Post by LIBERTE on Feb 7, 2013 12:43:42 GMT -5
With thanks to Chauvelin for this guide!
Please note that the real life French revolution was 40 years before the game setting and this isn't meant to be comprehensive, so corrections and additions are more than welcome. If there are questions, I'll be happy to try to answer them.
Period firearms fall into three general categories: handguns (pistols), long guns (rifles, shotguns, and muskets/musketoons), and artillery (cannons). All of them were muzzle-loading weapons, meaning gunpowder was dumped in the barrel, followed by a metal ball (sometimes other things, but usually a ball). A small mechanism with a flint (hence the term 'flintlock') was then used to strike a spark in the gunpowder, which ignited and sent the ball flying out of the barrel at a high rate of speed. They were all also single shot weapons, so if you wanted to fire again, you had to go through the whole process again. Experienced people could do so fairly quickly, but we're not talking modern day user-friendly rapid-fire weapons. Something to keep in mind if your character winds up in a gunfight, especially if he or she has no training.
Weapons in all three categories can be either smoothbore, meaning the inside of the barrel is smooth, or rifled, meaning the inside of the barrel has tiny grooves. For complicated reasons of physics that I won't go into, the rifled barrels are more accurate. At the time, however, they were also more expensive, slower, and more prone to the barrels getting gummed up.
Handguns are just what they sound like, guns designed to be held in one (or occasionally two) hands. The flintlock pistols of the period came in a huge variety of shapes, calibers, and sizes, so it's impossible to cover them all. The smallest could fit in a pocket (or a lady's muff, which isn't what it sounds like, it's a fur cylinder you put your hands in to keep them warm), the largest headed toward musket dimensions.
Long guns are, well, longer than handguns. They're designed to be braced against the shoulder when being fired, though they can be fired from the hip. Far and away the most common long gun of the period was the musket, usually the Charleville musket (musketoons were just shorter versions of that, think of them as sawed-off muskets). They were smoothbore and not especially accurate at much of any range, in open battle they were used for mass firing, where basically a hail of lead was sent at the enemy. The longer range rifles, which had rifled barrels (hence the name), were more specialized weapons and not used quite as much. They were far from unheard-of, though, and quite effective in trained hands. Shotguns were primarily for hunting.
Artillery of the time was cannons. They're probably not going to show up much in day to day play, but they'll factor into the revolution. Basically, they're ginormous guns that fire ginormous balls. Or, for crowd control, they might fire what's known as grapeshot. Grapeshot is a lot of smaller balls (picture a ginormous shotgun) and is for mauling people wholesale. If grapeshot gets used, matters have gotten very ugly indeed.
