Salamandyr
Adventurer
So thinking about this...thought it would be neat to have some basic dates for when various firearms appeared...(all dates very general and pulled from quick and desultory internet search)
handgonne or hand cannon...13th century, they've got one dated about 1288 (originally in China) had a hole and were lit with a match, like early cannon.
Arquebus...15th Century-, started out much like the gonne, lit with a hook and match, and later developed into the matchlock
As the arquebus became lighter, around the 17th Century, the term "musket" became the common term for long barrelled smoothbore rifles. Other than technical developments (from match, to match lock, to wheellock to flintlock) there really doesn't appear to be much difference between a musket and an arquebus (which I didn't know before I started this).
Rifles (ie, long arms with rifled barrels) appeared in Europe in the 15th Century. These were much more accurate (and thus more useful at a longer range), but slower loading than a smoothbore rifle, and so muskets were the common military sidearm.
Pistols seem to date from the 16th Century and were a European invention. No word on rifling...I think they commonly weren't. They used the same firing mechanisms as muskets and rifles (match to wheel to flint.
As far as technical developments...
Matchlock...appeared 15th Century
Wheellock...developed around 1500 (start of 16th Century)
Flintlock...early 17th century (early 1600's).
Around 1820 or so, flintlocks started to be replaced by percussion cap weapons.
None of these firing mechanism changes really affect the deadliness of the weapon, just the reliability. Rifling made guns more accurate, but to really up the deadliness, one needed a technical development of another kind.
For almost all this time, the bullet was a ball, usually of lead, probably about 3/4 inch wide, though smoothbores could fire anything smaller than their barrel given enough wadding. One would think such a large round would be devastating, but it was a round ball, fired with no spin, often only imperfectly fit in the barrel, so it lost a lot of power very quickly at range. The Brown Bess, the standard musket of the British Army had an effective range of supposedly 175 yards (less than the English longbow) but were usually only fired at a range of 50 yards or less. While a musket ball has considerably more kinetic energy than a sword point, for instance, it was spread across a much larger surface area, combined with an easily deformable material apt to spend itself easily against something much harder than itself (like a tempered steel breastplate).
In the early 1800's the minie ball, a shaped round designed to spin was developed that dramatically increased the range and deadliness of firearms. Combine that with paper cartridges, and pretty soon brass cartridges, and better production methods, and you have the wonderful, deadly firearms we know and love today.
By comparison...plate armor began to appear in the mid 14th Century, and became the dominant armor (not counting gambeson) by the 15th-ranging from the breastplate to full plate. While the rich and nobility might have the meticulously fitted plate that D&D uses to justify the expense of plate mail in the game, there was such a thing as munition armor-generically sized armor pieces stockpiled to be worn by any serving soldier it was issued to.
Mail (often called chain mail) continued to be used, but becomes less prominent. Once you've got the tech to make plate armor (first the ability to make consistent steel, and later sheet metal rolling), it's just easier to make plate than it is to make millions of riveted rings. Brigandine and other types of scale still get used (I don't know if the Chinese ever really did armor with large plates) because it's essentially plate made up of many small pieces instead of one big one, and in the case of Brigandine, it can be disguised as a doublet. And the modern armor soldiers wear today differs in materials, but not so much in design from the Wisby Coat-of-Plates from the 14th Century.
Plate armor of course never goes away until at least the 19th Century, and in Europe, I think there were still Cavalry soldiers wearing breastplates into the 20th Century, though I'm sure by that point it was largely ceremonial.
To take another example, the novel, the Three Musketeers, often pointed to as an example of the lightly armed swashbuckling epic many people want to introduce flintlocks to emulate (though the Musketeers rarely used firearms outside of their role in the army, takes place in 1625 right in the middle of the 30 Years War. Take a look at any depiction of battle in the 30 years war. What do we see? Guys in armor fighting with pikes, swords, and guns, while dudes in full plate ride around on horseback.
That's just in Europe; in other parts of the world, like Asia, armor was existing right alongside firearms-and I bet much like Batman's Batsuit in the Dark Knight, it could be relied on for everything but "a straight shot".
From what little I read on the Cuirassier, the post feudal armored cavalry, by the mid 17-18th Century, armor appears to have fallen in and out of favor. Certainly it became less complex, going from full plate eventually to just a breastplate and helmet (one can never, every forget the helmet). But remember that's late enough you had Cortez and his men running around in armor in Latin America and we dug up a brigandine in the ruins of Jamestown.
http://historicjamestowne.org/april-2009-2/
Even accepting the premise that firearms was the nail in armors coffin (it wasn't, except for a very short period from about the mid 19th Century to after WWII), armor and firearms existed contemporaneously for hundreds of years. There is no reason to give armor physics defying power no other weapons have.
handgonne or hand cannon...13th century, they've got one dated about 1288 (originally in China) had a hole and were lit with a match, like early cannon.
Arquebus...15th Century-, started out much like the gonne, lit with a hook and match, and later developed into the matchlock
As the arquebus became lighter, around the 17th Century, the term "musket" became the common term for long barrelled smoothbore rifles. Other than technical developments (from match, to match lock, to wheellock to flintlock) there really doesn't appear to be much difference between a musket and an arquebus (which I didn't know before I started this).
Rifles (ie, long arms with rifled barrels) appeared in Europe in the 15th Century. These were much more accurate (and thus more useful at a longer range), but slower loading than a smoothbore rifle, and so muskets were the common military sidearm.
Pistols seem to date from the 16th Century and were a European invention. No word on rifling...I think they commonly weren't. They used the same firing mechanisms as muskets and rifles (match to wheel to flint.
As far as technical developments...
Matchlock...appeared 15th Century
Wheellock...developed around 1500 (start of 16th Century)
Flintlock...early 17th century (early 1600's).
Around 1820 or so, flintlocks started to be replaced by percussion cap weapons.
None of these firing mechanism changes really affect the deadliness of the weapon, just the reliability. Rifling made guns more accurate, but to really up the deadliness, one needed a technical development of another kind.
For almost all this time, the bullet was a ball, usually of lead, probably about 3/4 inch wide, though smoothbores could fire anything smaller than their barrel given enough wadding. One would think such a large round would be devastating, but it was a round ball, fired with no spin, often only imperfectly fit in the barrel, so it lost a lot of power very quickly at range. The Brown Bess, the standard musket of the British Army had an effective range of supposedly 175 yards (less than the English longbow) but were usually only fired at a range of 50 yards or less. While a musket ball has considerably more kinetic energy than a sword point, for instance, it was spread across a much larger surface area, combined with an easily deformable material apt to spend itself easily against something much harder than itself (like a tempered steel breastplate).
In the early 1800's the minie ball, a shaped round designed to spin was developed that dramatically increased the range and deadliness of firearms. Combine that with paper cartridges, and pretty soon brass cartridges, and better production methods, and you have the wonderful, deadly firearms we know and love today.
By comparison...plate armor began to appear in the mid 14th Century, and became the dominant armor (not counting gambeson) by the 15th-ranging from the breastplate to full plate. While the rich and nobility might have the meticulously fitted plate that D&D uses to justify the expense of plate mail in the game, there was such a thing as munition armor-generically sized armor pieces stockpiled to be worn by any serving soldier it was issued to.
Mail (often called chain mail) continued to be used, but becomes less prominent. Once you've got the tech to make plate armor (first the ability to make consistent steel, and later sheet metal rolling), it's just easier to make plate than it is to make millions of riveted rings. Brigandine and other types of scale still get used (I don't know if the Chinese ever really did armor with large plates) because it's essentially plate made up of many small pieces instead of one big one, and in the case of Brigandine, it can be disguised as a doublet. And the modern armor soldiers wear today differs in materials, but not so much in design from the Wisby Coat-of-Plates from the 14th Century.
Plate armor of course never goes away until at least the 19th Century, and in Europe, I think there were still Cavalry soldiers wearing breastplates into the 20th Century, though I'm sure by that point it was largely ceremonial.
To take another example, the novel, the Three Musketeers, often pointed to as an example of the lightly armed swashbuckling epic many people want to introduce flintlocks to emulate (though the Musketeers rarely used firearms outside of their role in the army, takes place in 1625 right in the middle of the 30 Years War. Take a look at any depiction of battle in the 30 years war. What do we see? Guys in armor fighting with pikes, swords, and guns, while dudes in full plate ride around on horseback.
That's just in Europe; in other parts of the world, like Asia, armor was existing right alongside firearms-and I bet much like Batman's Batsuit in the Dark Knight, it could be relied on for everything but "a straight shot".
From what little I read on the Cuirassier, the post feudal armored cavalry, by the mid 17-18th Century, armor appears to have fallen in and out of favor. Certainly it became less complex, going from full plate eventually to just a breastplate and helmet (one can never, every forget the helmet). But remember that's late enough you had Cortez and his men running around in armor in Latin America and we dug up a brigandine in the ruins of Jamestown.
http://historicjamestowne.org/april-2009-2/
Even accepting the premise that firearms was the nail in armors coffin (it wasn't, except for a very short period from about the mid 19th Century to after WWII), armor and firearms existed contemporaneously for hundreds of years. There is no reason to give armor physics defying power no other weapons have.
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