Editing Firearm (section)

===Ye Olde Gonnes===
*Firelance: Oldest of the Oldschool guns, simple bamboo tubes stuffed with gunpowder and pebbles used in the Ten Kingdoms period and the Song Dynasty. One inaccurate spray of flaming fuck-off in close quarters, often tied to a spear.

*Handgonne: A catch-all term for a primitive gun without a lock that need their powder charges. Majority of these guns were handcannons, as in literal man-portable artillery pieces that had a 50/50 chance of either working or malfunctioning, the worst of which would be the gun exploding in the shooter's face.

*Arquebus - A basic matchlock Firearm. A note of clarification: 'Arquebus' and 'musket' are both used to describe firearms from this time and they are often used interchangeably. But if you want to be ''really'' technical in this period an Arquebus is a regular two handed matchlock firearm while a musket is a larger heavier gun firing a larger projectile, sometimes up to an inch in diameter. Latter (about 1700 onward) musket would refer to any muzzleloading long barreled handheld firearm used for mainly shooting solid shots. This is not too much of a big deal and is nothing to get mad about, but it is worth noting.

*Musket - Today, the musket is a catch-all term for all early smoothbore, shoulder-fired, muzzle-loaded firearms. Technically this isn't the case, the musket was an improved Arquebus, one of the earliest muzzle-loaded guns. However because of romanticism and literature; people who aren't acquainted with firearms will commonly refer to any muzzle-loaded long weapon as a musket (about the same reason why most people today refer to any automatic weapon as a machine gun). Muskets were inaccurate as people have yet to put serious research into firearm ballistics, lacked sights, generated a lot of smoke due to primitive gunpowder mixtures, and were temperamental to environmental conditions (rain will pretty much render a musket into an wet stick of wood), but still enjoyed a lot of popularity due to their lethality and ease of use compared to other man-portable ranged weapons at the time - and even their inaccuracy (they were after all, shooting at a bunch of guys standing shoulder-to-shoulder...) may have been more attributable to the generally-poor training given to the vast majority of soldiers of the time. Muskets were quickly phased out once rifles sufficiently improved (they co-existed for multiple decades, with rifles being reserved for light infantry who used their rifles to place accurate shots...at a fraction of the fire-rate of muskets who stayed in the hands of the line infantry, because the light infantry now had to shove the bullet in by the spiraled rifling) to do what a musket could do, but better. Muskets were categorized by what firing mechanism was used in the lock:
:*The earliest versions used matchlocks, which fired by poking a slow-burning fuse into the firing chamber. These were fairly unreliable and somewhat hazardous since you had a smouldering fuse close to the flashpan when you were reloading.
:*The next developed version was the wheel-lock, which used a quick rotation of a wheel against a pyrite to create sparks, making it the first self-igniting firearm. Due to it's price, it didn't replace the matchlock in most cases, only being used by cavalry, elite soldiers and gunpowder guards.
:* Flintlocks replaced matchlocks (itself an evolution of earlier snaplock, snaphance, miquelet lock, and doglock mechanisms) which ignited by generating sparks when a piece of flint struck the iron frizzen, igniting the powder in the flashpan. The flint would periodically break and need replacing, but it was still safer than a matchlock. British Soldiers of the era commonly nicknamed their Brown Bess Flintlock musket "Flinchlock", because the brief flash of fire going off right in your face from the powder igniting inevitably made you flinch, especially if you weren't used to it.
:**Fusils are early flintlocks (in fact "fusil" derives the Latin "foisil" , meaning a piece of flint), and like any early technology they were more expensive then there later derivatives. Therefore Fusils were given to elite higher trained troops, hence the english/french words 'fusileer' and 'fusillade'. The primary use of Fusils while they distinct from standard infantry weapons (matchlocks) were guarding artillery since unlike matchlocks, flintlocks like the Fusil do not produce so many sparks, a major concern around barrels of gunpowder common around artillery trains!
:** Snaplock uses a flint to strike against a frizzen but is different from the later flintlocks in that the frizzen and pan are separate pieces of the weapon while later flintlocks combine frizzen and the pancover into one, which made the later flintlocks much cheaper. The user also has to manually open the pancover before shooting, which can be a problem in rain. Like the wheel-lock, snaplock didn't manage to replace the matchlock and in fact, in many regards wheel-lock was considered superior despite coming first.
:** Snaphance is similar to a snaplock but it has an additional mechanism which opens the pancover automatically when pulling the trigger, making it a lot less likely that the gunpowder would get wet.
:* With the invention of the percussion cap came the Caplock, or Cap & Ball. Successfully outcompeted other newborn fulminate primer models (such as the scent-box/sliding lock and the pill/tube lock), this was the final evolution before breachloading became widespread. The cap would be fitted onto a tube to the firing chamber after the musket was loaded. Caplock firearms did not generate sparks in and of themselves; rather, they used a simple hammer to strike the cap, which would in turn ignite the powder in the firing chamber. Far more contained than flintlock, until the fully self-contained cartridge superseded it entirely. After the introduction of cartridges, it was fairly simple to convert existing caplock weapons by replacing the percussion cap tube with a firing pin, and adding a loading gate. Cap & Ball still sees use, even having a few entirely new designs created using the mechanism, due to many countries not considering them or anything prior as "firearms".

*Multi-barreled gun - In the olden days, people wanted more dakka launched at enemies, but things like magazines and self-loading weapons were still an alien idea during its time. So as an alternative people took a breach/muzzle-loaded firearm, slapped one or more barrels onto it, and reworked the trigger so they can fire more shots before needing to reload. This resulted in some particularly wacky times for guns. To this day, the only multi-barrel weapon still commonly used (disregarding military rifles with underslung grenade launchers, door breaching shotguns, or rotating barrel Gatling-style guns) is the double-barreled hunting shotgun. Some notable guns were volley guns called ribauldequin, which were a line of infantry dudes without most of the dudes. The problem was that this took very long to load, because you have one or two people ramming shit rather than 20 dudes each loading. So, that was a colossal fail in a long term artillery exchange, but quite effective for countering a charge when all you need is one volley to make mincemeat out of that cavalry coming at you.