Firearms, cannons, and other modern weaponry

[Garren Jacobsen]

I figured we could create a thread to discuss firearms. And I have a question. I need to know about going from canons to person firearms used en masse and how the use of canons (as a surprise "super weapon") would affect the early stages of revolution where it is the revolutionaries that are using the canons. So, any thoughts?

 

[Jerseydevil]

Cannons require a great deal of infrastructure to manufacture. They are large, heavy, and most importantly expensive. The casting of the guns (in the military, guns means artillery, not personal weapons) requires tons of iron or bronze. It has to be cast perfectly, or the weapon will either break or worse, explode under the pressure which happened often. If this is a world where cannons are a new invention and gunpowder was never seen before, research guns from the 1300s and early 1400s for details. In short, they are inaccurate and slow to fire. There was once a gunnery engineer that received a reward from the pope for increasing the volume of fire to a blistering five shots per day. They are next to useless in the field, and were reserved for knocking down castle walls. More effective guns came later, and effective field artillery didn't come about until the mid to late 1500s. Revolutionaries would probably not have access to the resources needed to make a cannon, and if the captured one, would not know how to use it. Training was needed to use it even against a stationary target and actually hit something. Trigonometry is involved somehow. And remember, they would blow up a lot. I cannot emphasize this enough. Really, they were giant, several ton pipe bombs. Early ones were prone to simply not working for no declarable reason (mostly because of damp gunpowder). In short, early guns were a lot of fuss and bother, very loud and terrifying, but more show than anything else.

Hand guns appeared around the same time, more as a novelty. They were hand cannons that were just scaled down versions of the larger guns with a handle. Because of the awkward grip, it could only be fired from the hip, making aiming near impossible. It was also slow to load and prone to exploding (I think you might be seeing a pattern here). The first effective weapon was the arquebus, which looks very similar to a modern rifle, and improved accuracy by actually allowing the user to look down the barrel and aim. It used a trigger mechanism to move a burning piece of match to a pan with black powder. It appeared in the 1500s. It was replaced with the matchlock musket in the late 1500s to early 1600s. Flintlocks came abut a century later.

As far as the use of infantry firearms is concerned, they were more of a novelty for the first few centuries, and military planners did not know how to use them particularly well. The gunner would point and fire at their own pace. The first to use firearms effectively were the Spanish, who introduced volley fire. The problem was that the guns were horrifyingly inaccurate, so if everyone fired at the same thing at the same time, someone might (emphasis on might) hit something. The other problem is that after discharging the weapon, the user was vulnerable, meaning that a brisk enemy counter charge could overwhelm them. To solve this, gunners were covered with pikemen. Look up the Spanish Tercio for details. Think Greek phalanx, but with firearms and long pikes. More linear formations came later in the 1630's under Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus

One other consideration. Gunpowder was needed for these things to work, otherwise you have a chunk of iron and an expensive, over-engineered club. Unless you had the ingredients (yes, I know the formula, no I'm not giving recipes for explosives over the internet), there would be a critical shortage. The Americans during the Revolution always had this problem, something your might have as well.

I wrote my Master's thesis on this subject, and found the book The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-1800 by Geoffery Parker to be invaluable on this subject.

 

[CupofJoe]

I wrote my Master's thesis on this subject, and found the book The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-1800 by Geoffery Parker to be invaluable on this subject.

Well done! And thank you for the book recommendation.