Artillery

"I took ballistics in school. Fascinating subject! Things go up, things go down!"

– Company of Heroes

"Artillery is the god of modern war."

– Joseph Stalin

"In peace the cry is for mobility, in war for weight of shell."

– Alan Brooke

If you were to ask any neckbeard into military history what they liked most about it, you'd get a few different answers. Some would tell you it's all about stories of regular humans going beyond their limits to beat back impossible odds, others are more interested in the organization and logistics needed to feed and move thousands of people.

But for the elegan/tg/entlemen among us, it's all about the big guns that go boom. Even before the advent of gunpowder and Cannons, humanity has long looked for ways to fling shit at their enemies from a safe distance, preferably outside of their opponent's ability to shoot back, and ideally, outside of line-of-sight.

Nowadays, Artillery refers to Cannons and Cannon-accessiories, like Rockets and Missiles, but we apply the label to any weapon that launches munitions far beyond the range of man-portable weapons (that being said, Mortars are still man-portable, so don't take anything an anon says to be definitive)

Siege Engines

Siege Engines are mechanical devices used to damage walls or kill the defenders. Weapons like the Onager, Ballista, and the Trebuchet (which could launch a 90kg projectile over 300m) are considered the first forms of Artillery.

Unlike what vidya and certain tabletop wargames will tell you, most of these weapons were too unwieldy and generally inaccurate to use against mobile targets. They were also too complicated and fragile to transport over long distances and had to be built at the site of conflict, which is why Siege Engineers were their own specialization.

List of Siege Artillery

Bolt Weapons

These are Siege weapons that look like oversized crossbows, and are generally accurate enough with their bolts to snipe defenders on the walls, and were torsion (crank) powered. They range from the simple Roman Scorpio, to the rapid-firing Greek Polybolos, both of which were developed from the much larger Ballista, which was initially used to throw small round projectiles, but would eventually fire more accurate bolts.

Technically, though they look like Crossbows, all of these machines are more complicated than that, using a combination of springs and torsion to build up energy. Some Catapult designs actually make use of the "bow" design.

Catapults

Arguably, the most famous of those siege engines was the almighty catapult! The romans used it, the greeks used it, and oh-so-many lords and knights used it during the Middle-Ages. It wasn't the most precise weapon on the planet, but we'd lie to you if we didn't say that it as beautiful to see a flock of rocks raining on a heavily guarded castle like it's judgement day. Catapults were generally some of the simplest siege engines around, and as mentioned above, used torsion mechanisms for power.

What made them supplant the Ballista was that you could use to basically throw anything more-or-less heavy with it; Boulders, would-be cannon balls, humans, barrels, literal sacks of shit (Yes, this did happen) over a longer, arcing trajectory and with more power. And it was one easier to build. Of course, it wasn't the most effective thing on the planet at destroying things, but the point of sieges was to capture a castle, not raze one. Why pass on the opportunity of getting a free castle? The best way to penetrate it was to simply injure the people inside.

Trebuchet

But when the need to eradicate the infidels, burn their houses, slaughter their families, destroy their unholy temples and autels of doom came around, Europeans perfected of destroying shit really hard by inventing the next big thing in siege engineering; the motherfucking trebuchet. Ten to Eighteen tons of a massive wooden tower made out of "Fucketh thee, I farteth ast thoust general direction".

The Chinese technically invented it, but it consisted of using slaves very brave and loyal soldiers to pull the projectile down and then releasing it. And then, reusing the design, engineers added a counterweight that would drop down with the force of a thousand suns to flung the heaviest of projectiles directly at the enemy at incredible speeds. A technological miracle of the XIIth Century to be sure, using the wonders of levers, momentum, and gravity to do most of the work.

Started a trend among technicians and engineers to come up with new tools of warfare, most notably Da Vinci who made a whole bunch of sketches of a multitude of possible war engines that were all kinds of wonky.

Cannons and Early Gunpowder weapons

As mentioned, the Chinese had various experimentations with Gunpowder. They had weapons like exploding lances and basic rockets, but it wasn't until Gunpowder reached the Middle East/Europe that the tech really started to find its niche.

The three Gunpowder Empires (Ottomans, Safavids, and the Mughals) were credited with perfecting Cannons, but that theory has since been criticized. The three empires quickly adopted Gunpowder into their armies and even used them to devastating effect against their gun-less neighbors (Romeaboos will forever cope and seethe about how Constantinople was taken down by a big ass gun), but these developments would never have been made without European metallurgy (back to the Fall of Constantinople: the siege of Constantinople took a long time and the Ottomans only had so many cannons; there is an anecdote that even though the Ottoman cannons were very good at breaking down the double-walls, they weren't great at it; the rubble caused by the collapsing walls couldn't be cleared, so the besiegers had to keep shooting at the breach until the rubble was removed)

In contrast, European artillery started out as large weapons, but eventually became smaller and more manageable, becoming Field Guns that could be quickly repositioned by horse, because multiple cannons enfilading the enemy army was much more useful than a single gun that couldn't even be aimed properly, or that would blow up after ten shots.

Modern Era

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