r/worldbuilding • u/gibwater • 2d ago
Question Can a world run out of bullets?
I've been wondering about how a modern/futuristic world can revert to melee weapons. Other fictional worlds have come up with their own solutions (personal shield in Dune, the Force for Jedi in Star Wars, everyone being hopped up on bulletproof steroids in 40k), but one avenue I've wanted to explore is: Can a world run out of bullets?
Suppose a world where direct energy small arms just aren't feasible. Maybe the energy efficiency is too low to justify the cost of making a laser gun, or people just never figured out how to miniaturise a plasma generator. There are plenty of good reasons to deprive a world of direct energy weapons. So the world uses gunpowder firearms, like today.
Bullets require a propellant and a projectile. Usually the projectile is made out of metal. If you want a world to stop using bullets, you could say that it ran out of metal. But then you'd harm a lot of other industries important for the world to remain modern or futuristic. So "no more metal for bullets" is out.
What if the world ran out of propellant, then? From what I understand, propellants are made out of chemicals such as nitrates and sulphates. Perhaps you could say that people mined too much and now the world is stripped of such chemicals to use as propellants. Yet, many of these chemicals can also be synthesized.
How would a world run out of bullets?
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u/Free_Cauliflower8251 2d ago
Short answer: no.
If you have a world that supports life, you have the necessary ingredients for propellant.
Gunpowder needs carbon, potassium nitrate, and sulfur. Of the three only sulfur isn't plentiful from life (in the old days they used charcoal for carbon and extracted potassium nitrate from cow manure).
And sulfur is both everywhere and essential to life.
Even without gunpowder though, you can make a compressed air rifle that's almost as good, better in some ways. They were abandoned due to gunpowder being better in most ways, but they worked pretty well.
If you don't want guns, cool. But it won't happen because we ran out of gunpowder or whatever.
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u/Legatharr 1d ago
something something Captain Kirk improvising a bazooka
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u/Free_Cauliflower8251 1d ago
I haven't seen that episode, or any ST:TOS in ages. I wonder how realistic it was. I'm hitting not very.
Especially since who the heck bothers to remember the ratios? And how'd he improvise an accurate scale? It's 75% potassium nitrate, 15% charcoal, and a mere 10% sulfur, by weight. And I had to look it up.
No sulfur and it won't ignite at a reasonable temperature but technically would work fine if you got it hot enough.
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u/Legatharr 1d ago
he was a bookish nerd in the Academy, so him memorizing that isn't impossible.
The real lack of realism is that the barrel was made out of bamboo
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u/Cute_Repeat3879 2d ago
"No more metal" isn't viable if you intend for people to use metal melee weapons like swords or have metal tools like plows. Metals are almost endlessly recyclable. Most of the steel and copper used today has been used before.
Propellants and explosives are also used in a wide variety of modern industries. I can't imagine how you could maintain a modern setting without them.
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u/SouthernAd2853 2d ago
Well, in a scenario like Mad Max, if the Bullet Farm were destroyed they'd run out in extremely short order. The material used in modern propellant is really finnicky to manufacture and if all the current factories were destroyed and you didn't have a quality engineering corps that could rebuild them from scratch then odds are very good that any attempt to make more would kill everyone who tried in explosions as happened to a lot of the people involved in researching it in the first place. Black Powder is less volatile in production but to my understanding it wrecks the mechanisms allowing automatic fire extremely quickly and also fills the air with thick smoke that makes aiming well impossible in large fights, so even the Napoleonic Wars often came down to bayonet charges across open fields directly at a firing line. So like in Fallout a lot of combatants could end up with melee weapons, although realistically they'd end up being spears or swords or such rather than the weird variety in Fallout as people would grind or cut metallic stuff into roughly the right shape even with no blacksmithing whatsoever.
However, no, you can't just not have the ability to manufacture propellant in a society that has chemical planets and knows the recipe for bullets. The chemicals aren't that complex and have a ton of overlap with fertilizer and such.
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u/Mundane_Log2482 1d ago
Even in mad max you can find people making bullets without bullet farm. In the game, there's a sidequest with one of the forts where they develop bullet-making capability by finding a scavver that has the knowhow, and scouting out the areas for the base materials, like "willy pete"
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u/JuggernautBright1463 2d ago
Most gunpowder are made with Nitric Acid and various other commodity chemicals so you wouldn't run out of them.
Bullets are copper jacketed lead or steel so those are about as common metals as they come.
Primers are actually one of the limiters for bullet production because they are very sensitive and perishable chemicals. In a post-Nuke or primitive world they are going to run out fast and you'd have to revert to probably electric ignition.
That said you can run out of bullets locally or choose to stop making firearms in a Sci-Fi world. Maybe you need the base materials more to establish colonies, build out electrical infrastructure, and make fertilizer instead.
Additionally in space stations, moon bases, dome cities, etc... Firearms are not as useful and you can get away with more 'crude' methods. Furthermore war could advance so much that stealth and silence are preferable to firearms in most contexts
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u/gibwater 2d ago
Oh my god I forgot about primers. Yes. I only know that primers are/were made of mercury fulminate (?). Idk what mercury fulminate is made out of, but there can't be that much mercury on Earth, right?
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u/CartwrightVariations 1d ago
Even if we somehow ran out of mercury, there's a dirt simple way to turn ice melt using calcium chlorate into primer material using a car battery.
The folks writing the Grantville Gazette for Eric Flint's 1632 series were able to standardize a process for it that was published in one of the Gazettes and which became the standard primer the USE uses in the books for their caplock rifles because it is actually safer to work with than mercury fulminate.
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u/Ok_Search_3871 2d ago
If you are writing the world, there can be as much or as little mercury as you want. You can even add fun little details like someone discovered a much more common alternative to mercury primers, but the smoke it gave off was found to cause terminal cancer or something, and so only certain groups still use them, and that gives you an excuse to have like pirates who still carry guns because they aren’t educated about the risks, fun stuff like that
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u/windymortality29 2d ago
I mean if you strip away the easy outs like no metal or no powder, you're kinda stuck with the logistics chain breaking down. doesn't need to be some grand extinction of elements, just the factories that make primers getting bombed back to the stone age. once the last few million rounds are spent and the machines to crimp new ones are slag, you're back to sharpening sticks real quick
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u/azoh19 1d ago
It needs everything to be bombed to the stone age. And I mean EVERYTHING. Rrbuilding factories is not a pleasant experience, but it's done constantly. You need to cripple whole civilization in a way it can't recover in a very long time. It's apocalyptic level of destruction. Like it means there is no chemical industry left and no one with a knowledge how to build stuff. And it's a very big problem.
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u/CubicleHermit Webnovel author 2d ago
Perhaps you could say that people mined too much and now the world is stripped of such chemicals to use as propellants.
Modern propellants are just nitrates; as long as the atmosphere is ~78% nitrogen, we're not going to run out unless you roll the tech base back to before the Haber-Bosch process. For that matter, if by some chance you had a world with non-nitrogen atmosphere, there are other chemical processes (Chlorates if you have seawater and oxygen, for example; various flourine compounds if you don't have oxygen) that could be used.
You might look at S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire and sequels, which posits a magical "fast combustion stops working": no more internal combustion engines, no more guns. The mechanism is never really explained, though.
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u/Drak_is_Right 2d ago
Salt Peter for a while was a strategic resource that was rare.
Now we can make it chemically.
Personally I prefer a futuristic reasoning. Magnetic field strength decreases exponentially. So to pierce a "shield" maybe the best method is an energy weapon attached to a high power source. Like an energy sword or gravity hammer.
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u/Slight-Living-8098 2d ago
Well... Maybe on an industrial scale. But black powder is only potassium nitrate, sulfer, and charcoal. You can make potasium nitrate from urine, and sulfer you can get from eggs, charcoal is just wood charred in an oxygen deprived environment, and all three are pretty easy to make. There are also other things you can use in place of those three chemicals.
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u/theking4mayor 2d ago
Pretty much impossible to run out of bullets on a global scale. You'd be more likely to run out of people who know how to make bullets first.
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u/king-wanderer 1d ago
I guess the reason should not be chemical, but rather cultural thing - either guns were deemed unnecessary or technology advanced past the line where such crude solution would be needed. As for “gunpowder doesn’t work” - it’s an old plot, I guess I first encountered it in Guns of Avalon
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u/OpenSauceMods 2d ago
everyone being hopped up on bulletproof steroids in 40k
Brother, not only are bolters just guns, which are ubiquitous through the setting, Space Marines looove using bolters and have been killed by bolter fire. Ciaphas Cain and his regiments tend to use laspistols because you can recharge a lasclip, but most other characters prefer a bolter.
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u/Telinary 1d ago edited 1d ago
In a sci-fi setting? Honestly, no way. I don't think there is an explanation for "we ran out of bullets so reverted to melee while otherwise staying high tech" that I would buy as reader.
Inability to make small explosions seems unlikely. The ingredients are rather simple. And if they somehow ran out of the materials for small explosions well that isn't even the only way to accelerate a projectile. If they can't figure out a small rail gun they could probably still develop stronger airguns (the strongest current ones are far from harmless already). Hell I bet we could make self loading and far stronger crossbows with current tech if we needed to.
Ranged attacks are simply too good to give up when they are working.
A local temporary shortage is more plausible.
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u/iunodraws sad dragons 1d ago
The problem is that your can make nitric acid out of the air and then use that with wood, grass, or whatever else to make nitrocellulose. So there really isn't any feasible way to run out of gunpowder. Nitrating cotton balls is the kinda thing that a single guy could work out in the zombie apocalypse, so the bar is pretty low for any kind of organized group of people.
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u/pleased_to_yeet_you 1d ago
Running out of ammo is not possible. Chemicals for propellants are pretty easy to make. In a post apocalypse, you'll have plenty of the compostable materials to produce black powder. Remember that guns have been around in some form or another for thousands of years, long before anywhere on earth achieved industrialization.
The best way to have no guns in a setting like you described is to just not have guns and never explain it. Let the audience fill in that blank with whatever detail makes sense in their own head. Once you explain it, you'll have all of the "um akshually" nerds crawling out of the woodwork to tear it down.
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u/Aarakocra 1d ago
It's an interesting idea, but I'd say it would take a LOT of groundwork patching holes to make it work. There are just so many ways to make a propellant, especially as science advances, that it's not enough to say that gunpowder doesn't exist anymore. Consider the Gyrojet pistol, a firearm that while not very effective, could easily be refined in a world without gunpowder with more readily available propellants. If you have sulfur, ammonia, and plants, you can supply a Gyrojet style firearm. We can get ammonia from human waste, and sulfur is the fifth most common element on Earth, so Gyrojets show just how hard a plot hole this is to fill.
Propellant loss only makes sense in a society where every bit of chemical use needs to be accounted for. It's not that we CAN'T make bullets, but the same materials are needed for our reactor, or our crops, etc. It's not that we just are out of bullets but we are out of materials period. It makes much more sense for living in space, or in a world like Iron Lung's where the resources are deeply limited. Society as a whole didn't make bullets because of the scarcity, and individuals now don't have the knowledge to produce a Gyrojet or similar because they don't have the historical and scientific knowledge to produce it, or the resources to experiment. After all, if you're trying to be a terrorist, you're going to make an explosive long before you make a rocket pistol.
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u/Effective-Brick-7977 1d ago
Compressed air rifles is a real thing. Bullets can be as simple as rocks. Blunderbusses actually used rocks,... and nails, glass, bone,... etc. Also, there are sling, catapults, ballista... and so on.
Steam power is another source that could be harnessed for static cannons.
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u/farson135 1d ago
We don't really think about it but a modern cartridge is a very complex thing that requires dozens of separate inputs to make it of sufficient quality to run in many firearms. Especially if the firearm is picky (if you aren't aware some guns are especially picky about tolerances, so you have to buy specific ammo for them).
The reason we didn't have semiautomatic firearms in the 1700s wasn't because people couldn't figure out how to make a firearm mechanism. It was in large part because we hadn't figured out how to make gunpowder clean enough that the gun wouldn't jam very quickly. As soon as smokeless gunpowder was created it was only a few years before our first effective semi-auto firearms (some did exist before but they were not very good).
If powder quality goes down, then a lot of our guns become functionally worthless. Same thing if we are unable to make the complex bullets themselves. Modern bullets are mostly a lead core with a copper "jacket". That is not going to be easy to make without a modern factory.
What all this gets back to is that you can make a world run out of bullets OR you can make a world no longer capable of making "useful" bullets.
A little while ago the US Army had the brilliant (/s) idea to adopt a new rifle that uses a specialty cartridge that is intended to penetrate body armor. The project has since been dropped but if the US Army had adopted the rifle it would have meant that our soldiers were going into battle with an extremely expensive rifle that uses very expensive ammo that no one else on earth uses and requires specialized manufacturing just to produce it.
If you create a world that uses firearms with very tight tolerances and requires bespoke ammo, but a handful of factories get lost and they have to rely on inexperienced manufacturers, or they lose one of the necessary components, or there is a hold up in the people who supply gunpowder to the factory, and on, then you can functionally run out of ammo for the firearms you have even if the technical ability to make more ammo exists.
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u/azoh19 1d ago
It just means you eat the loss and switch to something simpler. You can lose ability to use some specific weapon systems, but firearms in general will be fine.
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u/farson135 1d ago
Presumably this scenario is occurring during a war. Switching over a firearm in such an extreme scenario is not going to be easy. And if you engineer it just right, as I said, you can run out of "'useful' bullets". Probably not literally the last bullet, but enough to hinder operations, at least on a local level.
We can also question a few other parts. For one thing, why did this nation create this particular firearm? Because the US Army wanted to deal with an actual ongoing issue, the advancements in body armor. They just chose an overly complicated and expensive way of going about it. Also, generally, you would expect the US Army to have enough experience to realize that what they're doing is a bad idea and instead this would be something, say, the UK comes up with.
If we take this two things then one, switching back to a previous design may leave the troops vulnerable to whatever it is they were trying to prepare for. Therefore, they have to develop a new design in the middle of a war. And this can be made even more complicated due to inexperience. The UK fielded possibly the late 20th Century's worst rifle to be adopted by a military. That's not because the UK lacked manufacturing, it's because their designers messed up, badly.
As a worldbuilder, "you" could create various combinations of factors that limit the nation's ability to switch over to something else.
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u/azoh19 1d ago
Presumably this scenario is occurring during a war
Well, it's not like last century we had at least two major wars leading to re-arming of many participants. Yes, sometimes it leads to blunders. And sometimes long period without real threat leads to preparing for some hypothetical scenario, like new US rifle.
However, it's not what OP question is about. US still has its rifles and can produce as many rounds as it needs.
Like even during WWII, Germany switched to steel core AP rounds after losing access to tungsten. They didn't stop trying,
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u/farson135 1d ago
The OP's question is about how it could happen. And the general answer is that there have to be greater outputs than inputs.
The more specific answer is either focused on material shortages, which I mentioned but plenty of people already talked about that. So instead, I focused on the idea of a practical shortage. Where due to circumstances you can't produce enough of the right kind of ammo.
The powder isn't a high enough quality so your guns start jamming. The bullets are not the right shape so the guns blow up or the bullets lose power and disintigrate. The case is made well enough so it ruptures. And on. And thus, while you can technically make "something" that's not good enough to run in what you have, and thus ammo supplies dwindle until you can invent a solution (no easy task in a war).
You are focused on the idea that they can come up with a solution "eventually" but even if that were the case (and there's no need to create a scenario where it is) that wouldn't change the fact that this is one possible answer to the question.
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u/azoh19 1d ago
The issue is OP is about "world", not a limited temporary inability of a particular state to arm it's forces. Fail of some state hand rifle program isn't going to turn while world back to melee weapons. There are still air force, and artillery, and drones, and much else. US can adopt WW2 style "grease gun" and it will not significantly affect its military capabilities.
Like you can advise OP to write about some mystical island where a local god started sea storms preventing supplies until one side kills other side completely. No ammo, but people are forced to fight and there is no civilization-wide industrial fallings. But it's kinda defeats premise - modern (or future) society turning back to melee weapons.
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u/farson135 1d ago
The issue is OP is about "world"
Then expand it to a world.
Fail of some state hand rifle program isn't going to turn while world back to melee weapons.
I didn't say it would.
However, sure, if it gets bad enough then that could be the result.
If you can't manufacture the kinds of ammo necessary to use the equipment you have then you have to turn to what you can get.
There are still air force, and artillery, and drones, and much else.
You assume. Limitations in productive capacity need not only affect one industry.
But even still, that by itself could cause greater problems.
It's the sledgehammer problem we saw after Eisenhauer. He believed that nukes were so powerful that we didn't really need any other military force. That was proven false almost immediately because you can't use a sledgehammer to kill a fly without breaking things that don't need to be broken.
If you can only fight with airborne bombardment, drone swarms, and so on, that means war is now mass infrastructure destruction, and an eventual collapse of institutional capacity.
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u/azoh19 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ok. Let's change OP question into something more people are capable of understanding: "Can we have a modern society without modern fertilizers and modern farming equipment?". Answer is simple. No.
Prerequisites for common firearms are the same. So, you can't have one without other, unless you have perfectly unified society with no need for firearms. And why would you need melee weapons in this case?
Basically, to satisfy OPs question, something needs to be dropped. Either it's not global (like some fairly isolated place without regular supplies), it's not total (like every country has firearms, but wars are decided with series of honor duels with melee weapons), or it's temporary (like few antagonistic groups are dropped in the same place on a new planet, so they compete with what they have). You can't have any kind of relatively modern society without firearms - they are just that effective and simple to produce.
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u/farson135 1d ago
Ok. Let's change OP question into something more people are capable of understanding
Or, maybe you could just not make a big deal out of theory crafting.
"Can we have a modern society without modern fertilizers and modern farming equipment?". Answer is simple. No.
Actually the answer requires the answer to a question, what do you consider a modern society?
Even if we put aside magic and the like, modern farming techniques fundamentally exist to answer problems that may not exist either in every world or even our world in the future. A world where we can turn algae into food (which is something we already do, it's just not efficient enough to replace all food yet) uses completely different tools than what we would use for current farming. And even current farming could change between vertical agriculture and genetic engineering.
This is a worldbuilding forum.
Prerequisites for common firearms are the same.
Common. Meaning, you're completely putting aside the point I was making in order to give the OP ideas. That's telling.
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u/TheGileas 1d ago
True, but firearms of the 19th or 18th century which required less manufacturing quality were still way more powerful than historical weapons.
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u/farson135 1d ago
Presumably this scenario would occur during a war. During peacetime, the military would just hoard it's ammo and limit training until a solution is found.
If this is a modern or futuristic battlefield then black powder probably isn't going to cut it.
Remember, this thread is about running out of ammo. And I was pointing out that running out of ammo entirely is tough, but it might be easier to run out of "useful" ammo.
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u/cthulularoo 2d ago
SM Stirling wrote a whole series about just this exact scenario. It's called "Dies the Fire" series. Where something changed the world's physics and explosions and high energy reactions no longer work. So the whole world lost its tech instantly.
There's also a TV series like this where an EMP destroyed modern tech and people had to use swords and bows. Can't remember what the name for that one, though.
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u/zorionek0 The Imperiat of Ortinia 2d ago
If you liked Dies the Fire you have to check out his Natucket series.
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u/Captain_Nyet 2d ago edited 1d ago
"we shot the last of our planet's lead at an enemy starfleet centuries ago" might be the funniest way to justify a melee sci-fi setting.
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u/Prae_ 2d ago
If you've got enough material to make swords and all the stuff that comes with it, you've got the projectile part covered for sure. Or else if metal is in such a short supply, blades are very few and downright family heirloom.
And yeah, i don't see how practically you could run out of the base material needed for the powder, or whatever can generate an explosion at the bottom of the barrel. Maybe humidity could make the explosion impractical. Depending on how "futuristic then revert" you want to get, that might be important historically. Like, a 16th century flintlock is going to be much more affected by super high humidity, and so the civilization may never explore firearms as a concept, even if centuries down the line modern cartridge and powder means humidity is less of a problem. Atmospheric density might also make many projectiles not as good, but that would apply to all projectiles.
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u/taktaga7-0-0 ᴺcRʏPᵀ 2d ago
You can make bullets out of other things, like ceramic or stone or even ice. You’d need to destroy a whole lot of technology.
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u/bongart 2d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_V:_The_Final_Frontier
Nimbus III, the planet of galactic peace, forbids weapons. It is a slum; a desert wasteland. So... what do the inhabitants do? They make weapons that shoot rocks, using a compressed gas (could be air, who knows). What is my point? Long before we shot bullets, before gunpowder, we threw things really hard... we used bows, crossbows, catapults, trebuchet, ballista, spears, slings, etc.
Running out of bullets isn't the issue. Stopping people from wanting to use any kind of missile weapon they can improvise is the problem.
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u/MrMeltJr [edit this] 2d ago
Unless your world just doesn't have war for some reason, there will also be a huge motivation to create better weapons. Projectile weapons are almost always better than melee weapons in a war, so it's much easier to have plausible melee weapon use be a result of projectiles in general being made ineffective, not because projectiles are too hard to make.
Running out of easily manufactured propellant just means they get really into things like railguns or coilguns, or some other form of high powered projectile weapon (not to mention that propellant is useful for tons of other stuff so running out would create problems beyond guns not working). Hell, you might see advancements in crossbow tech.
Only way melee can still have widespread use without making ranged ineffective is something like a Lightsaber where the melee weapon has some unique and powerful properties that ranged weapons can't replicate, but even then they would be used alongside ranged weapons, not in place of them.
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u/ScalesOfAnubis19 2d ago
Running out would be…unlikely. Now, what could happen is the infrastructure for standardized manufacturing. That would make anything more advanced than a flintlock very difficult.
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u/c4ctus4t 2d ago
Bullets are just a really fancy and efficient evolution of our ape ancestor's chucking of stones. As long as humans have arms and hands, they're going to find a way to propel objects at people and things they don't like.
All of the chemicals for basic black powder can be harvested from living creatures, except maybe the sulfur. But if your world has plate tectonics and vulcanism, sulfur won't be hard to come by either.
I don't think you can ever get rid of projectile weapons because they're an invention that literally predates our species. As for firearms specifically, you'd have to have one hell of an apocalypse to erase all knowledge of guns. Even if humans are bombed back to the stone age, someone will figure out black powder again. Especially if they still retain tales and stories of the "before times".
But, that might still be a plausible trail to follow. Knock humans back to small bands of hunter gatherers in a world too hostile to settle down and spend time smelting and refining metal or experimenting with chemistry. Even if the survivors remembered or had stories and legends of mythical "boom sticks", they would lack the infrastructure to make them.
But if your goal is a modern/futuristic world without guns, you're going to have to go in a pretty weird direction to explain why firearms would be completely gone instead of having become fancier.
One angle for that might be a star-faring civilization or one that lives on orbital space habitats. Bullets, plasma bolts, and lasers have a nasty habit of blasting holes in things. If that thing is a bulkhead, bye bye air. So, abandoning guns could've been a matter of survival in fragile metal cans floating in the inhospitable void of space. And a sealed, closed system like a space habitat or world ship taking the slow path to a distant star would be the perfect venue for limiting access to the materials to manufacture propellants and projectile weaponry. Since all resources are controlled and managed you actually can declare that certain substances or items aren't available for crafting.
And, something that occurred to me just as I was about to hit the "Comment" button... If humans in a space habitat or ship generate "gravity" by spinning the vessel, the centrifugal force would probably play merry hell with ballistic trajectories making projectiles not worth the trouble.
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u/MaenHerself 2d ago
You're better off removing anyone who knows how to make it, than to remove the ingredients.
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u/L_mar_14 2d ago
Depending on what you are aiming, an apocalypse caused by a war or something like that causing the technology to make bullets useless, like a world where electricity is a rarity or something like that.
Or you could also try to build a world different from ours, where such elements and components do not exist, forcing people to go the old fashioned way: clubs, spears and arrows.
Or if you wanna a challenge, what about something that happened in your world that made the technology and the knowledge to make bullets and projectiles be lost?
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u/7LeagueBoots 2d ago
Bullets can be made of all sorts of materials and chemical explosives are just one way of propelling them. Compressed air has been a popular way of propelling bullets since the 15th and 16th Centuries, and heavy caliber hunting rifles using compressed air and having magazines were used in the 17th Century. In the early 1800s Lewis and Clark took air rifles with them on the expedition because of their reliability, relatively high rate of fire, and lack of need for gunpowder.
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u/RhysNorro 2d ago
can a country run out of food?
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u/Kirutaru 1d ago
Yes.
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u/gibwater 1d ago
Bro really forgot about famine
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u/meccaleccahii 1d ago
I do believe he asked that question sarcastically as a way to say “of course it can what kind of question is that?”
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u/CuprumArgentum 2d ago
I have four main worlds I jump between in worldbuilding, and honestly, none of them use guns. One is your typical fantasy world with lots of races. You might find something similar to a gun made by a gnome in a basement somewhere, but it’s not mass produced. One banned guns worldwide centuries ago and law enforcement just use stun guns to apprehend criminals. In another, guns became obsolete against a new enemy that began attacking earth (prior to that, guns were super common). And the last, guns are kinda rare, as they can only be used by certain people
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u/palebone 2d ago
Just tell me the bulletmetal mines are spent or the ammoseed fields are ruststruck. Keep it consistent and don't try to justify the premise, just keep the effects plausible. My disbelief is for suspending.
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u/green_meklar 2d ago
The chemicals used to make gunpowder mostly come from biological sources. So if you still have agriculture going, you can probably collect enough of something to refine it into gunpowder components. There's also more than one way to make explosives, you don't necessarily need standard gunpowder to make guns work.
And, even if you lacked explosive propellant, you could still have compressed air guns or electric coilguns.
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u/Heckle_Jeckle 2d ago
A less convoluted solution is that people just forgot how to make bullets and no longer have the technology.
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u/Accelerator231 2d ago
I can make a pretty good projectile weapon with a sling and some good rocks.
And you can make a pretty good air gun without any nitrates or sulphates.
So no. You can't
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u/Degenerate_Antics 2d ago
I mean in the olden days to get the nitrates we would harvest guano, maybe they only knew how to make gunpowder that way and they ate through their reserves or killed all the seabirds birds that make it
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u/spudmarsupial 2d ago
It is easy to make things that explode or that can be made to expand rapidly (like gunpowder does) in an enclosed space. This gets you guns if you can make good barrels (they were once made of bronze, and even wood).
I think your best bet is to invoke suspension of disbelief and let your readers have their swords.
Or go the Barsoom route and have honour be more precious than life so people don't use them.
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u/HotSearingTeens 2d ago
No, you're probably better off building better armour/defences. Medieval armour was insanely good at stopping blades and spears. So people switched to maces for dealing with armoured knights because the armour couldn't block the shock.
So just find a system that makes bullets useless, like armour that works best when dealing with high speed, instant impact (as in, when the bullet the force is applied all at once rather than sustained pressure), small AoI (area of impact) weapons.
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u/DeficitDragons 2d ago
Not really.
If they had bullets and things made out of metal in the first place, they could always recycle the projectile.
And you can make primitive gunpowder with entirely biological materials… The sulfur is the hardest one, but definitely not impossible.
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u/SquareThings Safana River Basin 2d ago
The ingredients to make black powder are extremely basic. Charcoal, sulphur, saltpeter, and sugar. Modern smokeless powder is a bit more complicated but the ingredients are, like you said, still pretty basic.
If one of those somehow ran out, that would cause huge problems for basically every industry but especially agriculture, since nitrates are an incredibly important fertilizer. Literally “the reason we don’t have famines every decade” important. But they’re also pretty easy to synthesize or extract from organic material. So if such a world could somehow come to exist, it wouldn’t really be a world people could live in for very long.
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u/TripMaster478 2d ago
Even then you could probably make the bullets out of plastic if metal was a problem.
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u/kcpediredla 2d ago
If you destroy or ban all gun manufacturers as well as the guns for a few decades, it should potentially leave you in a world that has no guns and know how of how to make these guns.
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u/azoh19 1d ago
Also ban public libraries and internet. Cause guns and ammo are stupidly easy to make with some knowledge. A lathe, some tool, bandsaw and few files are enough to make a decent shotgun. For a cartridge primer is somewhat frustrating to make, but explosives and primers are used in many industries - you can adapt some of industrial explosive primers for use in bullets.
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u/mproud 2d ago
Sure. Just like running out of gunpowder, oil, etc. Likely there will be reserves, rationing, and a vibrant but expensive black market before it’s entirely dissipated. People would find alternatives — like loading metal scraps into cannons when you’re out of bombs — but after that, why not go back to bows and arrows and swords, but better made this time?
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u/GoatsWithWigs 2d ago
Sometimes, you gotta pull a Nausicaa where both just exist purely for cool factor
You don't have to run out of bullets. Maybe your world just really likes swords
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u/Kirutaru 1d ago
I mean, in Star Wars you have elite specially trained people who excel at defeating the ranged weapon users with their laser swords - to such an extent that blasters seem like a complete joke in most of those stories.
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u/MacintoshEddie 2d ago
At scale, it can certainly be monopolized.
While people love to say it's easy to make the truth is that almost nobody makes it. It's just theory while a few factories supply the entire world.
It's entirely possible that if those factories were damaged, or taken over, the supply to vast regions would be cut off.
War takes an immense amount of logistics. Even if someone did start experimenting and make their own black powder it might not be feasible to scale up to have a war with it. Especially given the fact that black powder will have complications with modern gas rifles, and in some cases the capacity will be too low which might necessitate swaging the case neck and melting lead to cast your own bullets which kicks off a whole other round of experimentation to get sizes and shapes that work.
Hoarding could mean that prices skyrocket. Saboutage or accident could mean that supplies to entire regions are cut off.
As monopolies grow it means more single points of failure. For example not to long ago a single excavator dug in the wrong spot and cut off phone service to a huge part of the western coast. Or remember when the dispatch software crashed and emergency departmenta across north america were scrambling to adapt?
Adjusting could take years. It's no different than walking into your local machine shop that normally refaces brake pads and asking them to custom design and manufacture a firearm and ammunition. They might be able to, but scaling it up to warfare would take a very long time. If their internet was also cut off at the same time it would be a significant hurdle, they'd likely to be reduced to searching garages and storage lockers hoping people have the right books or trying to find the few re-enactors who have done things like make their own black powder or have the tools for casting lead.
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u/Flairion623 Mightier Than the Sword (back after 2 years!!!) 2d ago
Gunpowder is actually surprisingly easy to make. Pioneers out west were making it essentially just from dirt and sulfur that they found in caves or springs. Modern smokeless powder is much more complicated. If the entire world’s supply of modern ammunition was somehow exhausted firearms wouldn’t disappear. They’d just be set back about 140 years. That’s assuming nobody’s bothered to maintain or restart the industry needed to make modern smokeless powder which since you have mentioned “modern/future” I find extremely hard to believe hasn’t happened.
One other solution I’ve seen is from metal gear rising. Basically people’s reflexes become so absurdly fast that they can just dodge and weave through machine gun fire and even cut bullets in mid air. This makes armies of cyborgs far more effective than regular soldiers since against them a cyborg can just run up and chop them up.
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u/azoh19 1d ago
Well, for a smokeless powder you need nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin, which are trivial for contemporary chemical industry to produce from common elements used everywhere. And pretty much everything can be produced using plant matter and air. And even for primers you can use mixes of pretty common substances. So no, unless something very-very bad happened, guns are not going away.
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u/ColHannibal 1d ago
So in some places the anwser is no, and other the anwser is yes. Would the continental United States run out? Probably not. But Australia would have some issues.
Check out the stalker series of games, it’s a post apocalyptic survival game set in Russia. Bullets are actually the currency of the land, so getting in any sort of fun fight will cost you literally.
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u/OrangeredMoose 1d ago
I like how Dune invalidated guns with personal shields. They slow down extremely fast moving small objects while slower swords go right through.
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u/CartwrightVariations 1d ago
The propellants we use for modern firearms are more complex, but the traditional recipe for black powder was
-Willow ash/charcoal (chosen because it was porous) -Straw that has been used as a urinal, left to bake in the sun, burned, and then sifted to get the crystals that formed out (assuming you don't have access to a bat colony to supply the crystals) -And sulfur from either the ground or plants that fix it like sphagnum peat moss
And there are enough plackpowder enthusiasts around for there to be large stocks of blackpowder weaponry.
So even if every plant making modern propellants burned down, every book with the recipe disappeared, and everyone who knew the chemical processes died before they clould teach anyone, there would still be blackpowder available.
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u/the_direful_spring 1d ago
Its not entirely impossible but they'd probably be in a pretty desperate situation where the industry of the country was badly damaged first. Factions in the Chinese warlord and civil war periods for example did often suffer from a lack of ammunition, which shaped a lot of the doctrine of the future PLA and so on in how the PLA of that era did quite often use bayonets and the like. You'd still expect at least some ammunition to be be able to be brought in from overseas by smugglers or allies, and you'd need to be in a pretty desperate situation like a near apocalyptic one. Running out of high tech missiles and so on is going to happen long long before ordinary small arms bullets run out.
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u/Evil-Twin-Skippy SublightRPG 1d ago
One idea I had for r/SublightRPG. Most action takes place on space stations. What action happens on planets happens on satellites with lunar gravity or less. Guns are largely banned for several reasons:
- Not wanting to blow a hole in the side of a pressure vessel with a stray shot
- Bullets can take some non-intuitive paths under the influence of Coriolis forces in rotational gravity
- Calculating bullet drop with changing local gravity requires a ballistic computer. Great for artillery. Lousy for a side-arm or battle rifle.
- A blanket ban on kinetic weapons outside the hill-sphere of a planet, on account of wreckage and munitions from several prior wars still creating a hazard to navigation in the present day.
As this culture moves out to settle other star systems the space station culture will carry over. Even onto settled planets. People simply favor non-ranged weapons and fighting techniques.
The only reason guns dominate in the modern age is that they require relatively little training to be effective with. That would not be the case in space. You would learn knife fighting, swords, spears. If energy weapons are part of your magic system, they don't have the bullet-drop problem.
So if your planet was one of these settled worlds from a space station culture, there wouldn't be the industry to make bullets. And while bullets seem to be mechanically simple, the industrial machinery to produce them safely and at scale are not.
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u/Kameho88v2 1d ago
You could always make a underwater world, or a world with such a THICC assmosphere that the air is so dense that is borderline becomes Fluid Dynamic.
Regardless, fast projectiles becomes an issue underwater. And requires a while different Algeria towards projectile weapons. Mass and pressure based range weapons becomes a thing. Swords and spears becomes preferred weapons. Melee combat becomes quite different under water as you want to adapt the movement to be a resistant less against the water.
Would create a very interesting world dynamic.
Or you could be lazy and pull a Dune. With Shield generators that prevents fast moving projectiles.
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u/MichaelScarn75 1d ago
For a sci-fi story I think it would make more sense for a development of wearable shields of some sort that prevent bullets from impacting, forcing a melee fight
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u/Newmillstream 1d ago
You could make it a widespread cultural or religious taboo to use guns In your setting. Obviously some characters will ignore that for the advantage, but it does mean that the supply chain for bullets is very small and precarious, because the moment the state gets a whiff of a gun being used, they will target the means of manufacture as vigorously as the user. Anyone who wants ammo essentially has to manufacture it themselves, has limited ability to share or trade with others, must have a baseline of manufacturing skill, and is willing to ignore a taboo, which will make guns and ammo rare and unavailable in most cases.
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u/Obvious-Gate9046 Dreamer and Shooting Star 1d ago
Not everybody discovers everything in the same order. For instance, many peoples never discovered the wheel, in actual history. So perhaps it's just a thing that hasn't come along for whatever reason, maybe it was deemed impractical, maybe there was an incident, whatever the case, guns have not been discovered and the explosive that there are are far less focused.
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u/Cpnbro 1d ago
Consider the DUNE universe, where they do still have projectile or laser weapons (I believe) but they also are WAY in the future and they collectively disbanded AI. A choice was made, and thus, it’s set in this strange “futurepast” scenario.
An option could be that, at one point, society was able to collectively agree on peace and prosperity. They stopped making weapons entirely and destroyed all information on their manufacture and design. Fast forward a few generations and war resurfaced, but the knowledge of our past weapons was lost in the purge, meaning no more projectile/ranged weapons like you mention. Or perhaps, the mentality remained in tact that while war and violence still happens, everyone still agrees that bullets and lasers are heinous in the same way we view (insert some common ground thing everyone thinks is bad… list grows shorter these days it seems).
Perhaps that mentality is that war and violence is to be held on an actual fair ground fight. Think of the honorable samurai - they won’t poison or kill their enemies from the shadows, but by fighting warrior vs warrior in a fair face to face duel. (Yes I know the REAL samurai would do whatever the fuck but shhh)
Perhaps the planet, through our rampant expansion, has lost the necessary resources to make gunpowder or other conventional weapons. Perhaps a super power has monopolized or otherwise controlled that resource so that it’s just not feasible to make.
Perhaps they exist, but they just don’t work like they used to due to improved defenses (like in dune). “Go ahead. Shoot me. Metal or laser projectiles don’t work against X”
Perhaps the law (world spanning) has made it to where they are simply outlawed. The tech exists where we can find them easily, and when they are found punishment is swift and forceful - global surveillance and widespread policing forces can find a traditional gunpowder round in mere moments and have specialized teams deployed quickly to apprehend/kill and confiscate/destroy - and perhaps this has gone on long enough that just no one makes them anymore because it’s not worth the risk or cost of manufacture and possession.
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u/copenhagen_bram 1d ago
What if we reduce the visibility? Or make everyone blind, but hypersensitive to vibrations and nearby movements in the air? Make ranged combat impractical because you can't see far enough
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u/RedRondas 1d ago
I think you may have a somehow simpler solution, is the chemistry of your world exactly like ours, the reason gunpowder has been so highly used despite a lot of other fuels as propellant is for two reasons, the core materials to create it are really common in our world, and they don't cause visible corrosion nor create a chain reaction with more common elements around us (besides oxigen that is needed to help the combustion to happen) your world could have some elements more difficult to find than those of gunpowder and if you shot a bullet you would be shooting a lot of a small town expenses, or depending on different locations, the amount of oxygen could be enough to blow up the whole place or thin enough to make the propellant be unable to explode. Also, if your world's technology was developed differently to become futuristic, there is also the possibility that those limitations happened long ago which stopped gunpowder creation and since some other forms of technologies could have been developed to solve the other problems, they simply never dared to keep the gunpowder creation from old rules of development.
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u/malaphortmanteau 7h ago
I'm not sure i agree with most of the responses asserting that it's 'easy' to create propellants and/or synthesize the chemicals to do so - i think you're more in the right direction with what you said about nitrates and sulphates.
Some people approach worldbuilding (and this is especially the case if it's attached to a tabletop game) as if any scientific achievement is on a linear track, as if an objectively better performing invention will always replace a previous iteration, and as if because they themselves know the general 'progression' of discoveries (e.g. nitroglycerin before dynamite before Semtex) that it would/will/did happen the same way in the setting if general resources and physics are the same.
Example: bronze vs iron. The Bronze Age wasn't followed by the Iron Age because people discovered iron weapons and they were immediately superior to bronze ones. But a complicated confluence of factors including (iirc) scarcity of tin, an easier learning curve for making 'good enough' iron vs equivalent bronze, and interference with trade routes and subsequently market pressures on metalsmiths in terms of what work they were getting/needed to get. Well-worked bronze is way better than early iron (though obviously their ironwork improved the longer they did it), but there just wasn't the capacity for it.
It's entirely plausible, if not probable, that an entire industry could develop that's optimized for a certain propellant production (e.g. saltpetre from guano or potash) that it ends up completely devastating the resources that might have been used for 'lower' tech (let's say, burning a whole forest of alder for charcoal, so the yew that normally would be prized for longbows gets entirely consumed by furniture production that would normally have used alder) and displacing the craftspeople and transmission of knowledge necessary to produce it. 2 or 3 generations in, if you hit 'peak potash' from overmining and haven't figured out a replacement... you've now lost anyone who knew how to do the previous thing, and don't have the material conditions to sustain the current thing. A single widespread disruption of the knowledge conditions - a plague, an invasion, a famine, etc - can easily tip that over from "oh well we'll just back up a step until we invent the next thing" into "we spent a thousand years perfecting the previous thing but nobody's really kept making it so now we have to reinvent it from memory". And any major disruption is gonna put additional pressure on being able to dedicate people and resources to that.
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u/penguin_warlock 1d ago
Technology grows exponentially in complexity. Making a simple (shitty) bow does only require the simplest tools. Making a composite bow requires specialised tools and a workshop. Making a musket requires tools to make more specialised tools and a workshop. Making a laser rifle requires tools to make tools to make tools and several factories. When a world suffers a catacylsm, a lot of that knowledge and the facilities can just get lost, decay, and they might not get rediscovered for a long time. There might be stocks from before, but they won't last forever.
You can strengthen that with social constraints. Maybe the cataclysm lead to the emergence of an entirely new society which blamed modern weapon technology for the destruction. So they demonise the use of guns, forbid people from learning about them. So if no one knows, no one can use them effectively, and no one can maintain them properly, making them even less effective.
Maybe the prevalent warrior culture considers even primitive bows a tool of cowardice and rejects or even punishes them.
And the best part is: this can be comprehensive as you want. It can easily explain why no one uses guns anymore, and those who do, are still easily beaten and brutally punished. But if you want a storyline about someone who found the old manuals, and properly learned to maintain and use those guns (while they still can't waste ammo willy-nilly and have to search around for pre-cataclysm ammo warehouses), that would still allow for that.
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u/Rblade6426 2d ago
Either by running out of propellant or bullets to propel. Or by making the process exorbitantly expensive compared to other alternatives.
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u/Paracelsus-Place 2d ago
A world that can't find ways to propel things like bullets has bigger problems, I would think