Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX

[Gnoman]

The other thing is that "beauty" is often a secondary effect. A lot of "decorations" on hunting weapons from animistic cultures, for example, are intended to draw the spirit of the depicted animal. On more martial weapons, you might see invocations to the goddess of victory, or inscriptions exhorting the blood god, or curses on particular foes. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the practice of writing insults on ammunition - which has been seen on everything from ancient Greek sling bullets to ballistic missiles in Europe today.

You could also look at the way modern soldiers have decorated their vehicles for inspiration - WWII aircraft nose art, fierce features on tanks, etc. Not to mention more traditional examples like figureheads on ships or painted crests. Some of that is from boredom, others from an attempt to maintain morale, build unit cohesion, anthropomorphication of the vehicle (there's a reason so many cultures call ships "she" or "he" instead of "it"), defiance at the foe, etc.

Propaganda is also a common source, even if it isn't explicitly recognizable as such. Depictions of great deeds, heroic last stands, the perfidy of the foe, and other such events are incredibly common in art and literature. The works of Homer are a pretty good literary example of that.

[fusilier]

I don't think so. Long arms being larger often makes them easier to reload, not harder. You can let your musket rest on the ground and most of the motions you need to make are nice and large. A pistol is a small, fiddly thing that you have to brace against weird things, best reloaded at a table.

My personal experience would indicate that they do reload a little easier than a musket. That said, I'm more familiar with military pistols, which have locks that are similar in size, and robustness, to a musket's lock (a civilian example, especially something small like a Philadelphia Deringer, I could see being very fiddly to reload on the go). I think it's important to understand that the situations that they were used in (very close range), meant they were typically fired just once in a combat. Usually there wasn't going to be time to reload it, if that first shot wasn't sufficient.

A military pistol (compared to a musket) is short, light, and easily held firmly by the barrel/forestock. The short barrel means less time spent ramming, less time spent drawing/returning the rammer. Also it's more trivial to go from the muzzle to the lock for loading and priming. The steps are all the same, and the speed ups are all kind of marginal in my opinion, but it is a little faster. If it needs to be braced to drive home the ball, it's short enough it can be braced against the body, without making ramming awkward. But I'm not sure how common it would be to need to brace it. If mounted, very easy to reload while seated in the saddle. (With the caveat that moving makes reloading any weapon difficult while mounted, although certainly not impossible).

But in practice, it's just not going to happen very often that it needs to be reloaded in the heat of combat. And many sources note that careful loading usually leads to a better, more reliable shot than hurried reloading. I suspect few people would have practiced reloading a pistol quickly, compared to the repeated musket drills.

[fusilier]

I’m running a 1830’s France game, and I suddenly have a character with a FN Model 1910. How does that compare to a flintlock pistol? Specifically, I’m talking about accuracy, range, and impact on the target. I’m trying to figure out how to rule how much “damage” it does, and while I have stats for the flintlock, I don’t know enough to compare.

If this is relevant, it is Gavrilo Princep’s FN Model 1910.

So the time frame is about the time the earliest metallic cartridges were being developed, the pinfire cartridge. So the basic technological development has occurred, although smokeless powder, which makes automatic weapons more practical is still some ways away.

Other repeating weapons (proto-revolvers and pepperboxes) exist at that time too (although they are pretty new).

I think Gnoman answered this question pretty well already -- GURPS is great for these types of situations. A flintlock will do more damage per shot, but the FN 1910 will be able to fire more shots. Depending upon which system you are using, you may have to abstract out the effect.

[Raunchel]

If you're looking for decorated weapons and the like without showing wealth (which is to say, expensive ornaments), you could have a lot of personally done things. Things like wood carvings on shafts, bone handles, their clothes being embroidered in other (cheap) colours, and other such things that a normal person can do in the long evenings. That way, you can also show these things as part of personal pride and the like.

[halfeye]

I’m running a 1830’s France game, and I suddenly have a character with a FN Model 1910. How does that compare to a flintlock pistol? Specifically, I’m talking about accuracy, range, and impact on the target. I’m trying to figure out how to rule how much “damage” it does, and while I have stats for the flintlock, I don’t know enough to compare.

If this is relevant, it is Gavrilo Princep’s FN Model 1910.

Thank you! And yeah, dimension hopping is a thing. More specifically, a player wished for "a pistol to kill royalty" and that seemed like too good a fit not to pass up.

Well, it's nothing like a pistol, but this seems to be more the period:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infernal_machine_(weapon)

[Pauly]

Thank you! And yeah, dimension hopping is a thing. More specifically, a player wished for "a pistol to kill royalty" and that seemed like too good a fit not to pass up.

How about a Girandoni system air pistol?
https://www.rockislandauction.com/de...iner-of-vienna

Period accurate, little bit weird and mostly silent. I’m not sure on the exact lethality of the pistols but the Girandoni air rifles were lethal out to maybe 150 meters, which isn’t as lethal as black powder rifles, as Baker Rifles were known to be lethal out to 500 meters.

[fusilier]

How about a Girandoni system air pistol?
https://www.rockislandauction.com/de...iner-of-vienna

Period accurate, little bit weird and mostly silent. I’m not sure on the exact lethality of the pistols but the Girandoni air rifles were lethal out to maybe 150 meters, which isn’t as lethal as black powder rifles, as Baker Rifles were known to be lethal out to 500 meters.

Oooh. I did not realize there was a pistol version of the Girandoni. Very cool!

[Pauly]

Oooh. I did not realize there was a pistol version of the Girandoni. Very cool!

Not many were made and all the examples I have found have elaborate engraving and decorations. I think it’s reasonable to assume thet were weapons for the very rich.
I’m pretty sure the bullet was pretty anaemic compared to regular gunpowder pistols.

[Martin Greywolf]

I’m pretty sure the bullet was pretty anaemic compared to regular gunpowder pistols.

At ten grams at 150 m/s, let's consult Fragment hazard criteria on that...

It has about 50/50 odds of penetrating soft tissue (abdomen, limbs), or cracking a bone. This is against unarmored target, so... yeah, pretty anemic for a firearm.

[Martin Greywolf]

Fellow weapon nerds, in a recent video, Matt Easton made the claim that pollaxe was regulated by sumptuary laws, i.e. if you weren't a knight/nobleman/whatever you weren't allowed to have one.

This is the first time I've heard of this - do any of you either have a source for this, or have heard the same thing? I've asked the same thing in the comments of that video, but there was no response yet.

Note that I mean sumptuary laws specifically. Weapons were regulated in cities, restricting carry to nobles only or no one at all, and loot on the battlefield was pretty much always handed over to the brass to be redistributed later. Also, it's not a good idea to grab a weapon specifically optimized for armor on armor combat with you if you don't have armor yourself, but that means poorer soldiers wouldn't use pollaxe by choice, rather than being prohibited by law from using it.

[snowblizz]

Fellow weapon nerds, in a recent video, Matt Easton made the claim that pollaxe was regulated by sumptuary laws, i.e. if you weren't a knight/nobleman/whatever you weren't allowed to have one.

This is the first time I've heard of this - do any of you either have a source for this, or have heard the same thing? I've asked the same thing in the comments of that video, but there was no response yet.

Note that I mean sumptuary laws specifically. Weapons were regulated in cities, restricting carry to nobles only or no one at all, and loot on the battlefield was pretty much always handed over to the brass to be redistributed later. Also, it's not a good idea to grab a weapon specifically optimized for armor on armor combat with you if you don't have armor yourself, but that means poorer soldiers wouldn't use pollaxe by choice, rather than being prohibited by law from using it.

Never seen such a thing noted before.

[Pauly]

Fellow weapon nerds, in a recent video, Matt Easton made the claim that pollaxe was regulated by sumptuary laws, i.e. if you weren't a knight/nobleman/whatever you weren't allowed to have one.

This is the first time I've heard of this - do any of you either have a source for this, or have heard the same thing? I've asked the same thing in the comments of that video, but there was no response yet.

Note that I mean sumptuary laws specifically. Weapons were regulated in cities, restricting carry to nobles only or no one at all, and loot on the battlefield was pretty much always handed over to the brass to be redistributed later. Also, it's not a good idea to grab a weapon specifically optimized for armor on armor combat with you if you don't have armor yourself, but that means poorer soldiers wouldn't use pollaxe by choice, rather than being prohibited by law from using it.

Poleaxes were used, at least in later times, as a tool to kill cattle by butchers. Hence why we have the phrase “fell as if he had been poleaxed” which is sometimes shortened to just “poleaxed” in English. NB in use as a butcher’s tool the accepted spelling is “poleaxe” where the medieval weapon can be spelled “pollaxe” or “poleaxe”.

I really can’t see an item regulated by sumptuary laws, and thus prohibited to the working classes, evolving into a worker's tool.

[Gnoman]

I asked some people who have a good bit of archive access, and they failed to find any mention of sumptuary laws on this subject. Local level restrictions about lending them to other people "except in support of the mayor and the good people of the town", but that fairy refutes the notion of them being a high-class weapon.

More to the point, there are a lot of references to the exact scenario referenced, though not with poleaxes. Several references to peasants slowly scavenging complete sets of armor and weapons to become higher-status men at arms.

[Martin Greywolf]

I have stumbled on a neat thing that may interest you, a very early accounting record of a firearms inspection of a city - the claim is that this one is the oldest one of its kind, and it may well be actually true.

The record is about an inspection of firearms used on the walls of city of Bratislava (aka Presporok, aka Pressburg, aka Posszony, aka...) in 1443. Bratislava is in modern Slovakia, and was and still is on the banks of Danube and was for most of its time a border city - the exception being during the existence of Austria-Hungary.

What this record doesn't mention: anything that doesn't use a gunpowder e.g. melee weapons and crossbows (we'll get to those later), fireamrs in private hands, firearms in hands of city watch that wasn't assigned to the wall (there were at least 4 fortresses outside of the city walls), so the total amount of weapons would have been much higher. Still, it gives us a good lower margin.

Final thing to note is population of Bratislava, it was howering somewhere in 5 000 - 10 000 range, fairly small for French standards, pretty big for eastern Europe.

Now, the actual numbers: 125 barrels (not necessarily total firearms), a lot of gunpowder, 870 arrows (it just says arrows - were they for bows, crossbows or ballistae? we don't know), 3 incendiary arrows, 13 copper cannonballs, 52 lead cannonballs, 22 pounds of lead balls (i.e. for shotgun loads for cannons or for individual handguns)

• 62 hookguns and handguns
• 45 artillery pieces (tarasnica[1], howitzer, mortar, large cannon for stone cannonballs)
• 18 others, two of which were multi-barrell organ guns, with the possibility that they were counting by the barrel and these 18 are, in fact, just two 9-barrell organ guns

For a breakdown of how many where where:

• Otter gate - 19 handguns, 8 cannons
• Enemy of Hungarians Tower - 12 firearms
• Saint Michael's Gate - 1 hanguns on gate proper, with 4 hanguns and 3 cannons on its barbican[2]

Total arms can be sort of extrapolated from Hussite wars wagon crews - these were flexible by their nature, bud Dudik gives us some average numbers. A warwagon had 2 handgunners, 6 crossbowmen and 10 melee fighters. Assuming the same distribution for walls - and what are war wagons if not wars on wheels - we get total numbers for Bratislava's permanent defensive forces as:

• 47 - 63 gunnery crews, (141 to 315 people, when accounting for a crew fo 3 to 5 per cannon), with enough ammunition to shoot each of them... once? really?
• 62 handgunners
• 186 crossbowmen (4.6 arrows per crossbowman, 0.02 incendiary arrows per crossbowman), which is a wealth of ammunition compared to artillery
• 310 melee infantry

For a total of 558 soldiers plus artillery crews, which gets us to 699 - 873 men. For a city of, let's split the difference and call it 7 500 people.

What does this tell us?

A full tenth of city's total population, so every fifth male, was in the militia. This isn't that surprising, cities having a very martially-oriented public life is well documented, but this gives us some perspective - pretty much everyone would have a relative in the city's defensive forces, if not the actual patrolling militia proper.

The ammunition stores are extremely low. The city would have to rely on either 1) hearing of enemy army approaching and stocking up, or 2) requisitioning ammunition from local fletchers and powdermakers. This also means that any surprise attack, hard as it would be to achieve, would be incredibly effective. Nota that this is a comparatively very defensively successful city, it was rarely taken in a siege.

Surprise inspections were a done thing in year of our lord 1443, don't hesitate to hit your players with one.

Spoiler: A 1735 map of Bratislava

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This one is fairly useful, the city walls didn't move from ~1200 to this point in time, the only difference is slightly more towers on said walls.
I do have better maps, but all of them are in physical books, and I am far too lazy to scan them

A - St. Martin's Church (Cathedral at the time of drawing of map, church in 1443), two towers above it, next to plot 24, is the Enemy of Hungarians tower
L - St Michael's gate
K - Otter gate

Danube is below the bottom edge of the map.

[1] there is no proper translation for this one, French word is Fauconneau, it is a stationary gun for direct fire into people with a long barrell, kinda like an oversized musket

Spoiler: Tarasnice

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Spoiler: Much improved swivel gun, this one is 17th century

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[2] The defensive setup was: inside city -> Gate proper -> drawbridge over moat -> barbican (i.e. a small courtyard ringed by walls) -> barbican gate -> drawbridge over moat -> outside of city

[Gnoman]

Is this buried in some archive, or is it available online? I know people who would be very interested in reading this source.

[Martin Greywolf]

Is this buried in some archive, or is it available online? I know people who would be very interested in reading this source.

Okay, so, here is what you do. Prepare yourself mentally to do this in Slovak or German, because English versions of the relevant sites don't exist.

Next step is, go to this site. Click on the magnifying glass on top, write 1443 to the search bar, press enter. THe results are on the left, you want to click on the tiny icons of magnifying glass next to "AMB Archiv mesta Bratislavy", becasue intuitive UI design is for losers.

That will get you to three Kammerbuch (accounting books) results from year 1443 for Bratislava. It is at this point I can no longer help you, because I can't actually read them. Well, I kinda can, but it is painfully slow and those things are 200 pages a piece. The entry you'd be looking for is from 2. august 1443, so probably in the middle book - medieval Bratislava had fiscal years that started in IIRC may.

If that fails, you'll need to contact Doc. PhDr. Vladimír Segeš, PhD. from Slovakia (you'll know you have the right guy if he has a ton of titles next to his name) - I think he still works for our Institute of Military History, their webpage even has, wonder of wonders, an english translation. Ask about the source of survey from his book "Kriminalita a justícia v stredovekom Prešporku" (Criminality and justice in medieval Bratislava), page 88, "Dávne delá a pušky" (Old cannons and handguns).

[Pauly]

I have
The ammunition stores are extremely low. The city would have to rely on either 1) hearing of enemy army approaching and stocking up, or 2) requisitioning ammunition from local fletchers and powdermakers. This also means that any surprise attack, hard as it would be to achieve, would be incredibly effective. Nota that this is a comparatively very defensively successful city, it was rarely taken in a siege.
y

Not so surprising. Ammunition was very expensive relatively speaking. I don’t have my references with me but I remember reading that at the time of the Spanish Armada some British captains became stupendously wealthy because the value of the powder captured was worth more than the value of the ship carrying it.

[Gnoman]

The people I wanted the source for say the same thing. Large stocks of ammunition were laid in only when siege was expected.

[Grim Portent]

Can anyone reccommend a source for the armaments and tactics preferred in Eastern Europe in the late 1400s? Specifically interested in Hungary, Romania (Wallachia and Transylvania primarily) and the Ottoman Empire.

[Pauly]

Can anyone reccommend a source for the armaments and tactics preferred in Eastern Europe in the late 1400s? Specifically interested in Hungary, Romania (Wallachia and Transylvania primarily) and the Ottoman Empire.

Have you tried the Osprey catalogue? I’m sure they’ll have some books that suit.

They’re nor super in-depth but give a good overview and often have very interesting bibliographies for further research.

[Telok]

13 copper cannonballs

This is the first I've heard if copper cannonballs. Alas I can't have time to do decent searches and quick ones aren't turning up anything decent. Is there somewhere with more/better info on the use & reasoning behind using copper for cannonballs?

[Gnoman]

Stone takes a lot of work to shape, iron thakes a lot of work (in the form of heat) to cast. Copper melts quite easily, is reasonably common, and is thus rather cost-effective in that narrow time period.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Stone takes a lot of work to shape, iron thakes a lot of work (in the form of heat) to cast. Copper melts quite easily, is reasonably common, and is thus rather cost-effective in that narrow time period.

Similarly, this is why we use lead bullets (usually jacketed in copper to retain their shape). So in some sense, we still fire copper "cannon balls". It's just the copper is an outer shell around an even easier-to-work, easier-to-deform (which is useful in rifled applications) lead core. Except depleted uranium ones...that's a whole different "ball" game. Pun intended.

[Pauly]

This is the first I've heard if copper cannonballs. Alas I can't have time to do decent searches and quick ones aren't turning up anything decent. Is there somewhere with more/better info on the use & reasoning behind using copper for cannonballs?

My assumption was that they were for firestarting. Copper is an excellent conductor and it would transfer heat from the cannonball to a wooden target faster than an iron or lead ball.

I have nothing other than my assumption to back this up.

[halfeye]

My assumption was that they were for firestarting. Copper is an excellent conductor and it would transfer heat from the cannonball to a wooden target faster than an iron or lead ball.

I have nothing other than my assumption to back this up.

It was a long, long time ago, but if I remember correctly, copper is an excellent conductor, but it has a very low thermal capacity.

[Pauly]

It was a long, long time ago, but if I remember correctly, copper is an excellent conductor, but it has a very low thermal capacity.

I use copper saucepans at work. The great thing about using copper is heat goes on, heat goes off very quickly, which makes it great for things like delicate sauces and fish. Cast iron holds heat which makes wonderful for grilling meat, but its a bitch to bring it up to temperature or change temperature.

[Telok]

Stone takes a lot of work to shape, iron thakes a lot of work (in the form of heat) to cast. Copper melts quite easily, is reasonably common, and is thus rather cost-effective in that narrow time period.

My only issue with that is I don't think lead has every been significantly rarer or more expensive. This sort of thing is where I really love references. My own guesses would involve the balls having different flight or barrel wear characteristics, but they're just guesses.

[Martin Greywolf]

The people I wanted the source for say the same thing. Large stocks of ammunition were laid in only when siege was expected.

Well, yeah, but I was still surprised by how low the stores actually were, I was expecting something like 5-10 shots per cannon, not one. Especially since it's the ginpowder that is a pain to store, not the shot.

Can anyone reccommend a source for the armaments and tactics preferred in Eastern Europe in the late 1400s? Specifically interested in Hungary, Romania (Wallachia and Transylvania primarily) and the Ottoman Empire.

In English... pretty much Osprey. Also look up works on Sigismund, he was emperor of HRE, but also a King of Hungary, and one of the main players in Hussite wars. It would be better if you found a work on his main Hungarian man, Ctibor of Beckov, but only significant work on him I know of is a 400 page monster of a book in Slovak. Frankly, anything Hussites used got widely adopted, because they empirically proved how effective it was - so reading up on those wars will get you places.

Ottomans... I'm afraid you're on your own reading specific papers and trying to get a picture of what they did. Probably the best thing to do is look at specific battles and get sense from those - Nicopolis, Belgrade, Nove Zamky/Ujvar, Mohacs...

My assumption was that they were for firestarting. Copper is an excellent conductor and it would transfer heat from the cannonball to a wooden target faster than an iron or lead ball.

I have nothing other than my assumption to back this up.

It was a long, long time ago, but if I remember correctly, copper is an excellent conductor, but it has a very low thermal capacity.

My only issue with that is I don't think lead has every been significantly rarer or more expensive. This sort of thing is where I really love references. My own guesses would involve the balls having different flight or barrel wear characteristics, but they're just guesses.

First possible reason, they were indeed incendiaries - Bratislava of the time sat ~50 meters off the banks of Danube (or sometimes in the middle of Danube come flooding season)
and it was besieged by ships several times in its history. As for sources, this paper has a direct reference to copper cannon balls being explicitly incendiary on page 223.

Spoiler: Bratislava's combat divers

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This is Henry III after some people from Bratislava swam up to his ships at anchor and drilled holes in them
Pucture is from Chronica Picta, written 300 years after this supposedly happened, so take it with a grain of salt
THe structure on the illumination is Bratislava castle, the town is just to the right of it
the castle and the city were, very atypically, two independent administrative/government structures

Second possibility? The one really hard to catch? It's surplus copper. Bratislava lies on one of several trade routes from Banska Bystrica, a mining city that was a major source of copper for half of Europe, some 150 km away. It's not impossible that these copper balls were made at a time when buying copper became a lot cheaper for reasons of surplus.

[Pauly]

Well,
First possible reason, they were indeed incendiaries - Bratislava of the time sat ~50 meters off the banks of Danube (or sometimes in the middle of Danube come flooding season)
and it was besieged by ships several times in its history. As for sources, this paper has a direct reference to copper cannon balls being explicitly incendiary on page 223.
.

Again I have nothing to support this apart from supposition.

In the time of Nelson shot furnaces in fortifications took ~30 minutes to heat an iron ball to temperature. Given the time frame it’s reasonable to assume furnaces from 250 years earlier were both smaller and less efficient. A copper ball would be much much faster to bring to heat and thus be better suited to sustained fire than iron ball.

[fusilier]

This is the first I've heard if copper cannonballs. Alas I can't have time to do decent searches and quick ones aren't turning up anything decent. Is there somewhere with more/better info on the use & reasoning behind using copper for cannonballs?

Reports from the Mexican-American War (and Texas Revolution) reference the Mexican artillery using copper cannonballs, and sometimes copper musket balls. The assumption seems to be that Mexico had lots of copper, and used it when supplies of other metals were hard to come by.