"Swivel guns and forts..." Topic

Hi,

I keep reading about the captured stores in forts in North America during the FIW and they always seem to have some amount of swivel guns. Are swivel guns just little hand cannons? Did they mount swivel guns on the fort walls? And lastly how accurate and effective were these things, is there any imperical evidence as to their range etc?

Thanks!

Hi

That can vary. A Wall Gun is, essentially, a gun to big for an individual to carry, hold, and fire without doing himself an injury.

Now, a set of numbers. We are talking smoothbore muskets here as a base line. In the period, various tests demonstrate the moa of the gun, essentially how "accurate" is in the range of 35 to 40. This means that a gun AIMED, clamped in a vice, loaded and fired, the round will hit RANDOMLY somewhere within a 3 foot radius of the aim point at 100 yards. Thus a man holding perfectly still has about a 35% chance of being hit with a "perfect" shot.

"Range"… whatever that means. While in a real sense a roundball is a high drag device and runs out of speed fairly quckly, it is still deadly well beyond the range of being able to hit something!

Wall guns that fire a bigger ball, due to "sectional density" will carry more energy further than a musket.

Thus, you would have a possible longer range effect, say shooting through a defense or something. Wall guns, however, are commonly used as big shotguns. Lots of smaller than bore bullets, nails and the like to spray the area at range. Thus, no more accurate at 100 yards than a musket, might be shooting, essentially a half dozen musket balls into the same circle upping the probability of a hit.

Range?

Effectively higher, but not absolutely.

Rocky

Essentially just big wall mounted shotguns to keep the hostiles away from the walls and gate. Shot would spread very quickly after leaving the barrel of one of these things. I would think an effective range against a massed target would be closer to 50 yards, although the balls would certainly travel further than that, but in a much more erratic pattern than say the balls from a volley of muskets.

Wallguns and swivel guns are two different things. the former are what rocky and 79thPA have described. the latter are "baby cannon", sometimes with a curved handle coming off the cascabel (hence the name "monkey tail" sometimes applied to this sort of piece). Swivels were usually used to fire canister or langridge as well.

link

scroll down to the second picture

Swivel guns were mounted on fort walls or in the bastions. They were common on the frontier especially for several reasons 1)Much easier to transport than proper artillery – hardly any roads and it must have been hell getting even a three pounder on or off a bateau 2)They were good enough to deter Indians (a lot of the blockhouses defending villages in the Mohawk Valley etc. only had swivels)3)You cant mount artillery without building a solid foundation, providing ramps etc, if you only had a timber structure swivels put little stress on it 4) They were cheap. They were mounted on most ships (on the quarterdeck rails). There was also a variant of the swivel used in the field called an amusette. OK it couldn't swivel but was about the same size. They seem to have had an effective range of 2000 paces and were sometimes used as counterbattery weapons. Hessian jaegers and the Queen's Rangers in the AWI had attached amusettes. De Saxe thought very highly of them.

* Blimey, that's an awful lot to read into one (allegedly) doctored photo

Do you do palm readings too?

Hmm, the text above was not from me. Wonder what happened.

V/R

Joe

I have a photo of the swivel gun at Ft. King George in lower Georgia that has my hand in front of it for size comparison. Of course I must qualify this reference by stating that my hand is of normal size, no huge mutated hands here. Unfortunatly, the photo is not on my laptop as I thought it was when I strted typing this, but it is at my house and I will post it when I get home.

Cheers
Bob

RAFM makes a pack of swivel guns/hand canons in there Frog and Indian War line

Indirectly related – as mentioned elsewhere, some 19th century Australian squatters (landholders) built miniature forts on 'their' properties, and some had an old ship's swivel gun loaded with improvised grape-shot, usually mounted on a tree-stump. Some may have combined the two.

A couple of years ago a I made a long-delayed pilgrimage to Ticonderoga and Crown Point. In the museum at Ticonderoga, I got a good look at a wall gun; a 91 caliber nasty thing with a horse-shoe/peg type of thing hanging from the bottom of it. It looked as though the lock mechanism could have belonged to a conventional musket, making the thing appear that much bigger.
Blue Jacket models has an assortment of "falconets" in different sizes ( not necessarily scales ) for reasonable a price: link