""Amusettes" in 25/28mm?" Topic

The Perry offerings are great but a little light for my purpose. Are there any others out there?

Preferably with a somewhat more substantial musket as shown (being towed by a rather thin fllow) at the link below

link

Bluewillow?????

Are they somewhat of the same idea as the swivel used on warships?

Swivel-mounted guns on ships (and somtimes fortifications, specially oversea) were very small cannons of the 'Rostaing' size or below; often breech-loaders at least in French Navy. 'Amusettes' as depicted by de Saxe came from another tradition, that of oversized 'galley arquebuses / rampart musket' (oversized blunderbusses 'espingoles' in the Mediterranean): smaller bore, longer barrel, a musket-type wooden butt.

Given their weight they had generally to be rested on some support (the Perry one is at the lowest extremity of the range; the accompanying wheeled mantlet was the multi-purpose limber of the light 3 pdr – the 'lord Townshend's Light on Congreve carriage' -the 'butterfly'): recent painting and re-enactors show those used by the Hessian jaeger used with a 'fourquine', the old heavy matchlock rest of the late Renaissance (as also done for equivalent 'heavy jezzails' in Asia). De Saxe has his amusettes swivel-mounted on a light cart (guess it could be towed by a large dog, like the Belgian machin-guns of WW1, or even a goat): the 'Hessian amusette, 1740' on the linke dpage is indeed a poor reproduction of a plate in de Saxe's 'Rêveries': picture

De Saxe's amusette is indeed larger than the Perry's: I suspect a 54mm matchlock musket would do the job, if the butt is somewhat filed / sanded down to be in 30mm scale. The carriage could converted -from a 20mm farm cart, or the front part of a 20mm wagon, maybe? But if the two crewmen are large and muscular, you can be content with a traditional musket rest?

Willow will be able to answer all this , he is the Amysette expert around our way

Very light cannons and amusettes differ on two points: the ratio barrel length / bore and the fact that swivel-mounted very light cannons sometimes had a handle picture but never a musket-type butt -the swivel mounting prevented any recoil. Of course, true 'amusettes' swivel-mounted on a unmovable support did not need a butt either.
Then, since both types had the same role, confusion somtimes arose: the so-called 'amusette' of the Belgian Revolution link , given its short barrel, is a very, very light gun mounted on an improvised field carriage -clearly intended for street fighting -as is this 'true' amusette picture . The late 19th C. 'swivel gun' here link belongs to the 'amusette' tradition. If such heavy amusette is mounted on a heavy enough traditional carriage, there is no need for a wooden butt link

The light amusettes were probably used like modern heavy sniper rifles -picking up officers, pinning down gun crews…- while the heavy ones, if loaded with several musket bullets, were perhaps more similar in intent to modern machine-guns?

A possible variant: galley arquebuses were sometimes multibarrelled: can be obtained with, say 6 (35mm? 40mm?) firelock muskets: keep one intact, glue a rod (florist's wire?) under its barrel, then glue the barrels of the other 6 around it.

Cheap plastic toys could be a suitable source of muskets to be 'sacrificed' and 'amputated'.

I will have two types available before Christmas I hope.

cheers
matt

RAFM make a package of wall guns etc. that could be used if you have a carriage.

I look forward to those BW

Redoubt have some naval swivel guns that may fit the bit. However after converting a whole host of "Endkampf" oddballs for my WW2 army I am feeling a little lazy regarding scratch-building.

Thanks to all especially Abdul for your valuable comments.

I got my swivel guns from Dixons…Very cool…