Matchlock firearms

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:32, topic:2095”]In practice I’d expect a musket to be quite innacurate compared to guns or even decent bows or crossbows. I don’t see a niche where it would be the best at anything either, but I also fail to see why that’s a problem. What it’s good at is being a freaking musket, it just is, make of it what you will.

We could have a whole range in the black-powder family, musket pistol, musket, blunderbuss, musket rifle are the ones I’m aware of, others may also be reaonable to add.

One thing I’m not sure of is ignition source, with the whole history of black powder weapons to chose from, the question is which has a good balance of manufacturability and reliability. I really don’t see sufficient benefit to having musket variants with different ignition systems, so I’d prefer to pick one and just stick with that for all of them.[/quote]

A smoothbore basic flintlock pistol or musket should hit like a truck and require no skill to use. Thus it would be just as good at low level as it is at high level, except possibly reload speed scaling with dexterity.

The power of the weapon would be determined entirely by the gun itself, and by the engineering ability of the maker. Making a really good flintlock with a rifled barrel, bayonet, maybe a sling to reduce carry volume, a reinforced barrel firing cartridges full of modern powder, or maybe two or three barrels or a break action like a double barreled shotgun, that should be a pretty good gun, which would also be sustainable if you wanted to use weaker ammo for it. But it should require excellent engineering ability and a lot of time and patience to make all that. Good constructed guns should be a big time investment, though they would be excellent training for engineering and firearms.

Overall, I think bows should be very physical skill based, because they rely entirely on strength and skill at archery, making them good for a physical-heavy character, they would also scale well with survival as that should tie into arrow crafting. Crossbows require some physical skills to use because they require good aim and good strength to draw quickly, but also benefit from good engineering ability, so they’re good for a balanced character, and some survival could be useful in crafting some bolts, but less so than bows. Gunpowder weapons require no physical ability, though good perception would help with the more accurate designs, they would be based entirely on your ability to get good materials to make guns and ammunition with, and your ability to use those materials. They’d scale very heavily with your ingenuity and intellectual abilities, they would not, however, have anything to do with survival, though they would also make you generally better with guns, which would tie into anyone hoping to use the modern firearms a lot as well, but who don’t want to use the precious modern ammo on everything. This would I think also fit well with the brainbox archetype, as firearms negate physical prowess, and their construction and maintenance would give them excellent skill training.

Basically I think you could have bows for your fantasy ranger type fellow. Crossbows for your combat pragmatist normal everyman fellow, using whatever works, and constructed firearms for your heavy science type fellows. They aesthetically fit the three archetypes I think, and give three quite distinct paths to ranged combat (which is to say, effective combat, a lot of the time).

Ignition sources, well, you’ve four choices really. Match, wheel, flint, and percussion.

Percussion is modern percussion caps. Stick a little sensitive material in the cartridge, whack it with a hammer, goes bang, gun shoots. Not much point using that one really as we already have it.

Match is easy, you have a simple lever with a tweezer on the end, stick a burning bit of string in there, pull the lever, it hits the pan and lights the gunpowder. Very simple but you need to keep replacing the string and it’s fiddly. Also doesn’t work in wet weather at all. Might be a bit too unreliable for anyone to want to use.

Flint is just a flint and steel, pull the lever and it strikes it. Much more reliable as it works better in wet weather, and wears down less. Flints should be… a little tricky to find without survival, though sporting good stores, cabins, LMOE shelters, maybe mansions, those should all have them around somewhere.

Wheellocks are odd, they’re most comparable to modern cigarette lighter with the spinny bit, they are kinda like flintlocks really but they use a wheel. I don’t really know why they invented them before regular flint and steel but apparently they did. Could get them off lighters quite easily. Old fashioned ones were… horrifyingly complicated. I really don’t get why they were used before flintlocks but they are an older design.

How about this, all guns are described as flintlocks, but you get the option to either break down a lighter, use a flint and steel kit (a modern survival tool that should be in sporting stores/LMOE shelters) or some natural flints + bits of steel to make the ignition mechanism. The gun doesn’t track exactly what you used, it just assumes you somehow managed to find something to strike sparks into the barrel.

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[quote=“Jotun, post:41, topic:2095”][quote=“Kevin Granade, post:32, topic:2095”]In practice I’d expect a musket to be quite innacurate compared to guns or even decent bows or crossbows. I don’t see a niche where it would be the best at anything either, but I also fail to see why that’s a problem. What it’s good at is being a freaking musket, it just is, make of it what you will.

One thing I’m not sure of is ignition source, with the whole history of black powder weapons to chose from, the question is which has a good balance of manufacturability and reliability. I really don’t see sufficient benefit to having musket variants with different ignition systems, so I’d prefer to pick one and just stick with that for all of them.[/quote]

A smoothbore basic flintlock pistol or musket should hit like a truck and require no skill to use. Thus it would be just as good at low level as it is at high level, except possibly reload speed scaling with dexterity.[/quote]
I’m not so sure of that, just like with a modern gun, the more accurately you can aim, and the more steadily you can fire, the better the results, because no matter how inaccurate the gun is, you can always add to it. The difference is that the degree of inaccuracy from the gun is larger, so the cost/benefit falls off faster, basically accuracy gives you a cap on effective range, and it might be the case that adding skill only marginally impacts effective range… which is probably what you meant. Hmm, it’s probably the case that skill will have a minimal impact on gun performance, so you’re right. Additionally the training from using one would be minimal because you can’t tell how much of the inaccuracy is from what you’re doing and from what the gun is contributing. Hmm, actually that might be a good way to limit firearm/archery practice in general, you can only get good feedback on your performance when the gun itself doesn’t make you miss, so more accurate guns would be helpful because you can get higher-quality feedback from them.

Totally agree, especially with crits being rather rare, the stats of the gun would dominate performance.

Oh man, I forgot about the upper tiers of smoothbore technology, at the highest levels you could have 2+ barrel monstrosities (look up “volley gun”) that should be able to stop a hulk.

Yea, it’s kind of ideal for the mechanically-oriented survivalist type.

[quote=“Jotun, post:41, topic:2095”] a bunch of stuff that’s totally reasonable, but I have no comment on.

Ignition sources, well, you’ve four choices really. Match, wheel, flint, and percussion.

Percussion is modern percussion caps. Stick a little sensitive material in the cartridge, whack it with a hammer, goes bang, gun shoots. Not much point using that one really as we already have it.

Match is easy, you have a simple lever with a tweezer on the end, stick a burning bit of string in there, pull the lever, it hits the pan and lights the gunpowder. Very simple but you need to keep replacing the string and it’s fiddly. Also doesn’t work in wet weather at all. Might be a bit too unreliable for anyone to want to use.

Flint is just a flint and steel, pull the lever and it strikes it. Much more reliable as it works better in wet weather, and wears down less. Flints should be… a little tricky to find without survival, though sporting good stores, cabins, LMOE shelters, maybe mansions, those should all have them around somewhere.

Wheellocks are odd, they’re most comparable to modern cigarette lighter with the spinny bit, they are kinda like flintlocks really but they use a wheel. I don’t really know why they invented them before regular flint and steel but apparently they did. Could get them off lighters quite easily. Old fashioned ones were… horrifyingly complicated. I really don’t get why they were used before flintlocks but they are an older design.

How about this, all guns are described as flintlocks, but you get the option to either break down a lighter, use a flint and steel kit (a modern survival tool that should be in sporting stores/LMOE shelters) or some natural flints + bits of steel to make the ignition mechanism. The gun doesn’t track exactly what you used, it just assumes you somehow managed to find something to strike sparks into the barrel.[/quote]
Hmm, yea, that’s a good approach, just drop the precussion and match locks, and have the ignition be some kind of flint-or-friction system, and you can assemble them from several different components. Possibly a generic “flintlock” item that would just be an ingredient in every black-powder weapon.

I believe the wheel locks would literally spin up to speed and grind against something to create hot sparks, which was an improvement over manually lighting it with an ember or something, but not by much. I think flint was actually an improvement in that it was more predictable, with a wheellock, there was a several-second period during which the gun could discharge, and you had to just hold it steady until it went off. With a flint lock, it might take a few tries to fire in some situations, but when it worked it would discharge a fairly predictable time after you pulled the trigger, which helps a LOT with aiming. Also a flintlock would require a single pull to cock, and a wheellock required winding, which could take a significant amount of time. Also wheellocks were large, heavy, and expensive.

Technically a modern lighter is a flintlock, it has a tiny bit of flint, and a steel I think wheel that rubs against it to make the sparks… you could have a hilarious gadget where butane (a lighter) is used as an accelerant to make flintlock ignition more reliable… Wow, if I were trying to make a black-powder gun for survival, I think that’s what I’d do…

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That all sounds good, using a simple pistol could benefit from some degree of aiming certainly, you could always be too bad to even point it at the enemy, but yeah after a short while you kinda stop being able to improve it by aiming because it won’t aim that well.

And yeah, ridiculous gun designs with half a dozen barrels or whatever would be awesome, probably very impractical and heavy as hell, maybe requiring a stick to balance it on (they used to do that with some long guns before they invented locks to fire them, because you had to hold them with one hand while you stuck a match in the gun yourself). But you could use them like artillery if you wanted to. I don’t know if I ever would but hell you have the ganz rustung, if you want to build field artillery I wouldn’t stop you. You could possibly treat extra barrels like a mod which just adds more volume and weight to the gun, and increases the magazine size by 1 every time you use it, maybe subtracting 1 or 2 from accuracy every time too but also decreasing recoil because it’s so heavy it hardly moves. On the note about gun rests by the way, a bipod would be a cool thing for guns in general, requiring a bit of setup time but letting you fire much more accurately.

I don’t know about wheellocks that much, honestly my confusion rests mostly in why they went with such a horribly complicated design that had to be built by a skilled locksmith when the flintlock is so much simpler and works better. According to wikipedia they still used a flint and steel arrangement, it’s just that the wheellock was like a lighter, and spun via a complex system of gears and widgets inside the mechanism, while a flintlock was just a sort of sprung hammer, which scraped it down a piece of steel.

But yeah a unified flintlock item might be worthwhile with variable construction methods. Bonus points if you allow it to be used like an improvement over the fire drill if just keep it around in your inventory, that way it’s not just a component for something else.

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The Wheellock was invented in 1517 in Nuremburg, while the flintlock wasn’t invented until supposedly the mid 17th century. The Flintlock phased out the Wheellock, which was already a prohibitively expensive weapon compared to the far less reliable and water-prone matchlock that it was supposed to replace. Compared to the matchlock, the wheellock had a more reliable firing mechanism, was less affected by wet weather, and was less stupid-prone. The slow match on the matchlock could be made useless by excessive moisture or put out by rain. Being exposed, a complete idiot could, in the process of reloading his matchlock, get powder from his powder horn on the lit match in the process of reloading, which would end predictably. The wheellock was one of the first firing mechanisms to use a flint, a self-igniting mechanism (inspired by the tinder boxes of the time), and later on (1530) a cover for the wheel was added to make it fire more reliably as well as more durable springs. Because of how expensive it was to make because of all the precision parts, it would find its ways into the hands of the nobility rather than a peasant. Once doglocks and later flintlocks were invented, which were nowhere near as expensive to make and maintain, wheellocks fell out of use. Basically the tech went “stick match into gun” → matchlock → wheellock → doglock → flintlock.

Anyway, I would imagine flintlock is generally what you’d want to use. After the flintlock you have percussion caps which are similar to the kinds of things you’d see today, so flintlock would pretty much be the cutoff point between ‘simple’ firearms and the more complicated stuff.

As for rifled muskets, I would love to see those, but as the sharpshooter sort of weapon; a variant and not a replacement for smoothbore firearms. Rifled weapons were a lot more accurate, which could be reflected in lower dispersion and requiring a great deal of either skill or perception/dexterity to achieve that precision, but were slower to reload than smoothbore muskets because of the very same rifling. There’s a little less you can do with it too because of the very same rifling. Meanwhile, smoothbores you could have a ball like your typical musket or you could make a shogun-esque blunderbuss with which you could use shot. Being faster to reload as well, you could have them be different enough that each would be good for different sorts of situations: Rifled musket being good for long range and high accuracy, Smoothbore musket having one or two or however many barrels you want that are faster to reload on an individual basis and probably do more damage, but are less accurate, and blunderbuss type muskets using shot, doing high damage but pretty much guaranteed to miss at any real range thanks to its dispersion. Blunderbuss and smoothbore would also be ‘easier’ to use, in that there’s less the shooter can do to fight the dispersion besides get closer, while rifled is much more skill/stat based when it comes to accuracy.

Those are my thoughts anyway. The more I think about it, the more I think having them in would be fun, especially making some of the crazier kinds of weapons envisioned in those days. Modern weapons would overshadow them, and bows would overshadow them too. However, bows and crossbows require strength, and modern weapon ammo is a non-renewable resource. My low strength super-genius character, assuming he never finds a gun store or armory, shouldn’t have to be stuck with a slingshot for the rest of his days. Muskets would be a good time for him.

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Rifled muskets could be less powerful (their ammo was generally a bit smaller I think) and as you say, slower to reload. They’d also need proper formed bullets rather than regular ball ammo, so the ammo would be a bit harder and slower to make.

So you could advance down the smoothbore line by sticking three barrels on it and maybe a set of speed loaders? (kind of like for a revolver, but for a multi-barrel musket/pistol?) and just fire masses of cheap ammo which hurts if it hits but often won’t. Or you could go along the rifle line and make something accurate and which you could even get headshots with sometimes, but which you can’t fire overly fast.

Pepperpot designs would be better indoors, but your rifle could be used outdoors to pick off stragglers.