this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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Experimentation is good, but I don't think this idea was destined to go anywhere.
The design is a more complicated way of firing chainshot. While chainshot is certainly going to be devastating to a person it hits, the primary historical use was for taking out masts and rigging on ships. That's what it was best at.
To take on infantry, canister of grape shot is more ideal and practical.
This idea is like in the modern day if somebody proposed an APFSDS firing gun to use against infantry, but also it has a slower rate of fire than current tank guns. Sure, it will kill the infantry it hits, but there isn't really a reason to pursue it.
Fun fact, modern anti-aircraft charges are just an unfolding wire version of chainshot.
I wonder if this actually would have been more effective than the usual in naval combat. It's more complicated than a single-bore cannon, but only slightly, and you guarantee the chain spreads out horizontally.
The down side of grape / canister shot is that the firing pattern is a circle. That means when shooting at a line of enemy soldiers a lot of the stuff is going to miss high or miss low.
The idea behind this invention was good -- basically turn a field gun into something that fired a line of death rather than a single point or a circle. If it had worked, it could have been much more devastating than a solid ball or a bunch of smaller balls with a circular firing pattern. But, I don't think 1800s tech was up to building a device that could reliably do what they wanted.