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Chase argues that guns were not particularly useful against these opponents. [38] Guns were supposedly problematic to deploy against nomads because of their size and slow speed, drawing out supply chains, and creating logistical challenges. Theoretically, the more mobile nomads took the initiative in sallying, retreating, and engaging at will.
The history of the firearm begins in 10th-century China, when tubes containing gunpowder projectiles were mounted on spears to make portable fire lances. [1] Over the following centuries, the design evolved into various types, including portable firearms such as flintlocks and blunderbusses , and fixed cannons, and by the 15th century the ...
The earliest gunpowder recipe and gunpowder weapons date to China's Song dynasty and the oldest extant guns appear in the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China. However, historian Tonio Andrade notes that there is a surprising scarcity of reliable evidence of firearms in Iran or Central Asia prior to the late 14th century.
Wheeled gun carriages became more commonplace by the end of the 15th century, and were more often cast in bronze, rather than banding iron sections together. [35] There were still the logistical problems both of transporting and of operating the cannon, and as many three dozen horses and oxen may have been required to move some of the great ...
Weiyuan General Cannon [3] (simplified Chinese: 威远将军炮; traditional Chinese: 威遠將軍炮), also known as "Weiyuan General Gun" or "Divine Invincible Great General Cannon", [4] was a large-caliber, short-barreled front-mounted mortar, [5] manufactured in the 29th year of Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty (1690).
Gunpowder and firearms explicitly for combating them on the sea were imported from China in 1374 [7] but the necessary expertise for production was still restricted by Chinese government policy. Local production did not begin until Ch'oe Mu-sŏn , having acquired the methods for purifying potassium nitrate from visiting Chinese merchants ...
Although the Xanadu Gun is the most precisely dated gun from the 13th century, other extant samples with approximate dating likely predate it. One candidate is the Heilongjiang hand cannon , discovered in 1970, and named after the province of its discovery, Heilongjiang, in northeastern China.
According to the Song dynasty military compendium Wujing Zongyao (published 1044), the hu dun pao is depicted as a traction trebuchet with a triangular frame. [1] It is operated by a dedicated corps of 70 haulers, who took turns pulling the ropes attached to the trebutchet arm to send the projectile, a 16-pound (7.3 kg) stone or bomb, into flight. [2]