so you find yourself in 272 bc....

[Ibrahim]

Since you have no instructors and your soldiers lack even the most basic knowlegde of gun-warfare, it would take decades to train your army. There is litterally no-one who has even a remote clue how to aim, fire and reload a gun. Let alone he'd do it when being charged by some gaesaetae. You'll need to have some accuracy and firepower to make volleys deadly. You'll still have to armour your soldiers (since your opponents will use missiles), which almost forces your soldiers to reload these guns when fully armoured. I really want to see that happen. You can no longer have any kind of decent shield. You'll have to equip your soldiers with something that is capable to break a charge of heavy cavalry...

To me, the introduction of guns seems at best possible in some very specific situations: you need to be able to train your units (no berserkers please) and to have a proper battlefield (no northern-european ambushes, no quick skirmishing raids,...). You'll need to have decent accuracy and enough manpower in order to make your volleys deadly (just imagine being encircled, being heavily outnumbered, or being utterly butchered in man-to-man fighting). You'll need to be capable to find ammunition, to keep your powder dry, to have decent supplies of powder and ammunition (swords can be repaired if needs be)... When you finally assembled your army you should avoid barbarians living in trees or opponents who rely on archers or any kind of heavy shock unit - whether infantry of cavalry.

no, it doesn't have to take decades; around 10 years is feasible (heck, the japanese modernized their army in about 10 years). just show them how to make, and they'll churn it out. and training a musketeer doesn't take long anyhow, anywhere from a few weeks to a full year. compare that to a lifetime of bow and arrow practice. and its a great excuse to centralize government-the Chinese and seleukids would have loved it.

and accuracy is irrelevent-no one from that timeperiod would want to mess with a bunch of boys with "firesticks". and the range isn't that short (of course, if your paranoid enough, just rifle the barrel and you can multiply the range by 2 to 4 fold..and if you can support them with pikemen, even better.

as for armor: by your logic, musketeers in the 18th centry were a bunch of turtles-afterall, they fought each other with missiles

besides, I said specifically that I prefer to start in china: they definately had the means to train, churn, and use (and maintain)musketeers efficiently-hell, they used crossbowmen the same way

@satalexon: shooting each other didn't stop Qin from improving their weapons/armies* in RL, so why not a musket?

*hey, doesn't that take...listening, then providing the resources.