Why did muskets immediately become ubiquitous in warfare even at the time when they were more unwieldy...

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They were around for several centuries before they replaced bows, crossbows, polearms etc. But its because they were fairly simple to operate and catching a volley in the face at close range is rather traumatizing.

Depends a lot on the ammo and sights.
They're fundamentally no more limited in accuracy than a modern smoothbore shotgun with slugs, and those are commonly considered good to 100 yards on a man-size target.

But they generally did not have sights (not even a front bead), and were used with round ball rather than elongated, drag-stabilized bullets, which tend to reduce accuracy.
But 20 feet? Sure, that's no problem.

Because training a bowman for a bow that competes with an arquebus or culverin takes a lifetime.

The last generation of crossbow was as slow to reload, more awkward, and lacked the raw firepower of matchlocks.

Saltpeter and slow matches are fairly expensive to be fair.

It scared horses and punched through plate armor at greater distances.

>like, i can still plug a guy from twenty feet reliably right?
You definitely can.
youtube.com/watch?v=X1WwQkeDuXs
It's the reloading that'll get ya, but thankfully they came up with volley firing in ranks to counteract that drawback.

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Is there anything more terrifying than being in the front ranks during a push of pike?

youtube.com/watch?v=wAcoekA2Zs8

Psss because that's inacurate.
Muskets and pistols saw extensive use in hunting for nobles for decades before they became a staple of battle. The first firearms to take the field were accurate at skirmishing ranges, and thus could be relied on to fill a nitch. During the first major deployment of field firearms during the Hussites wars, for all their faults, they proved surprisingly good at blunting Calvary charges, particularly heavy Calvary as they could still penetrate the armor of the time. Mix in some arquebus with a spear line, decent positioning for good matter, and suddenly your little infantry core was invulnerable to a charge on top of being able to screen the enemy knights. This was massive, and led to the arquebus being widespread in western warfare almost immediately, not as the main force but as just a useful tool to keep around.
Over time there were minor improvements, but firearms didn't improve much or become that much more widespread, untill the next breakthrough. Either the French, Germans, or Dutch where the first to come up with it, but they all adapted around the same time. Some absolute mad lad was able to put two and two together, he realized that pistols were just sort barrled undersized arquebus/muskets, and that firearms were excellent at killing Calvary. A proper musket couldn't be carried and fired from horseback, and they would greatly struggle to reload, but pistols had been designed for the job. Initially a hunting weapon designed for horseback run downs, by simply upgrading the caliber into a "heavy pistol" you could use them to reliably kill other armored forces. Not only that but the could kill from around 25ft! Which doesn't sound impressive till you realize the main Calvary weapon was still the lance. Charging in, delivering 1 or 2 vollys before charging out agian/chasing the routed force was not only far safer than lance charges, it was also more time effective. 1/2

A regiment wealthy enough to afford them could carry many pistols. Meaning the force may be able to carry off 6-8 charge's before having to fall back and reload, meanwhile a knight can carry maybe 1 heavy lance or 2 light ones before needing to retreat entirely to rearm. The new middle class also played a part in this, most that could would fire from horseback with middling gear, religated to light Calvary. Pistol combat let them go toe to toe with heavier knights a lot better, they'd still lose the one on one, but it was enough threat in mass to keep heavy cav close to their infantry, who still had the muskets to fend off enemy Calvary from a distance. The pistol became a noble weapon, and saw substantial development during this time. Wheellock was invented, followed shortly by its more influential cus flintlock. Flintlock was cheep enough to make the jump back to infantry which needed increased firepower to fend off pistol Cav and the rest is 15th-17th century history.

Leading a charge against a fortified position that's expecting you.

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Early guns could go through armor

From historical accounts, the survival rate of the first rank in a push of pike was somewhere around ~5%

Training as others have stated.

Bowman started training at very early ages. All said and done you are looking at 10-15 years to get a competent set of archers.

With firearms, you draft a bunch of peasants from the villages. Give them a few weeks of training and now they can effectively fight knights and bowman that have decades of training. Why wouldn't you raise an Army of rifleman?

I wonder how many cuckolded faggits attempted to cling to their longbows and use the mental cope of “muh honor” to deal with the fact his very identity was becoming obsolete

Part of it was a general decline in the skill at archery among the yeomanry (who made up the long bowmen) over about two centuries. The longbowmen who coexisted with the arquebus had markedly declined from the English longbow's heyday.

>easier to train
>gun and ammo is more portable than bow and arrows
>gunpowder can be hard to produce but making bullets is extremely simple
>far more force

By the time "whyte" (head to toe full plate) armor came around, no longbow could reliably go through it anymore, while arbalests powerful enough to do so were fuckhueg and very slow to reload (needed cranequins, windlasses etc. to wind up).
Also firearms ignored the physical state of their owner, so a guy wracked with dysentery could let off shots about as quickly as a completely healthy soldier.

because they're WAY more aesthetic, you tasteless plebeian

They didn't. Not immediately, anyhow. In less wealthy nations like Sweden and the Netherlands where levies would just sorta show up with whatever arms they had on hand and then be sorted into a functional army after the fact, firearms and crossbows were used side by side for a while up until around the beginning of the 17th century. In these nations missile armed infantry tended to be what made up the majority of combatants with the majority of exceptions being specifically mandated to wield pikes.

old slow matches were literally a piece of string drenched in piss

You’re wrong because modern slugs are rifled and engineered to be aerodynamic. I’d assume they would be less accurate than that.

The "rifling" does literally nothing for accuracy. It's just crush space so that bubba doesn't blow up his bird gun shooting a slug that's larger than the choke.

That's fucking wrong, though

youtu.be/jRPo19DWlZY

bowvsmusket.com
Tldr muskets have longer range (yeah really), hit harder, penetrate armour, are cheaper than bows or crossbows. They still require lots of training though.

Don't mind me asking but why are springs necessary in matchlocks again?

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You’d probably hit a man at 100 feet 9 times out of 10

They were used to scare enemy horses..?

Polearms can do that too. Even cheaper if they were pikes.

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Here’s a good documentary to start to give an idea

youtu.be/z12ombr-y3c
T.i’m on The shitter

Problem was that balls often weren't fit correctly to the bore due to the limits in technology at the time. This meant that balls would often bounce around when being fired, leading to less accuracy.

elon msuket

>wrong
How so? Nothing stops you from using a modern slug design in a musket. That's not a fundamental limit of the gun, it's an ammo issue.

The rifling does nothing"for stabilty (it's still a drag-stabilized projectile), but not quite "nothing" for accuracy..
The very slow rotation it imparts (about 1 in 1000") averages out the effect of manufacturing imperfections.Rather than arcing left or right and getting increasingly far off course, an imperfect slug will move in a spiral, coming more-or-less back on target after one turn, maybe 30 yards or so.
At 100 yards or more, continually veering further and further off course vs looping in a spiral is a pretty big difference. But at 20 feet (a fraction of a turn) there's next to no difference.

Yes but a line of pollarms support be fire is more effective than each put together and able to check enemy Calvary trying to move around stationary pike blocks.

You still want the act of fireing, hense a spring loaded slow match.

Both the Japs at the introduction of the musket and the Koreans during the Imjin War remarked on the range/accuracy and stopping power of the musket. Given that both had archery central to their warfare at the time, that says a lot. The Imjin War where musketless Koreans met Jap-wielding muskets is particularly illustrative. There was no doubt on either side that musketry was superior to archery. It should also be noted that muskets were not the first firearms used in Europe, and that they underwent a long evolution before they fully replaced other missile weapons. Muskets did not just come out of nowhere and immediately replace everything, and prior to their ubiquity muskets referred to unwieldy, long and powerful small arms that required a rest, and were clearly designed to deal with heavy cavalry.

they're not necessary, as the trigger is often more like a lever attached directly to the "hammer" /wick holder, but the spring would help to retract the hammer/ reset the trigger.

>Jap-wielding muskets

kek

I'm not at all an expert on this so take it with a grain of salt. My understanding is that it was a mix of training being easy & firearms being able to defeat plenty, maybe even most, armor with regularity. I do know that plate caught up at some point and while I'm sure there was some back & forth I do believe that plate retained supremacy for a time. Then firearms got to the point where they could regularly defeat plate and people moved away from plate but still wore a degree of armor for a time because melee was still a thing although progressively less so.

how would this compare against crossbow or bow accuracy?

"Snap matchlocks" are a specific type that have a spring-loaded wick holder, most matchlocks really just have the trigger as a lever like said. Japanese matchlocks are most always snap matchlocks because the guns they got from the Portuguese and based theirs off of were that kind