How To Fire A Cannon Correctly

How To Fire A Cannon Correctly
As suggested by Amy Brewer, a cannon lover from London Town, student and business manager in Edinburgh. She shares her birthday with both her parents and she's an only child.

A cannon is a piece of artillery that fires a projectile. usually using gunpowder and sometimes other types of propellant.

Being a type of artillery, this originally meant, "any infantry armed with projectile weapons," but the term has changed to refer to, "engines of war" that operate by projectile of munitions beyond the range of effect of personal weapons.

Engines of war - although sounding modernist or futurist (they being obsessed with the production of machines to do things for humans - baking, manufacturing, killing), they have operated since antiquity. Machines of war have been used to break or circumnavigate city walls or fortifications in siege warfare.

It all started with battering rams and catapults or siege towers. The biggest being Demetrius Poliorcetes' Helepolis (lit. the Taker of Cities). Nine stories high (as big as ten double deckers stacked one on top of each other) and iron plated, it weighed 180 tonnes - requiring 3500 men to operate it. Demetrius was King of Macedon in 294 BC. He also made a battering ram 180 feet long - longer than a football pitch and taking 1,000 men to operate. Neither worked.

An early form of cannon is of course a cross bow - one of the earliest being the Gastraphetes in 285 BC. These were soon accompanied by oxybelles - giant cross bows that fire giant spikes.

Later on came gun powder - its first recorded use on January 28th 1132 - a Thursday (Jan 28th is also the birthday of Ronnie Scott, Acker Bilk, Robert Wyatt, Nicolas Sarkozy and Elijah Wood). On this Thursday General Han Shizhong of the Song Dynasty used it against the city of Fujian. He won.

It caught on in Europe big time during the Hundred Years War (actually 116 years) (actually 7 wears - the Edwardian War, Caroline War, Lancastrian war, Breton war of succession, Castilian Civil War, the catchily named 1383-1385 war and the War of Two Peters).

In case you were wondering the two Peters were -of Castille and -of Aragon. They were fighting over Castille and fighting over Aragon. They both wanted each other's crown. Castille won, but both Peters ended up looking like a couple of Dicks.

Anyway, during the (false) 100 Year War, cannons got powerful enough to - get this - Knock Down Roofs. Up until 1430 most cannons were static, unweildy and inaccurate. They were mainly used for defence. In fact Joan of Arc came a cropper against them here on British soil.

Cannons, or bombards as they're currently known in this period are muzzle loaded tubes that fire stone or metal balls. Or just any old rubbish lying around. Bombard is from the French form of a Greek word meaning a humming noise.

Some notable examples from the time period include the improbably named Mons Meg - 4 metres long and fired cannon balls half a metre in diameter. Or the more improbably named Philip The Good. There's the Pumhart von Steyr (Steyr by name, slayr by nature) - an 8 tonne, 2.5 metre party popper - shaped exactly like the irritating festive decoration. It fired 700kg, 80cm balls.  Then there's Mad Meg, Lazy Mette, Lazy Grette and the Grose Bosche, which in German means Big Gun. How very German indeed.

These were the Superguns - flinging their huge big balls around and extremely dangerous to know. The balls were bigger than 50 centimetres in diameter and took so much powder to fire they'd often simply explode on the spot and kill the irreplacable gun crew. Sometimes they even took out their own Kings - as James II - a big advocate what would nowadays be the NRA - found out when on the 31st August 1460 (a Friday) his cannon exploded and killed him.

Cannons got smallers and lighter and were used on both sides of the war and as the 15th Century dawns the word "cannon" passes frequently into use.

The world cannon is from the Italian "Cannone" meaning "Large Tube" (calm it, you at the back). The plural, "cannons" is a recent Americanism, where before the plural of a cannon was cannon.

So now we get to the crux of the subject - How To Fire A Cannon Correctly.

Firstly, for muzzle-loading cannons

1. If just fired you'd cover the air vent to choke the barrel and suffocate any sparks
2. Insert a damp sponge to swab the barrel and clear out hot debris. This might seem like a waste of time but in a REAL WAR SITUATION its necessary and improves accuracy.
3. Insert the priming charge after removing it from its paper bag. If your cannon has a flash pan - fill that first. Then the propellant charge goes in.
4. Ram the charge into place using a ramrod. 
5. Add wadding and ramrod to hold the charge in place.
6. Add the projectile.
7. Use more wadding and ramrodding to hold the projectile in place, this also creates a seal to prevent gaseous escape.
8. Insert priming fire or fuse after removing the air vent cover.
9. Aim cannon taking into account distance, trajectory, slant range, inclination angle, horizontal distance and the formula Rs=√x²+y² = √( (2v²cos²θ)/g) ( (sinθ/cosθ) - m) + ((m(2v²cos²θ)/g) (sinθ/cosθ)-m) etc...
10. Light fuse
11. Run

Rifling

Rifling is measured by the formula T =((CD²)/L x √(((SG)/10.9))) where T = twist, C = either 150 or 180, D = bullet diameter, L= bullet length, SG = specific gravity of bullet and SG =(Vps) / (Vpw) where v = volume , p = density, s=sample and w=water and was developed to help bullets and cannon balls go faster.

Pachelbel's Cannon

Just in case you came to this page looking for Pachelbel's Cnnon (or Kanon und Gigue fur drei violinen mit Generalbass) - a German baroque pirece written in 1694 but undiscovered and unpublished until 1919. Thought to be written for JC (not JS) Bach's wedding.

It's three violins playing the same piece on top of each other but starting at different times over a bass playing the same two bars over and over.

Although due to the way it slots together it actually creates a pattern of Dmaj tonic, A Maj dominant, Bmin submediant, Dmaj 1st inversion, G maj subdominant, Dmaj tonic, Gmaj subdominant and Amaj dominant. Also known as the plagal sequence.