Records: howitzers

## **Explosive Discoveries**

Prince Richard hit Bordeaux hard, bringing the Royal Academy with him – along with the Order of Merlin, the Royal Company and so on. The least visible effort was the hardest hitting: the same effort that brought the Royal Army cannons now brought a hybrid to Aquitaine: *howitzers.*

This form of artillery was squarely between a cannon and a mortar, both of which were already deployed by the English Royal Arms. With a smaller barrel and less powder than a cannon, but considerably larger than a mortar, it was designed for indirect fire – arcing a shot up and down upon a target's head.

But that wasn't all.

Richard had started with standard cannons and made them with interchangeable barrels. A cannon crew could swap from direct-fire to the howitzer mode in five minutes. This allowed much larger indirect fire, much farther.

There was far more, though.

### **Fuzing**

The English hadn't yet used their mortars in their deadliest capacity, though loaded with frangible shot, it was no doubt lethal. What Richard pushed through was fuzing: the engineering that allowed explosive ammunition.

Solid cannonballs (“shot”) did not need a fuse, but hollow balls (“shells”) filled with something, such as gunpowder to fragment the ball, needed a fuse, either impact (percussion) or time. Percussion fuses with a spherical projectile presented a challenge because there was no way of ensuring that the impact mechanism hit the target. Therefore shells needed a timed artillery fuze that was ignited before or during firing and burnt until the shell reached its target.

Early reports of shells include Venetian use at Jadra, Croatia, in 1376 and shells with fuses at the 1421 siege of St Boniface in Corsica. These were two hollowed hemispheres of stone or bronze held together by an iron hoop.

Written evidence for early explosive shells in China appears in the early Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) Chinese military manual Huolongjing, compiled by Jiao Yu (fl. 14th to early 15th century) and Liu Ji (1311–1375) sometime before the latter's death, a preface added by Jiao in 1412. As described in their book, these hollow, gunpowder-packed shells were made of cast iron.

While the concept was out, its application was in its earliest prototype stages. Using timed fuzes for newly-introduced mortars and percussion fuzes for newly-introduced rifled howitzer cannons. The percussion relies on an oblong cannon shot with rear-fins attached, inspired by the arrows on now-obsolete English longbows, to ensure nose-forward flight. In this way, the English longbow lived on.

For Aquitaine's long-term defense, however, the Palatine Coronet was already half-done creating an all-magic version of this gunpowder weapon.

### **The Magical Analogues…**

Creating a magical analogue needed certain key elements:

* Battlefield durable
* Easily transported
* Accurate
* Operable under harsh conditions

There were a thousand ways it could be implemented, each with tradeoffs. The two finalists was an all-magic system that used no ammunition but burned through magic crystals at a fantastic rate or a system that could use simple ammunition (local rocks were fine), but then varied on the yield and the timing of the firing based on that ammunition.

Either way, the payload from arcane howitzers arced with a visible flare and detonated in a plasma ball that brought both heat and shockwave. It was destruction unlike the world had witnessed (thought the all-magic version was cleaner, the ammunition version was more fiery).

Prince Rick created and deployed both, running them against each other and possibly looking to keep both depending on how their battlefield logistics and psychology played out.

## **The Aquitaine Adaptation**

Guiding the weapons through development was a regret for Richard – but the psychological effect at Poitiers had been more devastating than the casualties themselves. Mere chemistry and mechanics, it may as well have been magic to the combined witnesses. More than the blood it spilled, the blood it chilled had prevented the death of thousands more.

At the Battle of Poitiers, Aquitaine turned the concept of shock and awe on its head in a form of champion combat between Prince Richard and Duke Louis of Anjou. Richard flew his own "Oriflamme" in a signal he had no desire to ransom prisoners. He had no desire to shed the blood of a country for the claims of the entitled few.

Richard himself had a fuze, and it was starting to show how short it could be. He wasn't motivated by personal titles and lands. In some respects, that made him far, *far* more dangerous. As dangerous, in a political sense, as the shells he'd just guided through to the Arms of Aquitaine.