Techs for a world without explosives

[Shaihulud]

Because a dismounted knight is an armoured man with a manouevrable sword, rather than a leather-clad conscript with a 20-foot long spear. Try stabbing someone with a pole-vault pole sometime; it's a lot less manouevrable than a broom or a rake. Pike lines are good at fighting against each other, or against horses, not really against anything else.

If you've got longbows and pikes, however, the knights are toast, because if the ride their horses, they can't break the pike wall, and if they walk, they are pincushions by the time they get to the wall.

This situation transformed itself into pikemen/musketmen combinations once the musket got reliable enough to be more effective than a crossbow. The longbow wasn't surpassed until the repeating rifle in terms of speed and accuracy, but any joe with a few weeks training could fire a musket, while the longbow took years and years of training.

The most salient example of pikemen in history must be the phalanxes used by Alexander the great to carved up his macedonian Empire, and it was for all things and by no means ineffective against infantry, it is also no vault pole but a heavy spear used to pierce the body of its enemies. In fact in formation, no ancient era infantry could defeat it headon. The primary advantage of a knight is that it is its horse, it affords it greater maneouvrebility and the horse is itself a weapon. The knight is also able to carry heavier amour and weapons such as a lance which affords him a long reach. On foot a knight has to be less encumbered, deprived of his primary advantage, his heavier amour, his lance. No different from the standard infantry but better equipped, if we are talking of something equivalent to a pikemen in the same age as a Knight we have the Swiss halberdier, some of the most fearsome medievel infantry, armed with a large halberd and crossbows, they easily slaughter Knights and Infantry both.

Historians testing the efficacy of longbows have found their reputation aganist french amour to be exaggerated.

 

[wiseguy101]

Swords might have become more like the lightsabers in Star Wars, but they still might not have had the technology to do that today, even if gunpowder wasn't around.

 

[The Dopelganger]

The most salient example of pikemen in history must be the phalanxes used by Alexander the great to carved up his macedonian Empire, and it was for all things and by no means ineffective against infantry, it is also no vault pole but a heavy spear used to pierce the body of its enemies. In fact in formation, no ancient era infantry could defeat it headon. The primary advantage of a knight is that it is its horse, it affords it greater maneouvrebility and the horse is itself a weapon. The knight is also able to carry heavier amour and weapons such as a lance which affords him a long reach. On foot a knight has to be less encumbered, deprived of his primary advantage, his heavier amour, his lance. No different from the standard infantry but better equipped, if we are talking of something equivalent to a pikemen in the same age as a Knight we have the Swiss halberdier, some of the most fearsome medievel infantry, armed with a large halberd and crossbows, they easily slaughter Knights and Infantry both.

Historians testing the efficacy of longbows have found their reputation aganist french amour to be exaggerated.

IGNORED (get your facts straight) moving on...

I realy hoped that someone could come up with an alternative to steam power in the begining to make this a more unique project, but it seems my hopes have been for nought. But I still think that we should have some neccesary means of moving to the alternative power source. My idea is that there is a labor shortage, but I can't think of a better reason then for weapons to become massivly destructive and whole populations are wiped out. Waiting for other peoples 2 cents on the idea!!

 

[binhthuy71]

"I realy hoped that someone could come up with an alternative to steam power in the begining to make this a more unique project, but it seems my hopes have been for nought."

Lamentably, that will take some huge imagining. Windmills and watermills (The powerhouses before the age of steam) average 1-5 horsepower (Ref: "The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century," by Fernand Braudel). Both are incapable of moving heavy loads over any great distance. Steam power was originally perfected to pump water out of mines (Newcommen). It was the only practical solution, given the limitations of metallurgy at the time yet it still largely solved the problem of flooded mines where wind driven and water driven power had failed. Even so, it took more than a hundred years to move from stationary steam engines to locomotive steam power. People tried everything (Including some very large springs) that their fertile imaginations could devise. Steam won.

If you're talking about battlefield mobility then steam is a non-starter anyway. Troops in the U.S. Civil war used horses and shoe leather to accomplish that despite the fact that steam driven rail was in wide use. Rail was used for supply movements but because it was limited in capacity and easily interdicted by cavalry, its use as a tool to win battles was negligible. It took another fifty years for troop trains to become a viable alternative to forced marches.

Don't despair; Rome, among others, fielded huge forces and supplied them at a time when Hero's "steam engines" were little more than a novelty. Mayhap your best bet is to consider what people may have done to perfect existing means of transport absent steam.

 

[Shaihulud]

IGNORED (get your facts straight) moving on...

Since the OP has decided to ignore me(i was not responding to his arguments), and since he also stated his incompetence at programming this, i will address my words to the rest of the people who might be interested and is relevant.

layden jars are a basic form of capacitor, basically 2 conductors sandwiching an air gap or an insulator. It would be impossible to produce one that is capable of having an offensive capability, uless you make it really big. A suggestion is if an element of fantasy might be added into it, some interesting ideas might be from Leonardo da vinci's models of machines, steam powered tanks, steam propelled artillery, gliders etc. The modern bows, or compund bows relied on a series of compound pulleys allow a much heavier bow to be drawn. This tech similarly applies to crossbows as well, a compound bow arm modified for use in a crossbow. A non combustible era would possibly harness heavy animals to do work, they might achieve this by breeding stronger horses or by domesticating elephants.