Editing Cannon (section)

== Types of cannon ammunition==
As mentioned before, cannon munitions can essentially be categorized according to two categories: shot or shell. Generally, you want the latter when you want to blow things up; the former is generally for breaking hard targets.

* '''Round shot''': As the name suggests, it's a round ball made of either stone or later iron. Round shot was best used against fortifications and infantry in the open. When firing at infantry the ideal use of iron round shot was to fire just in front of the infantry and let the ball bounce up and through the formation like a bowling ball from hell. This is replicated in cannon mechanics in Warhammer Fantasy. This is also one of the reasons why armies stopped fighting in deep formations and switched to lines. Also, don't knock a stone cannon ball because while they wouldn't bounce as well on impact, they have a tendency to shatter and spread deadly shrapnel like a primitive HE round instead.

*'''Hot Shot''': Against wooden ships that were full of black powder and other flammables, often the best solution is to light them on fire. As such an attempt to do this was to take an iron cannon ball, and heat it up so that it glowed red and then fire it... carefully. As you can imagine sticking a red hot cannon ball down the barrel of an iron tube full of explosive was careful work in order to pull it off they had to put a plug of wet clay between the ball and the powder. As any Hornblower fan will tell you, hot shot was rarely used by ships. Naval artillery in the age of sail was risky enough without adding an extensive furnace infrastructure and running red-hot balls all over your own very flammable ship. Hot shot was most often used by coastal forts against passing ships. This is the modern origin for the term "Hotshot" as someone who is renowned for their skill and courage - like the people who could load said red hot cannonballs without blowing themselves up in the process.

*'''Chain shot''': used mostly at sea, Chain shot was either two small cannon balls linked with chain, or one single cannon ball that broke into two halves connected by a chain after firing. Chain shot covered a larger area and was used to target the rigging of enemy ships (though as the tv series 'The Borgias' shows, it could also be quite useful in mowing down infantry). As steamships become more common however, chain shot became less and less useful.

*'''Canister shot''': A canister shot is a collection of small iron musket balls, that was jammed down the barrel in a tin can. Upon firing, it basically turned the cannon into a massive shotgun spraying the area in front of it with hundreds of musket balls. In a day and age where fighting was done shoulder to shoulder canister shot was lethal, a single cannon could and has stopped an infantry charge dead in its tracks. '''Grape shot''' was similar in concept but used bigger balls and was loaded in a bag, not a can (supposedly the bulges the balls made in the bag looked like a bunch of grapes, hence the name) and was more common on ships since it could better punch though wooden hulls. While still in use, with some utilizing dart-like flechettes instead of shot, canister rounds fell out of favour thanks to the invention of the...

*'''Shrapnel shells''': You know how a person invents a thing and get his name attached to the invention so completely that if you tried to use it today as a name it just sounds strange? Well Henry Shrapnel was so successful with his invention that all types of flying debris now bear his name. Shrapnel rounds were invented in 1784 and they're similar to a canister shot, except the outer hull is solid enough to withstand being shot out of the cannon, and it is outfitted with a fuze so that the shell explodes in mid-air. Rather than only a 'shotgun blast' at the muzzle of the gun, this almost triples the range of the anti personal round while keeping the lethality. Round shot for use against infantry became a thing of the past, and Shrapnel rounds were used all the way up to the 20th century when it was discovered that the fragmentation effects produced by the casing of a High-Explosive shell made the balls themselves largely unnecessary. That said, Shrapnel-like rounds operating on timed or proximity fuzes are still employed, with 'airburst' munitions designed to hit either targets hiding behind cover or to knock down fast-moving targets like planes/helo's and incoming missiles.

*'''Explosive shells''': A shell that's hollow and has explody stuff in it. While shells have been known to exist ever since the 14th century, they didn't become widespread until reliable fuzes appeared after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Prior to then, early fuzes were essentially slow-burning wooden plugs lit by the heat of firing: not very reliable, as they would often explode too early, explode too late (in which case an enemy could put them out), or not explode at all. Later fuzes incorporated a shock-sensitive explosive that would set off the main payload, detonating either on impact or much later, by mechanical timed or proximity fuzes. When introduced, they made the wooden sailing ship useless as no such vessel could withstand being hit by more than a few shells; likewise, their ability to blast apart brick and mortar made many an existing fortification obsolete. Today, such shells come in a wide variety of munition types with chemical and explosive, but the most common versions are High-Explosive (HE), (Semi-)Armor-Piercing High-Explosive ((S)APHE), High-Explosive Incendiary (HE-I) and High-Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT, see below).

*'''Nuclear shells:''' For a time, you also had shells with nuclear warheads, though these have been largely phased out as impractical. First, if you start tossing nuclear weapons at your enemy, they might take it as a sign that nuclear war is a go, which then leads to further escalation. Second, they irradiate the battlefield, which in turn poses difficulties for attackers. Thirdly, you need a really, really big gun to launch a nuclear shell far enough that your well out of the blast zone (and it has to have a big blast because why else use a nuclear shell at all?). Finally, with the advent of precision guided munitions (PGM) they've been largely rendered pointless: the whole point of a nuclear weapon is to ensure destruction of a target with as few munitions as possible, but PGMs can do the job nearly as efficiently without all the negative associations.

*'''Chemical shells:''' These are filled with chemical payloads. They were in their heyday during the First World War, when they were employed as a means of suppressing enemy defenders before an attack, but it was then quickly realized that they could be just as much of a hazard to attackers. Eventually, both sides came up with highly effective gas masks to ward them off. This, along with the lingering memory of the horror associated with their use, meant that they were very rarely employed in the Second World War and thereafter. The main exception is just below.

*'''Smoke shells:''' Self-explanatory. Designed to provide a screen that blocks visual detection, in addition to electronic devices such as infrared and thermal. Technically a chemical shell; some variations have offensive applications as well. The white phosphorus used by some countries (the United States and Russia) for example, will spontaneously combust in the presence of oxygen, setting flammables on fire and burning flesh on contact.

*'''Illumination shells:''' A special type of payload shell designed to eject a flare at a predetermined altitude, which then slowly descends on a parachute. As per the name, they are generally used for illumination, but different colored variations can be used for signalling.

*'''Cluster:''' It's a shell designed to burst in mid-air and scatter its payload over a large area. Said payload consists of tiny bomblets (incendiary, chemical, anti-personnel, or anti-tank) or mines. While bomblets are designed to explode on timer or on impact, the fuzes can fail, and since these each shell can contain dozens of these things, bombarding an area with cluster munitions can leave lots of nice little presents for people to later find. On the cheerier side of things, they can also be filled with paper and other things as well.

*'''Carcass shell''': No, not something a [[Deep Rot|necromancer]] would use. A carcass shell was a reserve of highly flammable material encased within an iron shell with some vents, as to spray the chemical after firing. it was called Carcass shell because, supposedly, the shot looked like a human carcass thanks to the holes. Carcass shell was shot mostly out of lower velocity mortars and Howitzers and was one of the first chemical weapons to be used. It was especially useful at night as the glow allowed it to be used to spot for the gun.

*'''Junk''': Obviously if you're out of proper ammunition you could just shove anything you want down the barrel and hope it works. Mostly, this amounted to things like scrap metal and rocks, but supposedly a Uruguayan ship once fired stale cheese out of their cannons and shattered the mast of a Brazilian ship. Contrarily to the common portrayal, however, the practice was discouraged as it would quickly wear the barrel of the weapon out and render it unusable.

*'''Armor-Piercing Composite Rigid (APCR)''': Also known as High Velocity Armor Piercing (HVAP) if you're an American or 'Hartkern' (hard core) if you're German. As tanks got bigger to the point where they were just shrugging off hits from tiny early war cannons, all nations were faced with the dilemma of stopping those monsters. There was the time-honored solution of bringing a bigger, longer gun, but that came with a prohibitive increase in weight, if only because you needed a bigger breech and enough mass to counterbalance everything. Another alternative was to make the projectile itself out of denser material, to focus all that energy onto a smaller area. That's HVAP/APCR/Hartkern. Same overall shell size, but the weight of the projectile is 'concentrated' in a smaller core made out of tungsten fitted with a lightweight aerodynamic cap. It worked, but at the expense of significantly decreasing range, since rifling isn't designed to stabilize a sub-calibre round. They also have the significant downside that the few materials they were made out of, like Tungsten or more recently, depleted Uranium, are either rare, expensive, hard to aquire or all of the above.
**'''Squeeze-bore''': A variant of APCR, also known as Armor-Piercing Composite Non-Rigid (APCNR). The most significant difference is that the gun is partially tapered, squeezing the sides of the shell as it travels down the barrel. This leads to propellant gases focusing on an ever smaller area, significantly increasing exit velocities. While it made APCR work a lot better, it has two major downsides: first it complicated logistics: guns employing tapered barrels or adapters to squeeze AP shells typically could not fire the same ammunition as other guns, even if they were of the same nominal calibre, and secondly a full on tapered barrel is a BITCH to make, since your trying to drill a long narrow CONE through a Cylinder!

*'''Sabot''': Not to be confused with the later armour-piercing shell design described below. Sabots (French for a clog shoe and pronounced like "Sah-bo") were used in the 19th century with weapons like the Paixhans gun, one of the first naval guns designed to fire an explosive shell. A sabot is a container made of a light material that fits the barrel and contains the actual munition but falls away after leaving the barrel, leaving just the sub-munition to fly toward the target. It was used to center the projectile and prevent propellant gas leakages, which could potentially prematurely detonate the shell in the barrel. Advances in metallurgy and the invention of the driving band have made such sabots obsolete. Buuuuut...

*'''Armour-Piercing Discarding Sabot (APDS)/Armour-Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot (APFSDS)''': Remember the APCR above, where we said 'core made out of hard material to deal more damage'? Well the modern APDS/APFSDS rounds take this one level further. A small, very heavy projectile is encased in a sleeve (called a sabot), which is discarded the moment it exits the barrel, leaving only the projectile to fly toward the target. Features much better ballistics than APCR, though APDS rounds still tend to somewhat less accurate when fired out of a rifled cannon. Accuracy is not much of a problem when Tanks and Self Propelled Artillery have built in targeting computers and communications systems. With the move to APFSDS, modern tanks now shoot what basically amounts to a huge dart made of depleted uranium or tungsten at one another through their smoothbore cannons. These are a whole kettle of fish altogether. Exhibiting an even smaller cross-section, they travel at near hypersonic (Mach 5 and above) velocities, with whatever they hit getting absolutely wrecked by the pressure wave and spall they generate while traveling through solid material. That said, if you tried to point them at the sides of a car or another lightly-armoured vehicle, all they'll do is make two very neatly-shaped holes, assuming that they don't turn someone into red paste on their way through.

*'''High-Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT)/High-Explosive Anti-Tank Fin-Stabilized (HEAT-FS)''': A modern round (it was introduced in WW2) that uses the Munroe effect to defeat heavily-armored targets, like a tank. In essence, all the force of the explosion is concentrated into a 'jet' that forces/melts/erodes its way through the armor and incinerates anything behind. Since their penetration capability is independent of the projectile's kinetic energy, they can take a variety of different forms: a shell launched by a cannon is the most applicable one here, but it also can be a rocket, or even a bomb thrown at/attached to a vehicle. While extremely effective, they have the drawback of needing to detonate at just the right distance and angle from their target. Furthermore, the rifling of a cannon tends to have a detrimental effect on the high explosive jet, causing it to splay out upon detonation, which needs to be counteracted in some form or another. The fin-stabilized version is a later variation that (as the name indicates) uses fins to stabilize the shell's flight (negating the need for rifling) and improve the chance of hitting at exactly said right angle/distance.
**'''Tandem Charge''': HEAT, when introduced, was a game changer and everyone scrambled to find ways to protect their tanks from them. The counterspell to the opponent's counterspell, a tandem charge is exactly what its name implies: a first small HE charge fucks up whatever HEAT countermeasures are installed to allow the secondary HEAT charge to strike true. It has since been broadened to different combinations of charges for different applications, but the general idea is always the same. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6j9wEF1sf8 See here for a demonstration of a building-clearing AP/HE combo.]

*'''High-Explosive Squash-Head (HESH)''': Bears a mention for completeness' sake, this one is a bit weird: the explosive charge is a blob of malleable plastic explosive. When it hits the target, the plastic is squashed against the target's surface (hence the name), and the resulting pancake is detonated by the fuze. This creates shockwaves that will cause the inner surface to break off and turn into shrapnel (spall). Modern composite armor and anti-spalling liners have rendered this type of shell inefficient against tanks, but they are still extremely effective against concrete structures and light vehicles. Unlike many of the shells described above, HESH requires rifling in order to work effectively, as the centrifugal force of a spinning shell allows the high explosive pat to spread out evenly. Unlike the other described above, only the British Army continues to use them in any serious capacity aboard the Challenger 2 MBT.

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