KrauserKrauser wrote:Blasting large irrigation channels or opening up waterways for travel and trade would be useful and possibly accomplished faster with the application of Blackpowder.
You'd need serious engineering knowledge for that, especially in calculating the blast effect. Way outside the bronze age powers, methinks.
As far as farming or food gathering goes, it would be useful in blasting stumps from the ground and the clearing of obstructions in fields, but they had slaves and animals to do the same. Blackpowder might not make any gains on that. It would be rubbish for hunting but I could see a fairly crude flashbang being useful in dangerous situations to scare away predators.
You'd still need standardized and reliable fuses, which they lack the industry and knowledge to manufacture.
They could float the powder out onto lakes and do massive fish kills with it. That would be wasteful and non sustainable but it would more than likely be effective while the fish population lasted.
How would the benefits outweigh the dangers? The chinese, iirc, did not do blast fishing, apparently for that reason. (Note that I am not so sure about that one, I believe I read a passing reference to that in a book.)
If applied correctly the Blackpowder could be used as mentioned early in the massive scale engineering projects of the day. Hell with enough manpower and enough blackpowder the pyramids that were built might have been greater in both and size and number with the increase in mining production possible with blackpowder added into the mix.
Getting huge stones is not the problem. Transportation, manufacturing and manpower are.
Whoever says "education does not matter" can try ignorance
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A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient, to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is 'survival as what'? A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! -
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