Could the Incas have made muskets if they captured some?

by hippiocan
Gargatua13013

Certainly not in any effective way, and much more likely not at all.

A musket requires a chamber which will reliably maintain its integrety during firing. Inca smelting was overwhelmingly along the gold-copper-silver suite and never went in the direction of ferrous metals, and the technological leap to go from non-ferrous metals, to iron and then steel is quite steep in terms of technology. The temperatures required are quite different. In terms of strength, you could not substitute Au, Ag or Cu for Iron-based alloys in a musket prototype.

In addition to Au, Ag & Cu, the Inca also used to some extent a few alloys of arsenic-copper, tin-copper and arsenic-nickel-copper. However, the use of arsenic-bronze mostly occurred between 400 and 1000 AD, so it has pretty much fallen out of favor by the time the Inca would have seen their first musket. I bring this up because arsenic-bronze is a bit tougher than the other metals used by the Incas, and might have been their best option to try their hand at musket production. That being said, better does not equate great, and a hypothetical arsenic-bronze musket prototype would not so much be a usefull weapon as it would be a face-held grenade, which is to say no good at all.

For more info on the history of Inca metal smelting, I suggest you look into Cooke et al., 2008. Metallurgy in Southern South America