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 are weapons used to breakthrough walls and other fortifications. Weapons like the Onager, Ballista, and the Trebuchet (which could launch a 90kg projectile over 300m) could be 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.

But again, there were exceptions. The Greek Polybolos is a chain-operated siege engine that wasn't technically a crossbow, but was still accurate enough with its bolts to snipe defenders, and with a rate of fire far beyond anything else of the time. The Romans also had the Scorpio, which was less complicated. The Chinese also had a variety of siege engines, which weren't supplanted by Gunpowder Cannons until much later, because Gunpowder tech was perfected by others.

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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