Cannon

After the Chinese worked out the basics of gunpowder, they began to experiment with how to use it on the battlefield. As such, during the Song Dynasty people invented basic bombs, rockets and firearms for use in combat. Eventually someone decided that their firelance was a good idea, but it could become an even better idea by making it even bigger. Thus were born the first cannons. By an odd quirk of fate this design process apparently happened in reverse in Europe when gunpowder got around to them, with cannons being built first which were then scaled down into man portable handgonnes/hand-cannons.

Not to be confused with canon, though they do share the same word root which refers to a tube/pipe.

Cannons in Warfare

The Great Turkish Penis Compensator Bombard, when you absolutely positively need to conquer Constantinople, accept no substitutes

Cannons can be generally sorted into either one of three main categories: gun, howitzer, or mortar. The main difference between these weapons is in their ballistic qualities and ammunition. Gun projectiles travel at high velocities following a fairly flat trajectory, mortar projectiles travel at low velocities with steeply-arched trajectories, and howitzers are between the two.

The gun was historically used to batter down fortifications, pulverize infantry, or smash boats with solid shot. Most forms of premodern artillery were guns. Prior to the invention of reliable fuzes, Mortars and howitzers were just about the only means of safely firing explosive or incendiary ordinance at the enemy. Mortars, with their steep trajectories, were very useful in dropping bombs on the heads of enemy soldiers hiding behind hills and ramparts; Howitzers on the other hand, were (and still are) highly versatile pieces capable of handling solid and explosive shells, though with less efficiency and more difficulty than either guns or mortars.

The history of the cannon is written in blood-- in its first chapters often the blood of their users along with their targets. The first generations of cannons were crude affairs made by people with rudimentary metallurgy working things out by trial and error, with error often ending with the poor sods manning the gun getting a face full of iron shards, if not vaporized by the blast outright. This was made all the worse by the crude gunpowder available at the time and mishandling by inexperienced crews. In this initial period history Cannons were used for two purposes: small wall mounted defensive weapons in fortifications and large siege weapons to get through city walls. While they were powerful, cannons were simply too inaccurate in the early times, which was especially true for the heavier offensive guns. The big siege guns would usually be carted into a fixed location and be set there. Even if nothing went wrong they could only get off a couple shots an hour. Early cannons fired a variety of shot from spears to chiseled stone balls, though eventually cast iron balls became the most common as things progressed. While early cannons were dangerous and unreliable in terms of accuracy or lifespan, they were more easy to cast and maintain compared to the wood and rope used to make catapults and ballista; with the latter prone to warping and decay from humidity and weather.

Eventually the art of cannon making improved as time went on and things became more reliable as gunmakers and gun crews got more experienced in handling their weapons (partially as the stupid ones got their jimmies blown off) and tried and true designs were replicated. Cannons went from massive bombards hurling large boulders to smaller but more powerful pieces firing iron balls at higher velocity. As this happened, it prompted a change in fortification design. Tall and comparatively thin walls with high towers might be imposing and good at fending off attempts to scale them with ladders and siege towers, but they could not take that many salvos from a besieging enemy. Walls instead became shorter and thicker, reinforced with heavy earth ramparts to absorb the shock of cannonballs, with pointed battlements better suited for mounting defensive cannon and bouncing shells.

An even bigger development was the matter of cannons at sea. Though some people tried using catapults, ballistae, and the occasional flamethrower (until the Byzantines forgot how they worked thanks to Emperors keeping the recipe and well...a coup and a couple of dead folks later, no one remembered where they put it.) as ship-mounted weapons, naval battles were up until this point settled by ramming or boarding actions. By the late 1400s potential of naval guns soon became obvious, damaging or destroying the wooden enemy ships outright, and navies began adapting their ship designs to carry guns. In 1571 the naval forces of the Holy League faced off against those of the Ottoman Empire off the coast of Greece at Lepanto. Though the Ottomans had a slight numerical advantage in terms of galleys and soldiers, the Christians had more that twice as many cannons as well as better trained gun crews which could get off two shots for every volley the Ottomans could which was a big factor in the crushing defeat that the Ottomans suffered that day. Even so, the days of the galley were done and the age of sail had begun. Purely sail driven warships might not have the short range speed advantage or the shallow water maneuverability of a Galley, but where a galley would have ranks of rowers manning oars and a five or so frontal cannons a sailing ship would have a broadside with dozens of cannon.

A 24 pounder Long Gun from the age of Sail

From about 1400 to 1800 there were two main materials used to make cannons: bronze and iron.

Bronze was by far the preferred material. In Europe, there was a long tradition of Casting large metallic objects out of bronze, namely church bells and bronze statues. Additionally, unlike iron, bronze takes much less energy to recast, so guns were made out of whatever bronze material was left lying around. Next time you're in Europe, take a shot every time you find a church bell older than 200 years. It sucks as a drinking game, since you won't end up drunk at the end. Bronze guns can be made lighter than iron guns of a similar size, and were therefore more mobile on the battlefield. Furthermore, bronze has some give to it, which means you have some warning if the gun is going to blow up. When an iron gun is about to blow up, it doesn't give any warning when it's no longer safe, but a bronze one will bulge first, letting you know when you're starting to push your luck. The problem was that copper and tin were fairly rare and in short supply and the cannon makers were not the only ones who wanted the stuff, so the number of bronze guns you could make was limited.

Iron is of course one of the most common elements in the Earth's crust. That said, it took more fuel to smelt, it was much harder to melt and reforge, it took different and less-common craftsmen (since you couldn't just conscript the various bell-makers in your given nation), and if you didn't have a good metallurgist you would end up making a brittle gun that was liable to explode in your face. The earliest guns tended to be made out of iron staves welded and bound together by iron hoops like a barrel, though these could rarely withstand the strain of repeated firings. Casting was no less easier. Simply put, it's just much easier to make a big thing like a cannon out of bronze than iron. That said, the use of iron became more and more common as time went on, as the need for artillery increased and the requisite metallurgy and tooling improved.

Of course iron and bronze were not the only things we made cannons out of. In a pinch or on the cheap, you could use wood to make a cannon, but wooden guns need much thicker walls than a metal one, limiting the size and weight of your shot and how much powder you can use. Another material experimented with was copper bound with leather, first toyed with by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden against Poland. They were... less than successful, and replaced with 3-pound bronze guns.

You might ask why Gustavus decided to make a cannon out of leather in the first place? The answer is that as time went on and cannons became quicker firing and more accurate, people began wondering about other uses for cannons besides blasting apart castles and ships. Armies back then formed up their infantry into large, blocky formations of arquebusiers (men armed with pre-musket guns), halberdmen, swordsmen and pikemen. Against such foes, the old and massive castle-crackers were overkill. Beyond that they were still slow-firing and a massive pain in the butt to move around. What was needed against those targets were smaller, lighter, (a cannon that can shoot a 3 pound ball is still very heavy, though much lighter than one that shoots a 12 pound ball which is why Gustavus tried leather to make a light gun) guns that could quickly be moved into position, loaded and fired. Thus, bit by bit Gustavus developed the idea of Field Artillery for antipersonnel use and would end up attaching 12 or so field guns to each of his brigades (a military unit he himself invented) to support his infantry. This made Gustavus army devastatingly effective against the Catholic forces in the 30 years war. Just not with the leather cannons.

In any case by 1700 it was made clear that field artillery was a critical part of any army on the march. This development also meant that armies began to shift their tactics away from blockish formations but to long firing lines. You see, you can aim a cannon ball so that when it reaches the ground it bounces off of it in front of the formation so that it would fly though a block formation of thirty or more pikemen and musketeers at hip level, killing and maiming until it went out the other side. This was called the grazeing shot and warhammer fantasy players are likely well aware of how effective this could be on thick blocks of troops. The same would apply to a three man thick line of soldiers, though with only a tenth the casualties. A cannon ball can only kill people it hits or those nearby (the later due to the fact that the bones of the people hit spray fragments everywhere). Explosive shells, which have a wider area of effect, had long been in use, but their effectiveness was always a little iffy, on account of requiring a v lit fuze in order to explode; they also couldn't be fired out of guns at very high velocity, since they'd also need thicker shell walls to withstand the stresses of firing, which reduces the power of the explosive payload.

Cannons changed substantially during the 19th century. Improvements in metallurgy and tooling not only made it possible to cheaply produce strong guns out of iron (and later steel), but to also give their barrels rifling, imparting greater range and accuracy to projectiles, as well as the ability to reload from the breech, which is a lot faster than trying to shove things down the barrel from the muzzle. You also had high explosives. Compared to regular old gunpowder (which is often called low explosive or black powder) high explosives were by nature much more powerful and very unstable. The latter quality however, made small quantities ideal for the creation of reliable shell fuzes and primers; when mixed with stabilizers, they also turned out to be much better propellants and explosive material than the old stuff. From now on, all forms of artillery could fire explosive shells with absurd range and power. You could shoot so far that you didn't even need to see your targets to hit them, though you needed spotters to tell you were to shoot. That said, there remained problems with accuracy. Which is why during World War One, they used weeks of saturating bombardments to try and destroy fortifications. Mostly, this didn't work: 1,738,000 shells were fired at the German lines before the battle of the Somme and enough Germans were left alive to kill 26,000 of the attacking British (Empire) and French on the first day. What was needed was a way to get a cannon in place to hit a target directly and allow the accurate destruction of fortifications. . . which lead of course to the invention of the tank and the modern infantry mortar to allow much closer range accurate fire support.

That pretty much leads us to today. The cannon is now generally only found in its purest form on Tanks, where high velocity solid shot is still one of the best ways to penetrate armour. They are also still in use on warships as dual-purpose artillery, though they rarely fire solid shot there. Mortars have generally been infantry-portable muzzleloading weapons, though a few are sufficiently massive to warrant mounting on vehicles and/or incorporating a breechloading mechanism. Howitzers are now technically gun-howitzers, incorporating aspects of both the gun and howitzer to rain fire on enemy positions many miles (or kilometres) away, though they are perfectly capable of murderizing things much closer, if the situation calls for it. For a time, it seemed that rockets and missiles would completely replace gun artillery, though the latter still has a significant niche in providing sustained, cost-efficient fire support. Most marked improvements to cannons in the twentieth century amount to either making them more portable by putting them on a tracked or wheeled vehicle. As for lethality, you now have one gun capable of doing the job of a dozen or more, courtesy of superior accuracy through computerized fire control systems, guidance systems, autoloaders, and the wonders of the atomic age.

In the future, cannons are likely to be replaced with high tech systems than small arms. Conventional propellants have reached the point where there is no room for further improvement, and so humanity's ongoing quest to hit things harder will require more exotic forms of propulsion. The railgun seems like the most promising candidate, using the power of two conductive rails to propel a solid metal dart at hypersonic (Mach 5+) speeds, imparting so much kinetic energy on contact that the need for an explosive payload is largely rendered moot. This has a number of advantages, key among which is that you no longer have to deal with your ammunition exploding. Laser weapons that can hit small explosive objects or UAVs with pinpoint accuracy are now in operational service with some militaries. However, much as is the case with small arms, such advanced weapons projects have yet to provide a system that can compete with the simple efficiency of a chemical explosion, as they are all dogged by problems relating to power requirements, heat generation, and durability, with few systems being reasonably portable or capable of firing more than a few shots before breaking down.

Cannons in Fantasy

One of the Empire's cannons, proving that you can mix fantasy with gunpowder weapons

Fantasy writers are a bit more accommodating to cannons than firearms: in part because they became more practical earlier on. Also they were crew served devices ill suited to use of a single warrior (unless he/she had fantastic powers to begin with) and cannons are the go to solution when someone says "thrilling non modern naval action". Even so there is some reticence about their use as it implies that sooner or latter someone is going to figure "Hey, why don't we take these things and scale them down?".

Many cannons in fantasy settings have some fancypants adornment with bores made into the mouths of roaring lions, dragons and similar and they are rarely even primitive breech loaders. Fantasy authors also have dislike of making their guns out of Bronze since we like the idea of a big black iron gun. Cannons also tend to exist in isolation, you don't see mortars or howitzers for example . Cannons also tend to be somewhat underpowered (compared to their real life counterparts) in settings where they have to coexist with monsters. To put another way, if a cannon can knock a castle down from 490m away, then I don't care how big your dragon is, one direct hit and it will be down for the count. Mind you, getting that direct hit is going to be a bitch and a half and they are not the easier things to lug around.

Types of cannons

Below is a non-exhaustive list of different artillery weapon types, roughly arranged according to era:

• Bombard: An early cannon that broke down castle walls by hurling massive stone balls at them. Unlike later cannons, bombards don't tend to have carriages and were fixed in place on wooden frames, though a few did have wheels. Single-handedly shortened the length of sieges by allowing for the breaching of walls in a matter of hours, but became obsolete as formulations for gunpowder improved, leaving out unnecessary bits like arsenic or mercury.
  • Basilisk: A similarly massive cannon, though slightly more refined. Made exclusively out of bronze, mounted on a carriage, and with a smaller bore firing iron cannonballs weighing over a hundred pounds each.

• Demi-cannon, Culverin, Saker/Minion, Falconet: A wide range of terms were employed from the 16th to 18th centuries to describe cannons of varying sizes. By this point in time, people figured that if you changed the formulation of gunpowder to make it more explody, you could make cannons lighter without sacrificing power. Just about the only thing they had in common were that they were all mounted on carriages and could be used as field artillery. Fell by the wayside sometime into the eighteenth century, as it became more common to refer to cannons by their shot weight in pounds.
  • Demi-cannon: Fired a ball weighing less than 42 pounds. Usually employed on ships by the 17th century.
  • Culverins: Fired a ball weighing between 20 and 14 pounds. Often referred to by the Koreans and Chinese as Hongyipao or "red barbarian cannon", since they were introduced to them by the Portuguese.
  • Saker/Minion: Fired a ball weighing around 5 pounds.
  • Falconet: Fired a ball weighing around 1 pound. The smallest of artillery pieces, though nevertheless provided with its own carriage.

• Licorne: Meaning "unicorn" in French, the licorne was the earliest form of gun-howitzer and so named due to the unicorns carved into the original models. It didn't really catch on outside of Russia.

• Secret Howitzer: The result of pure Russian autism and min-maxing. This 'weapon' was a howitzer modified to have an oval barrel, in the hope that it would spread grapeshot more effectively. The drawback was it was useless for any other purpose and not much better at its intended one. Of course, the Russians being who they were, it was decided that the penalty for talking about these guns was to be death, hence the name. This policy becomes more ironic when you discover that the only response to their enemies, the Prussians, finding out about these weapons was a collective WTF and having the captured units melted down for scrap.

• Gribeauval system: Not so much a type of cannon so much as a scheme for standardizing the production and use of cannons. Introduced by the French starting in 1765, the Gribeauval system made artillery so much more practical in the field by standardizing the weight of cannonballs to 4, 8, and 12 pounds; the same was done to mortars, howitzers, and siege artillery, which went up to a maximum of 24 pounds. It also came with a field carriage that could quickly hook up to an ammunition limber for horse transport, as well as prepackaged powder bags. Cannons thus not only became easier to move around and able to fire more quickly, but could also be more easily supplied with replacement parts and ammunition.

• Carronade: Short barreled, large bore cannons used for naval combat. These tended to be used on the main deck (above the gundeck) to give a ship the same punch as a similarly-bored gun for less weight; they also tended to be cheaper and easier to reload, though they did suffer from a substantially shorter range than a proper long gun. Carronades were almost exclusively loaded with grapeshot (basically a bunch of smaller cannon balls stuffed into a bag) and targeted to sweep the enemy deck clear of crew, although chain was also sometimes used to destroy rigging.

• Canon obusier de 12/Napoleon: A French gun that revolutionized gunnery when it was invented in 1853, combining the best features of both the cannon and howitzer. It could fire solid shot at high velocity like a cannon, yet was also capable of firing explosive shells like a howitzer, thanks to the introduction of contact-fuzed shells. Heavily used by both factions during the American Civil War.

• Double barreled cannon: An idea that sounds good on the drawing does not always means good in real life. Case in point, US Confederacy double barreled cannon. The idea was to load the guns with chain shot, two cannonballs connected by a chain, and then fire both barrels at the same time, so that the twin cannon balls would fly in such a way that not only would each ball kill the enemy, the chain between the ball would as well. The problem was in step two of the plan, getting both barrels to fire at the same time. To put it simply, it could not. It was tested three times. The first time the balls flew off target and tore up a corn field before the chain broke. The second time it missed again and tore holes in a nearby pine forest "like mowing machine" a witness said. Third time it was fired, the chain broke apart instantly and one ball flew off hitting a chimney, and the other killed a cow. The over optimistic inventor considered these tests a success. That the gun was lost for over ten years and found under a pile of rock speaks to how much the confederates thought of the thing.

• Quaker "Gun": Named after Christian Pacifists, and alternatively called "Dummy Guns". A Quaker gun is a gun mock-up (typically made of wood), made to look like real guns from a distance in order to deceive enemies you were more threatening than you actually were. Quaker guns found several instances of success throughout the ages and has negated battles that would have otherwise been an easy victory for the opposing side who didn't realize the guns they were scouting were fakes. These were particularly popular in the US Civil War, when an infantry advance on foot against cannons was absolutely guaranteed to cost the attacker wagonloads of dead and injured. Advances in modern reconnaissance technology has largely rendered dummy guns ineffective, but even as late as WW2 they were used to great effect in advance of Normandy and during the second battle of El Alamein.

• Parrott Rifle: A Union Civil War cannon, the Parrott rifle was distinctive for its cast iron construction incorporating a band of wrought iron strengthening the breech of the gun. This made it an accurate piece of artillery that was simple to produce, though it did have a distressing tendency to burst.

• Armstrong gun: The Armstrong gun is one of the first rifled breech loaders. It also employed an innovative built-up construction: an inner barrel made out of a wrought iron or mild steel, surrounded with more wrought iron coils that were shrunk to keep the tube compressed. The Armstong used a screw breech, so to load the gun you had to open it like the door on a ship by spinning a wheel to unscrew it. Armstrong guns were made in a wide range of calibers, from 6 pound horse guns to 110 naval artillery. Used by the British in their colonial wars and Japan in the Boshin War. The most famous Armstrong guns are the 100-ton guns used to defend Malta, capable of obliterating ships that are barely visible over the horizon. That said, despite its technical innovations, the next generation of British guns were all rifled muzzleloaders, partly because of cost concerns but also because the Armstrong's breech was not strong enough to handle armour-piercing shot at a time when a growing number of warships were clad in iron. Also, the Armstrong guns quickly became obsolete as everyone was switching from Black Powder to the more powerfl Smokeless Powder.

• Krupp System: Krupp is an old German company that has been making guns and working iron for centuries, but it really made its name known in the mid 19th century when it worked out a system to load a cannon from the rear. The idea of loading a cannon from the breech rather than cramming everything down the muzzle had been toyed around with before, but there had been problems which prevented it from being fully practical. In 1859, Krupp solved these problems by introducing a sliding block system on an all cast steel cannon able to fire explosive shells. Long story short, there was a block in the back of the cannon which could be fastened into place and unfastened and slid out of the way to load it. These guns let Otto von Bismarck unite Germany under his banner and let him beat the French in the Franco-Prussian War who, despite having better rifles, airships, and primitive machine guns, were still using muzzle-loading artillery.

• System de Bange: Yes that's it's real name. No, it doesn't mean 'Bang System', instead 'de Bange' was its inventor, though that arguably makes it funnier. Essentially a very efficient breech loading system. After the Germans beat them with Breech Loading Cannons, the French wanted their own such guns if those Germans came back. The solution they settled on was to make a cannon with a steel plug which screwed into the back, but with the screw's thread being removed on two quarters of the length of the plug/bore so it could be secured and opened by rotating it 90 degrees with a washer of good old fashioned asbestos to get a solid seal. The system worked very well and (with a few tweaks) is still in use today.

• Disappearing gun: Guns have recoil; a disappearing gun uses that recoil to lower itself immediately after firing, protecting them from retaliation and making them difficult to spot. Later versions were mounted on retractable platforms for the same effect. They became obsolete once planes were a thing. Because of the complex mechanisms involved, these tended to be used in stationary coastal defense batteries.

• Canon de 75 mle 1887: The French 75 (or as the French would put it, le soixante-quinze) was pretty much the first modern artillery gun as we know it, incorporating a fast-acting screw breech, self-contained ammunition (cartridge case attached to the shell), and most significant of all, a hydro-pneumatic recoil mechanism that smoothly returned the gun to its original position after firing. Put together, all of these features allowed the 75 to put out an average of fifteen rounds a minute, or as many as thirty rounds a minute with an experienced crew. That said, it was also one of the last field guns as we know it, with the advent of modern warfare pushing artillery way further into the backline, and off the field of battle.

• Autocannon: Essentially an automatically loading cannon with a calibre between 20mm to 76mm. Dating back to the 19th century (see below), the autocannon really came into its heyday during the Second World War, when there came to be a need for a rapid-firing cannon that could fire armour-piercing and explosive shells to swat planes out of the sky. They utilize a number of mechanisms to achieve their ends, including the tried-and-true Gatling mechanism to beefed up recoil operation systems, not to mention a range of externally-powered mechanisms that automate the process of loading, firing, and extracting ammunition. Employed on pretty much every vehicle you can think of. From wheeled vehicles to tanks; helicopters, fixed wing aircraft, surface vessels such as Patrol Boats, Destroyers, Cruisers and even Aircraft Carriers.

Noncannon guns worth mentioning

There have been numerous inventions in the history of firearms that use a cannon's limbers and caissons to mount a weapon that was not quite cannon, and was often used in a way most cannons were not. What they all had in common was that they were all "artillery" in the sense that they were static, mounted firearms that could fuck up enemies in ways that infantry-portable firearms could not, much like your average cannon.

• Chongtong: Not "really" cannons but this entry was here before the rocket page existed and these were fired out of a cannon. The Congtong was a Korean cannon, or rather, cannons since there was more than one type. The four types were the "Cheonja", "Jija", "Hyeonja", and "Hwangja", the names being roughly equivalent to Cannons A, B, C, and D. The Cheonja was the largest with a 130mm bore able to fire 30 pound rocket out to just over a kilometer. The other three types were pretty much the same, only shrunk down, the Jija had 100mm bore, the Hyeonja, 80mm while the Hwangja was very similar to a European hand cannon. (Wait a minute, barreled weapons that fire self propelled rockets... Why does that sounds familiar?)

• Da Vinci Cannons: included in this section because, as far as we know, they were never actually built or used in battle. If they were ever used, we have no record of them, and you’d think it would be a big deal if they were successful. The famous inventor Leonardo understood the emerging importance of cannons, and sought to improve on its design. He had an early version of breech-loaders, but like a true mad scientist, that was just the beginning. Not only did he design a triple-barreled cannon, steam-powered cannons, and his own version of the Ottoman Bombard, but also a 33-barreled cannon that had three rows of 11 small-caliber barrels set on a rotating axle, and each row would be fired in volley by rotating the row into firing position. Certainly reminds you of a certain gun from a certain tabletop game, doesn't it?

• Ribauldequin: Don't ask us how to say it (Ri-bow-de-kin, pretty much like it's written. Just ignore the 'l'). A simpler name is “Organ gun”, because the gun barrel arrangement looks like a pipe organ, or volley gun. The Ribauldequin is troubling to list as a "cannon", since it has a number of small barrels rather than one big one. Rather than a cannon, thinking of it as a bunch of guns on a cannon carriage may be more accurate. Of course, the downside to being able to fire a bunch of guns at once is that, in the age of muzzle-loaders, you had to take even longer to reload it. And compared to having a bunch of guys individually aiming an loading a single barrel, you had maybe one or two guys doing all the loading. Still, if you could take the enemy out in a single volley, or at least create an opening for the rest of your guys, it could be an effective force-multiplier and morale weapon. After all, it wasn’t called the “infernal machine” for nothing.

• Wall gun: Essentially guns too big to be personal firearms, but too small to qualify as proper field artillery. These are generally designed to be rested atop a wall, or supported on a stand. They are, roughly, the ancestor to modern sniper/anti-material rifles.
  • Abus Gun: An Ottoman artillery piece, similar to a Hook Gun, the Abus gun was small, but still hard to move about and was fired from a tripod and shot a roughly 5 pound cannon ball.
  • Hook Gun: Or Hakenbuechse, an oversized musket, that was always classified as an artillery piece, this weapon was popular in 16-18th century Eastern Europe and was usually used either in sieges or as a proto-sniper rifle.

• Swivel gun: Essentially small cannons on stick, swivel guns were mostly used on ships and were mounted on the decks. While ineffective against all but the smallest boats, against boarding parties they could be very effective.
  • Pierrier à boîte: A french breech loading swivel gun made of wrought iron. The Pierrier à boîte breech, though allowing it to fire more rapidly than other guns, still had issues and had a tendency to leak leading to a loss of power and additional danger to the gunners.
  • Lantaka: A (usually) bronze swivel gun developed by the Philippine Moros, firing a half-pound ball or charge of grapeshot. Mounted on the fronts of boats and on the walls of earthwork forts. Saw much use against the Spanish conquistadors, but was defeated by the howitzers and mortars brought by the American infantry.

• Mechanical machine guns: These are essentially the first machine guns. Technically firearms, they differ from later machine guns in that their firing mechanisms relied on repetitive manual operation via a crank or lever. They also tended to be mounted on artillery carriages, partly because these were pretty heavy machines, but also because military thinking had yet to really move on from the idea that crew served weapons didn't need to be horse-drawn. All of these were rendered obsolete by the Maxim gun except the gattling gun which with some modifications is still in use to this day.
  • Mitrailleuse: French for "grapeshot", though the word now refers to "machine gun" in that language. This was a weapon that looked like a cannon, only instead of one big hole in the muzzle it had twenty five 13mm barrels. It is not unlike a ribeaudequin, in that it fires multiple shots at a time. The main difference is that it is much easier to reload and shoot: all you need to do is unscrew the breech, slot in a steel plate with all twenty five cartridges, and then screw the breech closed. To fire it, you turned a crank that sequentially fires five barrels at a time. Was France's super duper secret weapon during the Franco-Prussian War, but it largely failed to live up to expectations in large part because the French insisted on deploying it as artillery just outside of rifle range.
  • Gatling Gun: Not to be confused with the chain gun, which operates on a completely different principle. The Gatling Gun features multiple barrels which fire in turn as they rotate around the twelve o'clock position. This configuration allowed higher rates of fire to be achieved without the barrel overheating. The earliest gatling gun required a person to crank it like a pepper grinder, so it's not like it can be fired automatically by some sandwich eating Russian. Notable for its use in Zulu and the Boshin war, mowing down those pre-historic savages unlucky pre-industrial indigenous like a combine harvester through chaff. It would later be brought back coupled with a motor to allow for so high a rate of fire that each of the guns "dakkas" blur into each other to become one long "BZZZZZZZZZZZZ", because jet planes were too fast to be easily brought down by anything less than a hundred 20mm rounds fired in a split-second.

• Dynamite gun: In the early days of high explosives, there were no explosives stable enough to be fired from a gun without blowing up, and high explosives were far more powerful than low explosives like gunpowder. Hence, the Dynamite gun, the most steam punk weapon ever deployed. Dynamite guns worked like a big air gun, only instead of a BB they fired a shell full of Dynamite or other high explosives and instead of air they used compressed steam if on a ship, or smokeless powder used to indirectly propel a gas into the barrel to launch the shell.

• Maxim gun: The first successful weapon that can be considered a true machine gun, harnessing the power of recoil to load, fire, and extract cartridges several hundred times a minute, with little more input than depressing a trigger. Like earlier mechanical machine guns, it was at first mounted on a horse-drawn carriages, though reductions in weight led to rethinking the whole mounting business and putting it on a lighter tripod. It was also the direct ancestor of the autocannon. The QF 1-pounder (37mm) and the QF 2-pounders (40mm) 'Pom-poms' (nicknamed like that because of the continuous rumble one produces when firing) were adopted by nations as soon as they became aware of them or had been on the receiving end, essentially converting the machine gun design into autocannons. The QF 1 started out as a field gun before it was used on warships as an anti-aircraft weapon. The Maxim along with it's descendants made field charges and line combat impossible, ushering in the era of trench warfare, with only mall ninjas and other idiots lamenting the loss of those tactics.

Types of cannon ammunition

As mentioned before, cannon munitions can essentially be categorized according to two categories: shot or shell. Generally, you want the latter when you want to blow things up; the former is generally for breaking hard targets.

• Round shot: As the name suggests, it's a round ball made of either stone or later iron. Round shot was best used against fortifications and infantry in the open. When firing at infantry the ideal use of iron round shot was to fire just in front of the infantry and let the ball bounce up and through the formation like a bowling ball from hell. This is replicated in cannon mechanics in Warhammer Fantasy. This is also one of the reasons why armies stopped fighting in deep formations and switched to lines. Also, don't knock a stone cannon ball because while they wouldn't bounce as well on impact, they have a tendency to shatter and spread deadly shrapnel like a primitive HE round instead.

• Hot Shot: Against wooden ships that were full of black powder and other flammables, often the best solution is to light them on fire. As such an attempt to do this was to take an iron cannon ball, and heat it up so that it glowed red and then fire it... carefully. As you can imagine sticking a red hot cannon ball down the barrel of an iron tube full of explosive was careful work in order to pull it off they had to put a plug of wet clay between the ball and the powder. As any Hornblower fan will tell you, hot shot was rarely used by ships. Naval artillery in the age of sail was risky enough without adding an extensive furnace infrastructure and running red-hot balls all over your own very flammable ship. Hot shot was most often used by coastal forts against passing ships. This is the modern origin for the term "Hotshot" as someone who is renowned for their skill and courage - like the people who could load said red hot cannonballs without blowing themselves up in the process.

• Chain shot: used mostly at sea, Chain shot was either two small cannon balls linked with chain, or one single cannon ball that broke into two halves connected by a chain after firing. Chain shot covered a larger area and was used to target the rigging of enemy ships (though as the tv series 'The Borgias' shows, it could also be quite useful in mowing down infantry). As steamships become more common however, chain shot became less and less useful.

• Canister shot: A canister shot is a collection of small iron musket balls, that was jammed down the barrel in a tin can. Upon firing, it basically turned the cannon into a massive shotgun spraying the area in front of it with hundreds of musket balls. In a day and age where fighting was done shoulder to shoulder canister shot was lethal, a single cannon could and has stopped an infantry charge dead in its tracks. Grape shot was similar in concept but used bigger balls and was loaded in a bag, not a can (supposedly the bulges the balls made in the bag looked like a bunch of grapes, hence the name) and was more common on ships since it could better punch though wooden hulls. While still in use, with some utilizing dart-like flechettes instead of shot, canister rounds fell out of favour thanks to the invention of the...

• Shrapnel shells: You know how a person invents a thing and get his name attached to the invention so completely that if you tried to use it today as a name it just sounds strange? Well Henry Shrapnel was so successful with his invention that all types of flying debris now bear his name. Shrapnel rounds were invented in 1784 and they're similar to a canister shot, except the outer hull is solid enough to withstand being shot out of the cannon, and it is outfitted with a fuze so that the shell explodes in mid-air. Rather than only a 'shotgun blast' at the muzzle of the gun, this almost triples the range of the anti personal round while keeping the lethality. Round shot for use against infantry became a thing of the past, and Shrapnel rounds were used all the way up to the 20th century when it was discovered that the fragmentation effects produced by the casing of a High-Explosive shell made the balls themselves largely unnecessary. That said, Shrapnel-like rounds operating on timed or proximity fuzes are still employed, with 'airburst' munitions designed to hit either targets hiding behind cover or to knock down fast-moving targets like planes/helo's and incoming missiles.

• Explosive shells: A shell that's hollow and has explody stuff in it. While shells have been known to exist ever since the 14th century, they didn't become widespread until reliable fuzes appeared after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Prior to then, early fuzes were essentially slow-burning wooden plugs lit by the heat of firing: not very reliable, as they would often explode too early, explode too late (in which case an enemy could put them out), or not explode at all. Later fuzes incorporated a shock-sensitive explosive that would set off the main payload, detonating either on impact or much later, by mechanical timed or proximity fuzes. When introduced, they made the wooden sailing ship useless as no such vessel could withstand being hit by more than a few shells; likewise, their ability to blast apart brick and mortar made many an existing fortification obsolete. Today, such shells come in a wide variety of munition types with chemical and explosive, but the most common versions are High-Explosive (HE), (Semi-)Armor-Piercing High-Explosive ((S)APHE), High-Explosive Incendiary (HE-I) and High-Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT, see below).

• Nuclear shells: For a time, you also had shells with nuclear warheads, though these have been largely phased out as impractical. First, if you start tossing nuclear weapons at your enemy, they might take it as a sign that nuclear war is a go, which then leads to further escalation. Second, they irradiate the battlefield, which in turn poses difficulties for attackers. Thirdly, you need a really, really big gun to launch a nuclear shell far enough that your well out of the blast zone (and it has to have a big blast because why else use a nuclear shell at all?). Finally, with the advent of precision guided munitions (PGM) they've been largely rendered pointless: the whole point of a nuclear weapon is to ensure destruction of a target with as few munitions as possible, but PGMs can do the job nearly as efficiently without all the negative associations.

• Chemical shells: These are filled with chemical payloads. They were in their heyday during the First World War, when they were employed as a means of suppressing enemy defenders before an attack, but it was then quickly realized that they could be just as much of a hazard to attackers. Eventually, both sides came up with highly effective gas masks to ward them off. This, along with the lingering memory of the horror associated with their use, meant that they were very rarely employed in the Second World War and thereafter. The main exception is just below.

• Smoke shells: Self-explanatory. Designed to provide a screen that blocks visual detection, in addition to electronic devices such as infrared and thermal. Technically a chemical shell; some variations have offensive applications as well. The white phosphorus used by some countries (the United States and Russia) for example, will spontaneously combust in the presence of oxygen, setting flammables on fire and burning flesh on contact.

• Illumination shells: A special type of payload shell designed to eject a flare at a predetermined altitude, which then slowly descends on a parachute. As per the name, they are generally used for illumination, but different colored variations can be used for signalling.

• Cluster: It's a shell designed to burst in mid-air and scatter its payload over a large area. Said payload consists of tiny bomblets (incendiary, chemical, anti-personnel, or anti-tank) or mines. While bomblets are designed to explode on timer or on impact, the fuzes can fail, and since these each shell can contain dozens of these things, bombarding an area with cluster munitions can leave lots of nice little presents for people to later find. On the cheerier side of things, they can also be filled with paper and other things as well.

• Carcass shell: No, not something a necromancer would use. A carcass shell was a reserve of highly flammable material encased within an iron shell with some vents, as to spray the chemical after firing. it was called Carcass shell because, supposedly, the shot looked like a human carcass thanks to the holes. Carcass shell was shot mostly out of lower velocity mortars and Howitzers and was one of the first chemical weapons to be used. It was especially useful at night as the glow allowed it to be used to spot for the gun.

• Junk: Obviously if you're out of proper ammunition you could just shove anything you want down the barrel and hope it works. Mostly, this amounted to things like scrap metal and rocks, but supposedly a Uruguayan ship once fired stale cheese out of their cannons and shattered the mast of a Brazilian ship. Contrarily to the common portrayal, however, the practice was discouraged as it would quickly wear the barrel of the weapon out and render it unusable.

• Armor-Piercing Composite Rigid (APCR): Also known as High Velocity Armor Piercing (HVAP) if you're an American or 'Hartkern' (hard core) if you're German. As tanks got bigger to the point where they were just shrugging off hits from tiny early war cannons, all nations were faced with the dilemma of stopping those monsters. There was the time-honored solution of bringing a bigger, longer gun, but that came with a prohibitive increase in weight, if only because you needed a bigger breech and enough mass to counterbalance everything. Another alternative was to make the projectile itself out of denser material, to focus all that energy onto a smaller area. That's HVAP/APCR/Hartkern. Same overall shell size, but the weight of the projectile is 'concentrated' in a smaller core made out of tungsten fitted with a lightweight aerodynamic cap. It worked, but at the expense of significantly decreasing range, since rifling isn't designed to stabilize a sub-calibre round. They also have the significant downside that the few materials they were made out of, like Tungsten or more recently, depleted Uranium, are either rare, expensive, hard to aquire or all of the above.
  • Squeeze-bore: A variant of APCR, also known as Armor-Piercing Composite Non-Rigid (APCNR). The most significant difference is that the gun is partially tapered, squeezing the sides of the shell as it travels down the barrel. This leads to propellant gases focusing on an ever smaller area, significantly increasing exit velocities. While it made APCR work a lot better, it has two major downsides: first it complicated logistics: guns employing tapered barrels or adapters to squeeze AP shells typically could not fire the same ammunition as other guns, even if they were of the same nominal calibre, and secondly a full on tapered barrel is a BITCH to make, since your trying to drill a long narrow CONE through a Cylinder!

• Sabot: Not to be confused with the later armour-piercing shell design described below. Sabots (French for a clog shoe and pronounced like "Sah-bo") were used in the 19th century with weapons like the Paixhans gun, one of the first naval guns designed to fire an explosive shell. A sabot is a container made of a light material that fits the barrel and contains the actual munition but falls away after leaving the barrel, leaving just the sub-munition to fly toward the target. It was used to center the projectile and prevent propellant gas leakages, which could potentially prematurely detonate the shell in the barrel. Advances in metallurgy and the invention of the driving band have made such sabots obsolete. Buuuuut...

• Armour-Piercing Discarding Sabot (APDS)/Armour-Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot (APFSDS): Remember the APCR above, where we said 'core made out of hard material to deal more damage'? Well the modern APDS/APFSDS rounds take this one level further. A small, very heavy projectile is encased in a sleeve (called a sabot), which is discarded the moment it exits the barrel, leaving only the projectile to fly toward the target. Features much better ballistics than APCR, though APDS rounds still tend to somewhat less accurate when fired out of a rifled cannon. Accuracy is not much of a problem when Tanks and Self Propelled Artillery have built in targeting computers and communications systems. With the move to APFSDS, modern tanks now shoot what basically amounts to a huge dart made of depleted uranium or tungsten at one another through their smoothbore cannons. These are a whole kettle of fish altogether. Exhibiting an even smaller cross-section, they travel at near hypersonic (Mach 5 and above) velocities, with whatever they hit getting absolutely wrecked by the pressure wave and spall they generate while traveling through solid material. That said, if you tried to point them at the sides of a car or another lightly-armoured vehicle, all they'll do is make two very neatly-shaped holes, assuming that they don't turn someone into red paste on their way through.

• High-Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT)/High-Explosive Anti-Tank Fin-Stabilized (HEAT-FS): A modern round (it was introduced in WW2) that uses the Munroe effect to defeat heavily-armored targets, like a tank. In essence, all the force of the explosion is concentrated into a 'jet' that forces/melts/erodes its way through the armor and incinerates anything behind. Since their penetration capability is independent of the projectile's kinetic energy, they can take a variety of different forms: a shell launched by a cannon is the most applicable one here, but it also can be a rocket, or even a bomb thrown at/attached to a vehicle. While extremely effective, they have the drawback of needing to detonate at just the right distance and angle from their target. Furthermore, the rifling of a cannon tends to have a detrimental effect on the high explosive jet, causing it to splay out upon detonation, which needs to be counteracted in some form or another. The fin-stabilized version is a later variation that (as the name indicates) uses fins to stabilize the shell's flight (negating the need for rifling) and improve the chance of hitting at exactly said right angle/distance.
  • Tandem Charge: HEAT, when introduced, was a game changer and everyone scrambled to find ways to protect their tanks from them. The counterspell to the opponent's counterspell, a tandem charge is exactly what its name implies: a first small HE charge fucks up whatever HEAT countermeasures are installed to allow the secondary HEAT charge to strike true. It has since been broadened to different combinations of charges for different applications, but the general idea is always the same. See here for a demonstration of a building-clearing AP/HE combo.

• High-Explosive Squash-Head (HESH): Bears a mention for completeness' sake, this one is a bit weird: the explosive charge is a blob of malleable plastic explosive. When it hits the target, the plastic is squashed against the target's surface (hence the name), and the resulting pancake is detonated by the fuze. This creates shockwaves that will cause the inner surface to break off and turn into shrapnel (spall). Modern composite armor and anti-spalling liners have rendered this type of shell inefficient against tanks, but they are still extremely effective against concrete structures and light vehicles. Unlike many of the shells described above, HESH requires rifling in order to work effectively, as the centrifugal force of a spinning shell allows the high explosive pat to spread out evenly. Unlike the other described above, only the British Army continues to use them in any serious capacity aboard the Challenger 2 MBT.

Medieval Weaponry
Melee Weapons:	Battleaxe - Dagger - Lance - Mace - Club Pole-arm - Spear - Sword - Warhammer
Ranged Weapons:	Blowgun - Bows and Arrows - Cannon Crossbow - Firearm - Rocket - Shuriken - Sling - Incendiary Weapons - Artillery
Armor:	Armor - Fantasy Armor - Helmet - Pauldron - Shield