Editing Cannon (section)

=== Noncannon guns worth mentioning ===
There have been numerous inventions in the history of firearms that use a cannon's limbers and caissons to mount a weapon that was not quite cannon, and was often used in a way most cannons were not. What they all had in common was that they were all "artillery" in the sense that they were static, mounted firearms that could fuck up enemies in ways that infantry-portable firearms could not, much like your average cannon.

*'''Chongtong''': Not "really" cannons but this entry was here before the rocket page existed and these were fired out of a cannon. The Congtong was a Korean cannon, or rather, cannons since there was more than one type. The four types were the "Cheonja", "Jija", "Hyeonja", and "Hwangja", the names being roughly equivalent to Cannons A, B, C, and D. The Cheonja was the largest with a 130mm bore able to fire 30 pound rocket out to just over a kilometer. The other three types were pretty much the same, only shrunk down, the Jija had 100mm bore, the Hyeonja, 80mm while the Hwangja was very similar to a European hand cannon. (Wait a minute, barreled weapons that fire self propelled rockets... [[Bolter|Why does that sounds familiar?]])

*'''Da Vinci Cannons''': included in this section because, as far as we know, they were never actually built or used in battle. If they were ever used, we have no record of them, and you’d think it would be a big deal if they were successful. The famous inventor Leonardo understood the emerging importance of cannons, and sought to improve on its design. He had an early version of breech-loaders, but like a true mad scientist, that was just the beginning. Not only did he design a triple-barreled cannon, [[Steampunk|steam-powered]] cannons, and his own version of the Ottoman Bombard, but also a ''33-barreled'' cannon that had three rows of 11 small-caliber barrels set on a rotating axle, and each row would be fired in volley by rotating the row into firing position. [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Certainly reminds you of a certain gun from a certain tabletop game, doesn't it?]]

*'''Ribauldequin''': Don't ask us how to say it (Ri-bow-de-kin, pretty much like it's written. Just ignore the 'l'). A simpler name is “Organ gun”, because the gun barrel arrangement looks like a pipe organ, or volley gun. The Ribauldequin is troubling to list as a "cannon", since it has a number of small barrels rather than one big one. Rather than a cannon, thinking of it as a bunch of guns on a cannon carriage may be more accurate. Of course, the downside to being able to fire a bunch of guns at once is that, in the age of muzzle-loaders, you had to take even longer to reload it. And compared to having a bunch of guys individually aiming an loading a single barrel, you had maybe one or two guys doing all the loading. Still, if you could take the enemy out in a single volley, or at least create an opening for the rest of your guys, it could be an effective force-multiplier and morale weapon. After all, it wasn’t called the “infernal machine” for nothing.

*'''Wall gun''': Essentially guns too big to be personal firearms, but too small to qualify as proper field artillery. These are generally designed to be rested atop a wall, or supported on a stand. They are, roughly, the ancestor to modern sniper/anti-material rifles.
**'''Abus Gun''': An Ottoman artillery piece, similar to a Hook Gun, 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.
**'''Hook Gun''': Or Hakenbuechse, an oversized musket, that was always classified as an artillery piece, this weapon was popular in 16-18th century Eastern Europe and was usually used either in sieges or as a proto-sniper rifle.

*'''Swivel gun''': Essentially small cannons on stick, swivel guns were mostly used on ships and were mounted on the decks. While ineffective against all but the smallest boats, against boarding parties they could be very effective.
**'''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 than other guns, still had issues and had a tendency to leak leading to a loss of power and additional danger to the gunners.
**'''Lantaka''': A (usually) bronze swivel gun developed by the Philippine Moros, firing a half-pound ball or charge of grapeshot. Mounted on the fronts of boats and on the walls of earthwork forts. Saw much use against the Spanish conquistadors, but was defeated by the howitzers and mortars brought by the American infantry.

*'''Mechanical machine guns''': These are essentially the first machine guns. Technically firearms, they differ from later machine guns in that their firing mechanisms relied on repetitive manual operation via a crank or lever. They also tended to be mounted on artillery carriages, partly because these were pretty heavy machines, but also because military thinking had yet to really move on from the idea that crew served weapons didn't need to be horse-drawn. All of these were rendered obsolete by the Maxim gun except the gattling gun which with some modifications is still in use to this day.
**'''Mitrailleuse''': French for "grapeshot", though the word now refers to "machine gun" in that language. This was a weapon that looked like a cannon, only instead of one big hole in the muzzle it had twenty five 13mm barrels. It is not unlike a ribeaudequin, in that it fires multiple shots at a time. The main difference is that it is much easier to reload and shoot: all you need to do is unscrew the breech, slot in a steel plate with all twenty five cartridges, and then screw the breech closed. To fire it, you turned a crank that sequentially fires five barrels at a time. Was France's super duper secret weapon during the Franco-Prussian War, but it largely failed to live up to expectations in large part because the French insisted on deploying it as artillery just outside of rifle range.
**'''Gatling Gun''': Not to be confused with the chain gun, which operates on a completely different principle. The Gatling Gun features multiple barrels which fire in turn as they rotate around the twelve o'clock position. This configuration allowed higher rates of fire to be achieved without the barrel overheating. The earliest gatling gun required a person to crank it like a pepper grinder, so it's not like it can be fired automatically by some sandwich eating Russian. Notable for its use in Zulu and the Boshin war, mowing down those <s>pre-historic savages</s> unlucky pre-industrial indigenous like a combine harvester through chaff. It would later be brought back coupled with a motor to allow for so high a rate of fire that each of the guns "dakkas" blur into each other to become one long "BZZZZZZZZZZZZ", because jet planes were too fast to be easily brought down by anything less than a hundred 20mm rounds fired in a split-second.

*'''Dynamite gun''': In the early days of high explosives, there were no explosives stable enough to be fired from a gun without blowing up, and high explosives were far more powerful than low explosives like gunpowder. Hence, the Dynamite gun, the most steam punk weapon ever deployed. Dynamite guns worked like a big air gun, only instead of a BB they fired a shell full of Dynamite or other high explosives and instead of air they used compressed steam if on a ship, or smokeless powder used to indirectly propel a gas into the barrel to launch the shell.

*''' Maxim gun''': The first successful weapon that can be considered a true machine gun, harnessing the power of recoil to load, fire, and extract cartridges several hundred times a minute, with little more input than depressing a trigger. Like earlier mechanical machine guns, it was at first mounted on a horse-drawn carriages, though reductions in weight led to rethinking the whole mounting business and putting it on a lighter tripod. It was also the direct ancestor of the autocannon. The QF 1-pounder (37mm) and the QF 2-pounders (40mm) 'Pom-poms' (nicknamed like that because of the continuous rumble one produces when firing) were adopted by nations as soon as they became aware of them or had been on the receiving end, essentially converting the machine gun design into autocannons. The QF 1 started out as a field gun before it was used on warships as an anti-aircraft weapon. The Maxim along with it's descendants made field charges and line combat impossible, ushering in the era of trench warfare, with only [[Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20|mall ninjas]] and [[/pol/|other idiots]] lamenting the loss of those tactics.