Editing Cannon (section)

== Cannons in Warfare ==
[[image:TurkishBombard.jpg|thumb|300px|right|The Great Turkish <s>Penis Compensator</s> Bombard, when you absolutely positively need to conquer Constantinople, accept no substitutes]]
Cannons can be generally sorted into either one of three main categories: gun, howitzer, or mortar. The main difference between these weapons is in their ballistic qualities and ammunition. Gun projectiles travel at high velocities following a fairly flat trajectory, mortar projectiles travel at low velocities with steeply-arched trajectories, and howitzers are between the two.

The gun was historically used to batter down fortifications, pulverize infantry, or smash boats with solid shot. Most forms of premodern artillery were guns. Prior to the invention of reliable fuzes, Mortars and howitzers were just about the only means of safely firing explosive or incendiary ordinance at the enemy. Mortars, with their steep trajectories, were very useful in dropping bombs on the heads of enemy soldiers hiding behind hills and ramparts; Howitzers on the other hand, were (and still are) highly versatile pieces capable of handling solid and explosive shells, though with less efficiency and more difficulty than either guns or mortars.

The history of the cannon is written in blood-- in its first chapters often the blood of their users along with their targets. The first generations of cannons were crude affairs made by people with rudimentary metallurgy working things out by trial and error, with error often ending with the poor sods manning the gun getting a face full of iron shards, if not vaporized by the blast outright. This was made all the worse by the crude gunpowder available at the time and mishandling by inexperienced crews. In this initial period history Cannons were used for two purposes: small wall mounted defensive weapons in fortifications and large siege weapons to get through city walls. While they were powerful, cannons were simply too inaccurate in the early times, which was especially true for the heavier offensive guns. The big siege guns would usually be carted into a fixed location and be set there. Even if nothing went wrong they could only get off a couple shots an hour. Early cannons fired a variety of shot from spears to chiseled stone balls, though eventually cast iron balls became the most common as things progressed. While early cannons were dangerous and unreliable in terms of accuracy or lifespan, they were more easy to cast and maintain compared to the wood and rope used to make catapults and ballista; with the latter prone to warping and decay from humidity and weather.

Eventually the art of cannon making improved as time went on and things became more reliable as gunmakers and gun crews got more experienced in handling their weapons (partially as the stupid ones got their jimmies blown off) and tried and true designs were replicated. Cannons went from massive bombards hurling large boulders to smaller but more powerful pieces firing iron balls at higher velocity. As this happened, it prompted a change in fortification design. Tall and comparatively thin walls with high towers might be imposing and good at fending off attempts to scale them with ladders and siege towers, but they could not take that many salvos from a besieging enemy. Walls instead became shorter and thicker, reinforced with heavy earth ramparts to absorb the shock of cannonballs, with pointed battlements better suited for mounting defensive cannon and bouncing shells.

An even bigger development was the matter of cannons at sea. Though some people tried using catapults, ballistae, and the occasional flamethrower ([[Standard Template Construct|until the Byzantines forgot how they worked thanks to Emperors keeping the recipe and well...a coup and a couple of dead folks later, no one remembered where they put it.]]) as ship-mounted weapons, naval battles were up until this point settled by ramming or boarding actions. By the late 1400s potential of naval guns soon became obvious, damaging or destroying the wooden enemy ships outright, and navies began adapting their ship designs to carry guns. In 1571 the naval forces of the Holy League faced off against those of the Ottoman Empire off the coast of Greece at Lepanto. Though the Ottomans had a slight numerical advantage in terms of galleys and soldiers, [[Dakka|the Christians had more that twice as many cannons as well as better trained gun crews which could get off two shots for every volley]] the Ottomans could which was a big factor in the crushing defeat that the Ottomans suffered that day. Even so, the days of the galley were done and the age of sail had begun. Purely sail driven warships might not have the short range speed advantage or the shallow water maneuverability of a Galley, but where a galley would have ranks of rowers manning oars and a five or so frontal cannons a sailing ship would have a broadside with dozens of cannon.
[[image:24_pounder_gun.jpg|thumb|300px|left|A 24 pounder Long Gun from the age of Sail]]

From about 1400 to 1800 there were two main materials used to make cannons: bronze and iron.

Bronze was by far the preferred material. In Europe, there was a long tradition of [[Casting]] large metallic objects out of bronze, namely church bells and bronze statues. Additionally, unlike iron, bronze takes much less energy to recast, so guns were made out of whatever bronze material was left lying around. Next time you're in Europe, take a shot every time you find a church bell older than 200 years. It sucks as a drinking game, since you won't end up drunk at the end. Bronze guns can be made lighter than iron guns of a similar size, and were therefore more mobile on the battlefield. Furthermore, bronze has some give to it, which means you have some warning if the gun is going to blow up. When an iron gun is about to blow up, it doesn't give any warning when it's no longer safe, but a bronze one will bulge first, letting you know when you're starting to push your luck. The problem was that copper and tin were fairly rare and in short supply and the cannon makers were not the only ones who wanted the stuff, so the number of bronze guns you could make was limited.

Iron is of course one of the most common elements in the Earth's crust. That said, it took more fuel to smelt, it was much harder to melt and reforge, it took different and less-common craftsmen (since you couldn't just conscript the various bell-makers in your given nation), and if you didn't have a good metallurgist you would end up making a brittle gun that was liable to explode in your face. The earliest guns tended to be made out of iron staves welded and bound together by iron hoops like a barrel, though these could rarely withstand the strain of repeated firings. Casting was no less easier. Simply put, it's just much easier to make a big thing like a cannon out of bronze than iron. That said, the use of iron became more and more common as time went on, as the need for artillery increased and the requisite metallurgy and tooling improved.

Of course iron and bronze were not the only things we made cannons out of. In a pinch or on the cheap, you could use wood to make a cannon, but wooden guns need much thicker walls than a metal one, limiting the size and weight of your shot and how much powder you can use. Another material experimented with was copper bound with leather, first toyed with by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden against Poland. They were... less than successful, and replaced with 3-pound bronze guns.

You might ask why Gustavus decided to make a cannon out of leather in the first place? The answer is that as time went on and cannons became quicker firing and more accurate, people began wondering about other uses for cannons besides blasting apart castles and ships. Armies back then formed up their infantry into large, blocky formations of arquebusiers (men armed with pre-musket guns), halberdmen, swordsmen and pikemen. Against such foes, the old and massive castle-crackers were overkill. Beyond that they were still slow-firing and a massive pain in the butt to move around. What was needed against those targets were smaller, lighter, (a cannon that can shoot a 3 pound ball is still very heavy, though much lighter than one that shoots a 12 pound ball which is why Gustavus tried leather to make a light gun) guns that could quickly be moved into position, loaded and fired. Thus, bit by bit Gustavus developed the idea of Field Artillery for antipersonnel use and would end up attaching 12 or so field guns to each of his brigades (a military unit he himself invented) to support his infantry. This made Gustavus army devastatingly effective against the Catholic forces in the 30 years war. Just not with the leather cannons.

In any case by 1700 it was made clear that field artillery was a critical part of any army on the march. This development also meant that armies began to shift their tactics away from blockish formations but to long firing lines. You see, you can aim a cannon ball so that when it reaches the ground it bounces off of it in front of the formation so that it would fly though a block formation of thirty or more pikemen and musketeers at hip level, killing and maiming until it went out the other side. This was called the grazeing shot and warhammer fantasy players are likely well aware of how effective this could be on thick blocks of troops. The same would apply to a three man thick line of soldiers, though with only a tenth the casualties. A cannon ball can only kill people it hits or those nearby (the later due to the fact that [[Khorne|the bones of the people hit spray fragments everywhere]]). Explosive shells, which have a wider area of effect, had long been in use, but their effectiveness was always a little iffy, on account of requiring a v lit fuze in order to explode; they also couldn't be fired out of guns at very high velocity, since they'd also need thicker shell walls to withstand the stresses of firing, which reduces the power of the explosive payload.

Cannons changed substantially during the 19th century. Improvements in metallurgy and tooling not only made it possible to cheaply produce strong guns out of iron (and later steel), but to also give their barrels rifling, imparting greater range and accuracy to projectiles, as well as the ability to reload from the breech, which is a lot faster than trying to shove things down the barrel from the muzzle. You also had high explosives. Compared to regular old gunpowder (which is often called low explosive or black powder) high explosives were by nature much more powerful and very unstable. The latter quality however, made small quantities ideal for the creation of reliable shell fuzes and primers; when mixed with stabilizers, they also turned out to be much better propellants and explosive material than the old stuff. From now on, all forms of artillery could fire explosive shells with absurd range and power. You could shoot so far that you didn't even need to see your targets to hit them, though you needed spotters to tell you were to shoot. That said, there remained problems with accuracy. Which is why during World War One, they used weeks of saturating bombardments to try and destroy fortifications. Mostly, this didn't work: 1,738,000 shells were fired at the German lines before the battle of the Somme and enough Germans were left alive to kill 26,000 of the attacking British (Empire) and French on the first day. What was needed was a way to get a cannon in place to hit a target directly and allow the accurate destruction of fortifications. . . which lead of course to the invention of the [[tank]] and the modern infantry mortar to allow much closer range accurate fire support.

That pretty much leads us to today. The cannon is now generally only found in its purest form on [[Tank]]s, where high velocity solid shot is still one of the best ways to penetrate armour. They are also still in use on warships as dual-purpose artillery, though they rarely fire solid shot there. Mortars have generally been infantry-portable muzzleloading weapons, though a few are sufficiently massive to warrant mounting on vehicles and/or incorporating a breechloading mechanism. Howitzers are now technically gun-howitzers, incorporating aspects of both the gun and howitzer to rain fire on enemy positions many miles (or kilometres) away, though they are perfectly capable of murderizing things much closer, if the situation calls for it. For a time, it seemed that rockets and missiles would completely replace gun artillery, though the latter still has a significant niche in providing sustained, cost-efficient fire support. Most marked improvements to cannons in the twentieth century amount to either making them more portable by putting them on a tracked or wheeled vehicle. As for lethality, you now have one gun capable of doing the job of a dozen or more, courtesy of superior accuracy through computerized fire control systems, guidance systems, autoloaders, and the wonders of the atomic age.

In the future, cannons are likely to be replaced with high tech systems than small arms. Conventional propellants have reached the point where there is no room for further improvement, and so humanity's ongoing quest to hit things harder will require more exotic forms of propulsion. The railgun seems like the most promising candidate, using the power of two conductive rails to propel a solid metal dart at hypersonic (Mach 5+) speeds, imparting so much kinetic energy on contact that the need for an explosive payload is largely rendered [[moot]]. This has a number of advantages, key among which is that you no longer have to deal with your ammunition exploding. Laser weapons that can hit small explosive objects or UAVs with pinpoint accuracy are now in operational service with some militaries. However, much as is the case with small arms, such advanced weapons projects have yet to provide a system that can compete with the simple efficiency of a chemical explosion, as they are all dogged by problems relating to power requirements, heat generation, and durability, with few systems being reasonably portable or capable of firing more than a few shots before breaking down.