt the need to invent tanks against such an opponent as has been described. In our world, they weren't invented until they were found to be necessary; i.e. when the incredibly effective defensive tactics and technology of trench warfare (machine guns, rifles, barbed wire, concrete) necessitated some major advance in offensive warfare. What's the need for tanks when your opponents aren't even armed with guns? Tanks aren't even an advantage in that case, I wouldn't expect; at least not in a rudimentary state of development.

 

In your story, @JadeX , do your competing nations have any/much contact with each other before aggression starts? If they have little or no contact, it's not unreasonable to imagine they wouldn't necessarily have developed the same things the same way.

@big soft moose 's point, about rifles versus sharpened fruit, brought that to mind.

There is also the example of the way Europeans were able to attack and defeat the indigenous people in the New World and other continents, like Australia. These places were unprepared for European weapons, tactics and intentions—because, before first contact, these places were unaware that Europeans even existed.

Kinda the way Earth would be, if it were suddenly under attack from some entity that came from outer space, with technology we never dreamed of.

It might not be the lack of resources or ability that kept your utopian nation from developing the kind of weapons your attacking nation had, but simply that it never occurred to them to do so.

 

There is some contact, but not much; trade is mostly done by land routes still. The antagonist nation and the protagonist nation have the biggest ocean-faring ships most capable of moving cargo, but this is still expensive and time consuming. The antagonist nation obviously has the best transportation technology, with steam-powered airships and recently the first steam-powered land vehicles; but these are used mostly on their own continent (the antagonist and protagonist nations are on separate continents).
The people in the protagonist nation would likely have heard stories of the other side's airships and strange vehicles, but would most likely have never seen any themselves - let alone the heavy guns mounted on some of them.

Edit:

@Friedrich Kugelschreiber These aren't the only two nations, they're only the two largest, each located on the two largest continents. Before now, they had mostly focused on things on their own continents. Now the antagonist nation has industrialized to a point that they are on the brink of taking over their world's economy, which would mean massive political leverage like they've never had before, and so now they're arming up to take on pretty much everyone (which is more feasible for them than it sounds). The better they are at protecting their forces, the more successful they're likely to be - and when the stakes are this high, they don't want to be just a little bit more advanced, so that's their motivation to dream up weaponry like nobody has ever seen before.
This is one of those "the odds are stacked so high against us it'll take a miracle to save us" sort of stories.
Hope that settles your curiosity!

 

What I was aiming at, you've kinda answered. The two societies were aware of each other—and aware of the possibility of attack. Did your Utopian society ever think they might BE attacked? If so, had there ever been discussion about how to counter such an attack? What was the outcome of those discussions, if they took place?

A society that is totally unaware of a threat is one thing. A society that is aware of a threat but does nothing to either get ready for it or to counter it might be a little bit ...naiëve?

 

I kind of addressed this a little bit earlier when I said this:

Basically, the queen of the protagonist nation underestimated their upcoming rival, and sought to undercut them economically and politically by increasing trade and exports, rather than building up her military (she did that too, just to a lesser extent; her focus was economic). Her apprehension toward military development can be explained by the fact that 15 years prior, she became queen after her uncle was deposed in a coup; because he had started an unpopular war that he, despite victory, ran haphazardly and at the expense of many lives, causing outrage throughout the kingdom. The queen doesn't want to risk starting an arms race that could possibly lead to war (and thus possibly to her own ill fate), but she isn't quite fully aware of the extent of the antagonist nation's development, either (many of the most powerful weapons are recent inventions, and in this world, foreign intel is hard to obtain).
TL;DR: She thought she could play the economic game and starve the opponent financially, turns out she was wrong due to lack of intel & her own miscalculations.

 

Keeping the formula for gunpowder--or whatever spec-fic equivalent these weapons might use--a tightly controlled state secret is one possibility. The Byzantines did this with Greek Fire, to the point its exact composition remains a mystery.

Naomasa already brought up the idea of controlling the supply of key ingredients, which would accomplish more or less the same result and is probably more feasible in the long term.

Given we're talking about a fantasy setting, the most obvious answer I can think of would be that their opponents may not need guns to be dangerous enough to prompt the creation of tanks. All sorts of powers could theoretically be at one's fingertips.

OP hasn't mentioned any sort of magic, so there might not even be such a thing in the setting, but it strikes me as the most elegant solution to the original question.

Why are guns so scarce? Because the people of this particular country looked at the rudimentary tech--that prototype fire lance/handgun/arquebus--and said "What's the point? I can pick up half a dozen pebbles with my mind and shoot them at half a dozen targets in the same time it takes somebody to load this device and shoot one metal ball at one target." Although the tech could eventually be more effective, nobody sees any reason to develop it further.

In this scenario, you'd end up with magic filling the niche of small arms. Which fits together with this bit in some ways:

No personal firearms, but artillery and machine guns. Hmm, why is that? Maybe the people of the antagonist nation have access to some form of magic as well, but it has fewer uses in combat. Or maybe both nations have access to the same type of magic, but the antagonist nation doesn't have as many people capable of it as your utopian monarchy does. In any case, they lean on technology to support their disadvantaged troops.

This is just me spitballing some ideas, OP. Don't feel obligated to consider magic and such if it clashes with your conception of the setting.

 

Sorry! I missed that...