Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
Small arms are also useful for siege work and naval warfare. As most sieges were resolved by means of treachery, it is by no means to be despised to have a few blunderbusses and pistols ready for the scuffle for the gate once your pet traitor opens it for your men. And Nelson was shot from the rigging.
The expense of smokepowder strongly supports using it only in quality weapons, with more accuracy than at low TLs and skilled users. And to never use more powder than is needed. There are roles for cannon, but battering wooden ships with poor accuracy is probably not one of them.
Note also that the wasteful Giff weapons above were developed on another world, where normal black powder works, but have been brought to the campaign world and there loaded with the cheap kind of smokepowder (equivalent to good TL5 black powder, if much more expensive).
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No more useful then crossbows. Marginal gains from one situation are made up for by superiority of archery in another. However the ability to knock a breech in a wall in a few hours more then makes up for any powder expended, while the casualties inflicted by musketry are not thereby increased. Musketry is only useful if you can be profligate with powder and shot; it's purpose is to allow peasants to stand up to only requiring the hiring of enough peasants. Archery is still more effective on a man to man basis. The main problem is that archers take fifteen years to train and musketeers only six months. If powder is to rare to use that advantage then musketry is in fact not an option(sharpshooting is, which requires you to discover the rifle, which requires a motive to make small arms).
Cannon already have a motive. A few cannon, or indeed a few petards and some stout lads to plant them, can keep unruly robber barons from making trouble at sufficient economic cost. One or two breeches in a castle will end the siege quickly and that is more then enough reason for expending hundreds of pounds of firepowder. Musketry also expends hundreds of pounds with less increased effect per pound.