Naruto With Firearms

[Corvus 501]

Assuming that a while before the primary story line, let's say during the Warring Clans Era, firearms of various types where invented and became popular. Consequently, chucking kuani, shruken and senbon at your enemies was seen as a way to take down targets quietly and at close range. Elemental jutsu developed much the same, but they would general used as area attacks, while just shooting someone was the most common way to solve problems of the violent sort.
While normal firearms would exist, (bolt actions, revolvers, shotguns, and some auto and semi auto weapons) ninja and samurai grade weapons are all seal enhanced to give them massive ammunition stores, as well as the usual bucket list for "magical" firearm upgrades.
Given this, how would the world of Naruto develop differently?

[Ahriman238]

Well, most of low-hanging fruit of ninjutsu are a lot less useful compared to just firing a gun. Actually, anything that requires people to form a series of handseals is probably going to lose to a quick-draw. There'll still be room for the earth-shaking level, but overall I think a lot of power is going to shift from ninja clans and samurai to the common people, who armed with guns are a viable threat to even master samurai and jonin.

That or some really draconian gun control is introduced in a probably doomed attempt to maintain the status quo.

[Corvus 501]

Well, stuff like the Great Fireball would serve as an excellent area attack, and earth release= instant cover. Furthermore, the way that I imagined it is that firearms consist of rifled muskets with sparkplug biased fireing mechanisms, and ammo scrolls to deal with reloading. Civilian grade guns would generaly be what you could find around the America Civil War to WWI, albeit designed to use smokeless gunpowder.

[Corvus 501]

So while civilians can be a threat to samurai and ninja, they aren't big threats, espicially with regular soldiers around. The way I see the Naruto verse is that samurai act as regular soldiers while the ninja act as suppersoldiers. In this scenario, they both act as supper soldiers, with samurai as close combat specialists and ninja as ranged specialists, snipers, assassins, spies, and saboteurs. Both would chakra reinforce themselves and use techniques.

[Q99]

The big danger of firearms is most genin will use them.

You'll see fewer develop proper jutsu as a result, causing the high-level techniques to be less common, I'd believe.

[Purple]

I do not see firearms being suppressed by the ninja to any meaningful degree. These people aren't stupid. 99% of combat oriented ninja techniques will go down the drain the moment someone figures out Renaissance grade musket squares. There is just no reasonable counter to that in a ninjas arsenal short of summoning a giant frog. Yes they might take out 5-10 rifle armed peasants before they are put down but so what? A ninja takes years to train where as you can just get 10 or even 50 new peasants. So in the numbers game they always lose. And the leaders of ninja villages and their countries are going to realize this sooner rather than later.

Thus what I foresee is a repeat of the Meiji restoration only with a world war thrown in. Local governments are going to start raising armies of firearm equipped levies whilst the ninja villages either fall in line or are made to fall in line at the point of a bayonet. Once that is done, the countries are going to start looking at one another eying each other for any sign of weakness. Which ever country can't keep up with the raising military spending or ends up ravaged the most by the "restoration" will get devoured by the others on short order.

At the end of the day the world will look nothing like what we know it to be. Ninja will be few and far between, their villages loosing most of their political power. Their role will be mostly that of spies and assassins, thus clans that specialize in this will prosper whilst those oriented more on direct combat will wither. The nations of their world will be industrializing rapidly and we will see an arms race that eventually leads to modern looking armies.

[Corvus 501]

Or, people use a little common sense and use ninja and samurai as force multipliers, causing massive disruption in enemy lines and spearheading assaults, respectively. Underground Movement combined with gunpowder charges gives you an instant minefield, and "assassinations" that consist of incinerating entire chains of command during staff meetings to cause mass chaos, or having people capable of punting jeeps show up with swords and semi modern weapons would break any army, or infantry square.

[Purple]

Or, people use a little common sense and use ninja and samurai as force multipliers, causing massive disruption in enemy lines and spearheading assaults, respectively.

So far most of the stuff we have seen can be categorized into two groups that being Super Sayan grade techniques that blow villages up, summon giant frogs or serpent etc. and the regular stuff which at best is equal to a hand grenade. And #1 seems mostly to be relegated to a small band of major characters whilst #2 seems to be practiced by the general ninja population. Stuff like great fireball just won't be that effective when faced with a guy that can put down five rounds rapid from several times the range. And that's what most ninja are really limited to.

Underground Movement combined with gunpowder charges gives you an instant minefield, and "assassinations" that consist of incinerating entire chains of command during staff meetings to cause mass chaos

Stuff like that falls into the special forces thing I mentioned.

or having people capable of punting jeeps show up with swords and semi modern weapons would break any army, or infantry square.

Such feats are actually not that impressive when you consider the fact that they die just like a peasant does. Combine that with the fact that a ninja takes years upon years to train and you get troops that are simply too expensive to deploy in the way you imagine. If a battalion of your infantry gets killed by a squad of enemy ninja but they manage to take the ninja with them that's a win for you. You can just draft a new battalion. They need 15-20 years to get a new squad ninja.

That's all besides the point though as far as the immediate future goes. Because as things stand right now there are greater things to think about. The real issue here is that as it stands Ninja villages have a lot of political power. In fact I would go so far as to call them the power brokers of the setting. And the moment a cheap way of equipping an army comes along local political elites will jump at the chance to take that power away.

[Corvus 501]

Two words: Body armor. Seal enhanced ceramic plaits backed up by ballistic cloth stops most firearms. Besides, the only people with semi automatic firearms are samurai and ninja, and they cannot be mass produced, BECAUSE SEALS ARE HAND DRAWN. In this case, you don't have IRL ninja and samurai, you would have special forces equivalents facing people using weapons out of the American Civil War. In terms of armor, mobility, training, and weaponry, civilian soldiers are utterly outclassed.

[Korgeta]

Well I'll be seeing half the episode of someone chargin a gun (it's anime, they can charge a negative if they wanted) and another ten minutes of multiple pov's stating if he really is going to use the special bullet technique with no way with gasps as the villain was wearing body armour all along.

more on topic there's a gun on the shopkeeper's desk http://media.animevice.com/uploads/0/48 ... _super.jpg

They do exist and would work on some characters but close and direct against the likes of Naruto etc is just not going to work, if there was an assassin or arc villain that would use a gun against the top tier Naruto characters they would be a sniper type character hitting them from the shadows afar waiting for them to lower their guard, forcing top end of Naruto character to use their wit and their training to avoid the killing blow.

[Corvus 501]

There are also hand held automatic kuani launchers. The idea behind this is that a societal change in ninja and samurai led them from the "chucking knives and swordplay" style of combat to modern "take cover and use suppressing fire" style, facilitated by magi-tech armor and weapons. The living legends are skilled and powerful enough to dominant any battlefield, and the rank and file ninja and samurai are like Navy SEALS going up agents American Civil War to WWI era troops.

[Corvus 501]

Back on the subject of Naruto verse firearm use, in hidden villages, there are generally two levels of weapons. First, there's the standard issue, the Battle Rifle, Autumatic Pistol, SMG, Carabine, Marksman Carabine, Sniper Rifle, and Combat Shotgun, well designed, functual, weapons that get the job done, and are reasonably cheap. Secondly, there are clan models, which can be rather... ecentric. For instance, (in Kohona) the Sarubouti, Senju, and Kuarma clans tend to use standard designs built with higher quality matirals, most other clans tend to have less standard weapons. The Uchiha clan for instance, tends to use caribines and pistols, and they rarely use any sights besides iron sights. The Nara clan tend to use weapons with extremly extensive flash suppressors, the Inuzulka tend to use combat shotguns and grenade launchers loaded with canister shot, (as do the Amichi) the Aburaum use suppressed pistols and SMGs with subsonic rounds (with marksman caribines as backup weapons) the Yamanaka use suppressed pistols alongside standard weapons, and the Hyuuga use 15mm anti material rifles. They are usually 6 feet long, and are rated to go straight through fully grown trees, as they where invented by a pissed off Hyuuga who wanted the ability to shoot whatever he could see.

[hunter5]

Didn't a couple of the movies have if not actual fire arms rapid fire weapons such as full auto knife launchers, ninja aircraft carriers, and even some kind of rapid fire beam machine guns?

[Q99]

Didn't a couple of the movies have if not actual fire arms rapid fire weapons such as full auto knife launchers, ninja aircraft carriers, and even some kind of rapid fire beam machine guns?

There were some very large giant shuriken throwers and some ninja with mecha-hands and similar, but I don't think aircraft carriers and the like.


I haven't seen all the movies, so I could be wrong.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

I've been thinking about this myself, in the context of planning a fanfic.

It seems apparent that guns are a known technology in Naruto's world; especially if we accept the Movies as canon. In 'Blood Prison', the guards are shown carrying what look suspiciously like matchlock muskets. There are some other, far more bizarre exceptions to Kishi's supposed no guns rule, notably a battlesuit firing rockets, but that's another matter. The obvious explanation in the case of Blood Prison is that guns are effective because the prisoners cannot use their chakra to defend themselves; whether by blocking or dodging the bullets, or by taking out the guards before they can fire, or other more exotic means. This would also explain why we so rarely see guns elsewhere; or any ranged weapons for that matter. The only large-scale uses of ranged weapons I can remember are the crossbows carried by the people of the Land of Waves (http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q64 ... f18658.jpg) and the soldiers of the Land of Demons using bows (Naruto Shippuden, the Movie).

But this raises another question; the Elemental nations are seen to have technology far in advance of matchlock muskets, so why can't they create more powerful firearms? One possibility is that no one really sees the point; people are so convinced that guns are useless against Shinobi that no one bothers to develop them further. A variation on this is cultural cachet; people overwhelmingly associate Ninja and Jutsu with military power, so any new idea that doesn't involve these gets dismissed out of hand. This is a simple explanation and somewhat believable, but ignores an all-too-human tendency towards reckless tinkering; in other words, surely someone must be willing to give it a try?

The issue ties in to the considerable disparities in technology we see throughout the anime and movies. A good example is ships; the Elemental nations appear to use wooden sailing ships, yet in 'Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow', our heroes travel to the Land of Snow in a Chinese-style junk and use snowmobiles when they get there. In 'Legend of the Stone of Gelel', Haido's knights use metal-hulled ships with a pre-dreadnaught feel. In 'Guardians of Crescent Moon Kingdom', the heroes travel to the eponymous island on a mid to late 19th century steamship (it includes masts with sails), and then leave it on a modern-looking cruise liner. Funnily enough, the Crescent Moon Kingdom's army (or a not-very-loyal Royal Guard) wear suspiciously modern-looking armour and fatigues, yet carry swords, spears, and shields. There are plenty of other examples, including Ninja using personal radios yet relying on messenger birds for long-distance communication, or how half the homes in Konoha have TVs, or how the Ninja use computers.

The best explanation I can come up with is that the Elemental nations don't make the technology themselves (or at least not all of it). Considering how technology spread around our own world, it's not inconcievable that the Elemental nations prefer to just import any technology they want, rather than develop or build it themselves. The situation would be something like Tokugawa Japan if the restrictions on imports were somewhat loosened, and there was no 'Black Ships' event to scare the bejeesus out of everyone. The Daimyo (backed by the Ninja) would allow 'harmless' technologies to be imported, while blocking anything that might upset the social order. This would include more advanced firearms, but also mechanised farming, and arguably industrialisation in its entirety (except the bare minimum they need to use their new toys).

[Corvus 501]

A radio can be intercepted easily, messenger Hawks need to be seen and shot down. Messenger birds in general are just couriers. As to the technology, it also could be summoned, or just pure magi tech. Depending of how sealing works, you might be able to skip 99% of the steps needed to make a working computer or radio. In this situation, however, guns where designed to be used with seals, allowing ninja and samurai to get 21 century performance out of 19th to 20th century guns, even when everyone else is stuck with the base technology. In short, ninja and samurai have assault rifles while almost everyone else is stuck with muskets. ( there are a few bolt action rifles and semi modern artillery, but those are rare, and the large production lines that they need tend to suffer frequent "accadents")