Szkin's Art Corner

you guys should draw Feo Ul more often, they deserve more fanart. here i'll go first

Sauce : ArmurerieDuForestier.eu

A hand mortar, sometimes mistakingly called a cohorn in literature, is a shoulder-fired blackpowder weapon designed to launch fused grenades at medium range. It is a pretty straight-forward combination of a static mortar, an artillery piece designed in the Late Middle Age to launch explosive shells, and a firelock musket as developed in the Early Modern Era.

A bronze mortar ; note how thick and stout it is, as mortars were designed to handle large amount of propellant to lob heavy explosive shells over walls.

Generally hand mortars are constructed with a simple musket stock and lock, be it matchlock, wheellock, flintlock or other. Some examples have their stocks replaced by a long curved monopod meant to redirect recoil into the ground.

Fitted on either of these constructions was a large barrel, that had a powder chamber in the back before flaring up into a cup of a much larger diameter designed to accept the grenade. 

Art by yours truly.

Said projectile would be a metallic sphere filled with blackpowder and primed with a fuse - either a match or a plug. Although used throughout the Modern Era - read ‘from around the Italian Wars of the late 15th century to the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th- hand mortars were notoriously finicky and dangerous to use. They combined early grenades lit using open flames with firing mechanism that were not entirely reliable, meaning any misfire could potentially light your projectile while leaving it inside the weapon for about five seconds before both of those would explode along with the user’s arms, face and dignity. Hand mortars could be used as line throwers on boats and, especially ones made using pistol grips, were also commonly used to launch flares and other pyrotechnics on the battlefield. There is also a few recorded instances of them being used filled with lead shot as an extremely large shotgun.