Cannon

After the Chinese worked out the basics of gunpowder they began to experiment with how to use it on the battlefield and as such during the Song Dynasty people invented basic bombs, rockets and firearms for battlefield use. Eventually someone decided that their firelances was a good idea that could be made even better by making it even bigger. Thus was born the first cannons. By an odd quick of fate, this design process apparently happened in reverse in Europe 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.

Cannons in Warfare

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

The history of the cannon is written in blood, in it's first chapters this is 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. 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. Early cannons fired a variety of shot from spears to rough rocks, though eventually cast iron balls became the most common as things progressed.

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. 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 thinner, reinforced with heavy earth ramparts to absorb the shock, with pointed battlements better suited for mounting defensive cannon.

An even bigger development was the matter of cannons at sea. Though some people tried using catapults and the occasional use of crude flamethrowers as ship mounted weapons naval battles were up until this point settled by ramming or boarding actions. By the late 1400s it soon became obvious on the potential that naval guns had in damaging or destroying enemy ships outright and navies began adapting their 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.

From about 1400 to 1800 there were two main materials used to make cannons: Bronze and Iron. Bronze was an easier material to cast guns out of and it had a fair bit of give to it. In Europe the fact that there was a long tradition of making church bells and bronze statues meant that developing a bronze gun industry was fairly easy, Additionally unlike iron Bronze take much less energy to recast so it was much easier to smelt down a worn gun or statues or church bells into a cannon. next time in your Europe take a shot every time you find a church-bell older then 200 years. It's sucks as a drinking game since you won't end up drunk at the end. Bronze is also lighter then an Iron gun of a similar size make it more mobile on the battle field. Further since Bronze has some give to it, you have some warning if the guns going to blow up. When an Iron gun is about to blow up, it does not give any warning when it's no longer safe, but a Bronze one will bulge first letting you know when your starting to push your luck.

The problem was that copper and tin were fairly rare and in short supply so the number of bronze guns you could make was limited. Iron, by contrast was more common and harder. That said it took more fuel to process, it was much harder to melt an iron gun down to reuse the metal, it took different less common craftsmen since you could not just conscript the bell makers in your nation to do it for you, and if you did not have good metallurgy you would end up making a brittle gun that was liable to explode in your face. However an Iron IS the better material thanks to it's hardness and an Iron gun will last longer then a bronze one (which it has to since you can't melt back down as easily), it's just much easier to make a big thing like a cannon out of bronze then iron.

When it came to making your cannon your best option was Casting, be it cannons or models of cannon the process is pretty much the same for each.

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

This might lead to to ask why Gustavus decided to make a cannon out of leather in the first place? The answer to this 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 premusket guns), Halberds, swordsmen and pikemen. Against such foes, the old massive castle crackers were overkill, still slow firing and a massive pain in the butt to move around. What was needed against those targets were small-er light-er, (a cannon that can shoot a 3 pound ball is still very heavy, though much lighter then 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.

Cannons in Fantasy

Fantasy writers are a bit more accommodating to cannons than firearms: in part because they became more practical earlier anyway on and also because 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?".

Types of cannons

Note: for easy of use only list black powder weapons so we don't talk about every gun that ever existed.

• Cannons/Howitzers/Mortars: The difference between these weapons is in how there projectiles are fired. Cannon projectiles follow fairly flat trajectory, Mortars are fired in high steep arcs that drop the round directly onto the targets head, while Howitzers are between the two firing upward but not as steeply as a mortar.

• Quaker "Gun":Quakers are A US christian group who are pacifists. A Quaker gun is a wooden log painted black to trick an enemy into thinking you have many more cannons then you really do have.

• Bombard: An early cannon, a Bombard is a big iron wide bore cannon that fired massive stone balls at castle walls in order to break them down. unlike later cannons few bombards don't tend to have carriages and have to be fixed in place wooden frames, though a few bombards did have wheels.

• Culverins: 15th and 16th century cannon that fired a ball weighing between 20 and 14 pounds. Used a slow match fuse.
  • Hongyipao: The name literally translates to ""red barbarian cannon" and was introduced to Korea and china by the Portuguese, however in most regards it was pretty much just a Culverin.

• Saker: a smaller version of the Culverin from the 16th century fired a five pound ball.

• Minion : Minion is the french word for "cute" and it most certainty was. A 17 century version of the Saker it too fired a five pound ball. Used on ships as a weapon to repel boarding partys.

• Demi-cannon: an 18th century cannon that fired a ball less then 42 pounds, while being bigger then the saker. Replaced full cannons in the british navy due to them being too unwieldy, First rate (Google it if your curious what it is, but all you need to know now is that were talking a big ass ship), mounted 100 such cannons in 50 gun broadsides.

• Falconet: a light cannon the fired a one pound ball. Though invented for land use, it was common on ships and both the Americans and British used them in the revolutionary war. A breech loading version was invented in the 1620's

• Carronade: the mathematical formula to determine how hard something hits with, how much force it has, is Mass times acceleration. So to get a cannon ball to hit harder you have two options, shoot it faster, or make it bigger. The Carronade takes the second option. The carronade was invented by the British navy and they are short, almost sawed off, cannons the fired reduce powder charges, but with a much bigger ball, while the cannon it self was lighter due to being shorter. However they had a much reduced range, but god help you if you got broadsided by a ship with whole side of these.

• Canon obusier de 12/Napoleon: the napoleon is a french gun and it revolutionized gunnery when it was invented in 1853. It was portable yet able to destroy fortifications almost a mile away. Used by the French and both Americas in there civil war and were the last Bronze cannons used in an American army.

• Parrott rifle:A US civil war cannon, the Parrott rifle was, well, rifled. What made the parrott special was that is used iron, not steel to forge it but had a additional band of iron applied to the breech of the gun to strengthen it.

• Ribauldequin:Don't ask us how to say it. the Ribauldequin is troubling to list as a "cannon", since it is also known as a Organ gun and has a number of small barrels rather then one big one. rather then a cannon thinking of it as a bunch of guns on a cannon carriage may be more accurate.

• Abus Gun: An Ottoman artillery piece 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.

• Basilisk: a medieval big, big gun, the basilisk was a bronze cannon that was ten feet long, weighted up to 4 thousand pounds,had a five inch or 130mm, (the M1 Abrums today is armed with a 120mm cannon) bore and fired a ball upto 160 pounds in weight. The basilisk was too big however and it was phased out in favor of lighter more maneuverable guns.

• Swivel gun: a small cannon a stick, the Swivel gun were mostly used on ships and were mounted on the decks and while ineffective against all but the smallest boats, against boarding party's they could be very effective. thanks to there small size Swivel guns were the first breech loading weapons and breech loading versions existed by the 16th century.
  • 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 then other guns, still had issues and had a tendency to leak leading to a loss of power and additional danger to the gunners.

• Gatling Gun: Name after a guy who created this pretty cool weapon during the American civil war. A heavy weapon firing repeating barrage of bullets on the field. It has a multiple barrel which each barrel takes its turn to fire everytime they rotate in a cylinder fashion. This configuration allowed higher rates of fire to be achieved without the barrel overheating. The earliest gatling gun requires a person to crank it like a pepper grinder, so is not like it will fire automatically by some sandwich eating russian. It is mounted on a 2 wheel cart that generally it requires horses or people to move it. Notable for its use in Zulu and the Boshin war, slaughtering those per-historical savages unlucky pre-industrial indigenous like no tomorrow.

• Puckle Gun: Possibly the oldest repeating revolver invented in 1718, older than the gatling gun mentioned above. Just like the Gatling gun, it requires a person to crank it like a pepper grinder. It was desired for use by the Christians to slaughter the false believer like the muslim turks and it had a choice of round bullets for use against fellow Christians and square bullet because they considered to be more damaging. The Puckle gun however was unpopular it's some what finicky flint lock and other mechanical issues since it was revolver made 100 years before colt made his first revolver in a caliber over three times bigger. The technology to allow this sort of weapon was not there yet.

Types of cannon ammunition

• Round Shot: the first type of cannon ammo, Round shot is, as the name suggests, a round ball made of either stone or later iron. Round shot was best used against fortification and infantry in the open. when firing at infantry the ideal use of 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 replicated in cannon mechanics in Warhammer fantasy. This is also one of the reasons why army's stopped fighting in deep formations and switched to lines.
  • 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 and this is the modern source of the term "Hot Shot" as some one who does not take proper care and precautions.

• Chain shot: used only at sea, Chain shot was either two small cannon balls linked with chain, or one single cannon ball the broke into two halves after firing. Chain shot covered a larger area and was used to target the rigging of enemy ships. As steam ships become more common however, chain shot became less and less useful.

• Canister shot: Canisters shot is a collection of small iron musket balls, that was jammed down the barrel in a tine can. Upon firing it turned the cannon into a massive shot gun spraying the area in front of it with hundreds of musket balls and in a day and age where fighting was done shoulder to shoulder, Canister shot was lethal. Grape shot was similar but used bigger balls and was more common on ships. A cannon loaded with canister shot could and has stop an infantry charge dead in it's tracks. Canister rounds were made all the way to the modern age, and in many cases are still used for clearing out infantry at close range, but in artillery style cannon fell out of fashion in favor of. . .

• Shrapnel rounds: you know how a person invents a thing and get his name attached to the invention so complexly that if you tried to use it today as a name it just sound strange? Well Henry Shrapnel was so successful with his invention that all types of flying debris now has his name. Shrapnel rounds were invented in 1784, and there basically canister shot, with a fuse so that the shell explodes in mid air rather then only at the muzzle of the gun almost tripling the range of the anti personal round. Round shot for use against infantry became a thing of the past. Shrapnel rounds were used all the way up to the modern age and some country's still make Shrapnel rounds for there tanks.

• Shells: a bullet that's hollow and has stuff in it. Typically explosives but chemical payloads are also known. While Shells are known to exist ever since the 14th century, it was not until the modern day when accurate fuses came about that Shells became more common then solid shot.

• Carcass shot: no not something a necromancer with a cannon would use. Carcass shot was a high flammable material with an iron shell around it and some vents to spray the chemical after firing. it was called Carcass shot because, supposedly, the shot looked like a human Carcass thanks to the holes. Carcass shot was used 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.

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