Editing Spear (section)

===Death of the Pike===
Guns and cannons finally killed the pikeman: a gun took only modestly more training than a pike, but a musketeer or rifleman can kill you from considerably farther than seven meters away (like ten meters for early firearms). That said, pikes and guns worked together for much of the 1500's to the late 1600's, where men with black powder guns were protected from dangerous cavalry rushes by being combined into mixed Pike and Shot formations with well trained pikemen.

However, as the development of ranged weaponry progressed, having large formations of men became tactically unsound. Massed firepower or artillery could easily wipe out blocks of soldiers. This meant that being a professional pikeman was quickly becoming suicide, as the enemies were less and less likely to engage you in melee and more likely to use you as target practice. So the "deep" formations of the past were phased out in preference to smaller, tighter "lines" of men, which meant that bouncing cannon balls would go through far fewer targets. Pikemen only really work in deep formations, since that's the whole point of a long-ass spear which is otherwise a bit cumbersome to use against someone within the 3-meter range.

[[File:Defenders NGM-v31-p369-A.jpg|thumb|right|300px|the spear is still in use in modern times, though given the length of those things they're more like Glaives]]

However, this was not the final deal breaker for pikes. After all, guns or not, cavalry were still a problem until rifles gave infantry enough range to overcome the speed advantage of cavalry. What truly finished off pike formations off were '''bayonets'''. Why let a man only have a spear when you could give a man a gun that could stab, or rather a spear that could shoot (since smoothbore firearms sucked in every regard except armor penetration and ease of training)? This dual purpose would allow formations of musketeers to ward off cavalry charges and protect themselves in melee engagements from other infantry just like if they had a pike while still keeping up with their barrage of shots while unengaged. Fortunately for the spear, the bayonet long remained a vital weapon even as guns improved - seriously, military officers for centuries never thought themselves as winning a battle until they expected to be able to drive the enemy from the field at a bayonet's point, and this viewpoint would have merit until the 20th century. Better practiced gunners with more advanced and rifled guns were later capable of achieving high enough rates of fire at long enough ranges to no longer need the help of pikemen to ward off incoming charges; given that cavalry themselves were rendered obsolete by the advent of machine guns and other automatic weaponry, the need for bayonets diminished to nearly nothing. Soldiers today still carry bayonets for emergencies and the odd (successful) bayonet charge can occasionally be heard about, but most modern bayonets are meant pretty much just for aggression training, POW control, and then to double as normal knives as well.

{{MedievalWeaponry}}