Quote:
Originally Posted by vierasmarius
Oh, another thought. What sort of artillery will be used? Presumably there are large-scale ruby guns, but they sound like direct-fire beam weapons, preventing them from using high angle indirect fire. Without some gunpowder analog, the only artillery available would be trebuchets and catapults, though they may have magical payloads available.
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Oh, there is definitely gunpowder. Per the book, Azoth-7 diverged from Homeline during Isaac Newton's life, so conventional cannons are definitely a thing.
I'm thinking that most guns in my version of the setting will essentially be Napoleonic era rifles firing lead balls. The difference is that instead of black powder, the ball is propelled by an alchemical reaction that occurs when the gun's hammer strikes an alchemically sensitive plate. I'm also thinking that most of them will be repeating- I'm envisioning a tubular magazine running below the barrel, though I'm not really sure how the feed mechanism would work. Lever action seems like the way to go, since that seems to be what the earliest repeating rifles used. Again, the concept here is to make weapons that are roughly equivalent to TL 6 guns while emphasizing that most of the improvement over TL 5 weapons has come from innovations in alchemy rather than improved mechanical engineering.
As an aside, I think pistols will also be lever action repeaters, just because I think the idea of a character dual-wielding lever action pistols with the One Armed Bandit perk would be ridiculously cool.
If any of the resident gun and/or physics geeks can think of reasons why the above would be ridiculous or unfeasible, do please let me know =)