You Want to Make a Fantasy World: Part XLIV - Musket
Nowadays we look at the musket as comically primitive, but it was a catastrophic change to the battlefield.
The first firearms were guns, direct-fire field artillery. They were fired with a lit matchcord hand-placed in the flashpan. Firearms were miniaturized to the point we got handgonnes. It still used matchcord, but at least could be carried around.
Firearms then progressed to the arquebus, and matchlocks, where the lit match was attached to a lock, this allowed you much greater aiming abilities. The arquebus was expanded to the musket for armour penetration.
During the entire time, the firing capabilities of hand-held firearms never caught up to the English Longbow, (not until WWII), but to train a longbowman, you need to start with his grandfather. Archers were rare, archers equivalent to the English longbowmen were vanishingly rare.
For much of history, if you wanted to have archers, you needed to find archers and earn their loyalty. And I do mean the archers already had to exist. They needed to have a tradition of archery. When you build your army, you can spend a few months training a half-decent swordsman, far, far less for pikemen. But the Archers have to already exist. Along with Horsemen. If you have 10,000 men, and none of them are archers, you have 0 archers. You could train them as light infantry and heavy infantry, but not horsemen, and not archers, (horsemen need to come with a horse).
Slingers fall into the archer category, and it takes a LOT of training.
The role firearms were replacing was not the bow, but the crossbow. Crossbows require far less training, but still extensive, and they are expensive and complicated to make. Firearms can also be mass produced, whereas crossbows are made by individual artisans, firearms were typically cast, (by bellmakers). Muzzleloader did not need a breach, so the actual firearm, the pressure bearing components, was just single tube. So, if you have the money, and raw resources, (and knowhow), you can now produce as much as you want, centrally.
Firearms could be given to every soldier, and every soldier could be trained to use them in relatively short time. As the T34 proved, quantity has a quality of it's own. Especially since the core of every army, since time immemorial, was the line infantry, whereby you don't have to hit an individual soldier, but a massive wall of them standing together.
The musket was longer for better armour penetration, to the point that armour was almost useless, which makes it much cheaper to equip your military. Allowing you to equip more soldiers.
And then something unheard of happened. It turns out you can take your metal stick, and put a pointy end on it, (bayonet), you can turn it into a pike.
Most archer units were 2/3 archer, and 1/3 pikemen or billmen or halberters, or something, for close protection. Most line infantry was 100% melee, in some form. The bayonet allowed every soldier to be both pikeman and archer. Every soldier you got could be kited with a firearm, trained to use the firearm, and be his own pikeman for protection. To the point every other type of infantry was removed, leaving only light firearm infantry and heavy firearm infantry. The firearm could be used by every - single - infantryman, regardless of how you wanted to use him.
You just effectively doubled the manpower of your military, all of which are now considered similar to the most elite military units. Military units you had to find and court, not train. And if you get a city of archers to agree to help you, their maximum strength might be 10,000, but they only agree to give you 800 archers. Traditionally, that would be an incredible addition to your army.
Now, you can get 10,000 raw recruits, and turn them into archer/pikemen.
This is how you get Roark's Drift
A supply depot turned into temporary hospital, that can defend itself against an army 28x it's size.
When the rifle arrived, it was inferior to the musket based off the tactics every army used, and the tactics every other army would use against them. It honestly took one asshole American, (compliment), to completely change the nature of warfare. Before this, rifles were slower to fire than muskets. When the primary enemy tactic is line infantry, slower called shots was not as important as rote volley fire. What they had to do was turn every rifleman into light infantry, which is very battlefield dependent, and relies massively upon individual initiative. It takes a lot longer to train this initiative than it does to train someone to use a musket, and with a rifle, you are aiming at an individual soldier, and not an army, and so requires much, much, much higher marksmanship.
The Most Gangster General Of The American Revolution - Daniel Morgan
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