Designing the Spike Gun
Imagine a world were these became a thing instead of muskets.
Feel free to post better designs.
The Spike Gun
Lucas Kelly
Jack Bennett
That gun better be 18 if you're putting anything in that special hole
Camden Gutierrez
Taking bets on when the projectile begins to tumble. My money is on 30ft.
Blake Reed
How do you stop the spike from tumbling?
Change the spike and barrel so it spins while flying?
Nathaniel Gomez
Way, way, way shorter projectile that looks like a minie ball.
Tyler Garcia
so darts?
Bentley Ross
fin stabilized discarding sabot.
making it armor piercing is optional.
Liam Bennett
>heavy ass projectile with small charge
Whew imagine if the whole world had -30 IQ and thought spikes were cool
Camden Nguyen
if you tie some string to one end of the spike the arresting force of the string will keep the spike pointing in the opposite direction of the string.
Logan Cox
I bet a greenarrow fan made this.
Jaxson Sullivan
Early black powder weapons were literally bundles of arrows in a basket with a small charge.
Jackson Young
Evan Foster
Similar things have been tried back before the musket showed up.
Early firearms would at times fire bolts rather than bullets. These would be rather like crossbow bolts, but with the vanes set a bit further forward so you'd have a "tail" to stuff down the barrel. The vanes may also be metal to survive the launch, and you're also likely to find a metal plate over the butt to keep that from being blasted apart. Overall this appears to have faded from frequent use in the 15th century.
Now the vanes will of course limit the effective barrel length quite considerably, too much butt sticking out behind them on the bolt will render them ineffective yet that tail part is all the effective barrel you have. Thinning down the butt end to put some full-bore vanes there is an option, but I have a feeling those aren't going to do a great job at stabilizing anything. All of this is probably why the bolt fell out of favour and the bullet became the one thing people used.
Breech loading on the other hand was invented in the first half of the 15th century (probably early on in the period), and was somewhat common for cannons for perhaps a century. For handheld guns it seems to have been rather rare, but we do see examples of it. In both cases you'd have a removable chamber-piece, allowing you to quickly swap in pre-loaded chambers. The issue with breech loading is that it's obviously not as strong as a single piece design, while being more of a bother to create. So for artillery the single piece cast gun ended up reigning supreme, giving you an easily manufactured and very strong design. I suspect that handheld guns likewise were usually better off with a more solid design back in the days of very uneven powder quality. And if you're going to have to shove a long spike down the muzzle anyway the benefits of breech loading seem questionable here.
Pic: triple barrelled dart gun from the first half of the 16th century, an "executive toy" of Emperor Charles V.
Aiden Barnes
15th century breech loader with removable chamber piece.
Luke Reyes
Now for handheld guns this idea never really went away, but it was never something for mass produced battlefield weapons.
Jaxson Lewis
Fire bolt, ca 1330, meant to be launched with what counted as a cannon at the time. Metal vanes, metal butt plate, some wrapping to keep it snug in the muzzle and a cage like structure at the front filled with incendiary mixture.
Camden Gonzalez
And from the 1540's, which is probably the twilight years for this weapon.
Dominic Martinez
Fire bolts being launched with guns and crossbows, 1440's.
Jaxson Cooper
The earliest known European depiction of a firearm, 1326.
Carson Scott
look at the background vs the character - this art nigga really wanted to be a paneller for a mangaka
Connor Peterson
Ayden Adams
Rifle the barrel to a 1:1 twist and give the spike a shape more similar to a rifle bullet to engage the rifling better. This is going to ramp up pressures like a motherfucker, so you'd need a really heavy barrel to not kill yourself.
Jackson Perez
So a gunpowder harpoon gun?