this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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NonCredibleDefense
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Chain shot was a thing. Two cannonballs attached by a chain (or by a bar making the projectile look like a barbell) were used in naval combat to cut the rigging on the sails. They were fired out of a regular cannon and were one of several attempts to make attacking the rigging on ships more impactful.
I have no idea why they’d try a double barrel field gun for a solved problem. The ammo did have an issue where it caused damage to the barrel and was ridiculously inaccurate compared to ball shot, but I don’t see how this design solved that. The chain would have had to be six feet long at least for this gun and the ball would certainly run into it on the way out of the barrel.
I bet they wasted less money on this than the fabled Sgt. York M247. It was an experimental intelligent anti-aircraft gun that did things like lock targeting onto the spectator stand during the demo, or insisted that the latrine fan was a slow moving rotary aircraft.
So much this. Chainshot was highly effective at taking down masts and sails, effectively immobilizing the target. If you fired a chainshot towards the mast, chances were really high that each ball would hit 9n each side of the mast, with the chain tearing off the mast itself. And even if you missed and hit only sail, the chain would rip out a huge chunk of sail and any rigging it hit as well.
Source: I used to play Cutthroats a lot back in the day.