We're getting pretty seriously off-topic here.
Yeah, the Chinese had gunpowder way before many other civilisations and they used it for pretty fireworks and weak rocket-cannons.
And multi-stage rockets, and landmines, and hand grenades, and weird spinning things that shot fire and poison at you. Just saying.
All of which are totally awesome, but not as practical as mass-producing a metal rod filled with some gunpowder with a small projectile and shooting somebody with it. 
lamed.
If we're going to be accurate, Mesopotamians were extracting petroleum by heating rock asphalt back in 2000 BCE. The Ancient Greeks weaponized petroleum's utility by combining it in various mixtures with pitch, resins, sulfur, and quicklime, and delivered it via catapults, arrows, firebombs, and ships. Medieval Islamic alchemists took things one step further, by distilling petroleum into fractions which sometimes had more incendiary power than the original substance, and deployed them via grenades, rockets and torpedoes, which played a key role in Islam's eventual defeat of the Crusaders. By this point the Chinese had refined their particular mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter which would become known as gunpowder: an Islamic chemical treatise from 1100 CE lays out seven gunpowder recipes; another one from 180 years later describes more than 70 for a variety of purposes (one proving ideal for rockets, while another is better suited for cannons).
By 1340 CE, firearms had not yet reached most of Europe. At that time England's earl of Derby and earl of Salisbury happened to be in Spain at the battle of Tarifa, where they witnessed Arabian cannons used against the Spaniards. They were quite impressed by the results and decided to introduce the technology to the English army, which adopted them enthusiastically and even used them against the French at the battle of Crécy six years later.
So while yes, the British did eventually attempt a subjugation of the Chinese (as they tried basically everywhere else), attributing their victory to firearms while overlooking their respective economic and social histories, which contributed more to their respective levels of technology adoption than the presence of individual inventors, is like saying the Chinese lost because they couldn't win. It's an empty statement, devoid of meaning.
The invention of firearms cannot be attributed to any single inventor or culture. Guns were not the result of a single stroke of inspiration after working with raw materials; their development came from one artisan improving on an earlier artisan's design. You can attribute individual designs along the arc of development to particular inventors, and you can similarly trace certain developmental traditions to specific origins, but settling on some arbitrary collection of characteristics as the Aristotelian ideal of the firearm and bestowing Inventor status on the first model that contains all the relevant characteristics demonstrates a willful disregard of the history of technology.
(Dates, events, and some of the words used to describe them stolen from Jared Diamond's excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the clash of civilizations.)To get back on-topic:
I'm really looking forward to seeing what the community does with the new anatomy tools and custom creatures. I remember being entertained by the
nuclear catsplosion; I can't wait to see what sort of bizarreness this system will enable.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3633307 times)