Old firearms are not functional, but a nice decorative element indeed, specially thoughts for collectors of these precious historical items. We found varied and beautiful models incredibly true to the originals.
Among those old firearms copies we can see cannons, machine guns, pistols, rifles and blunderbusses, many of them relate to Middle Age.
Cannon is a piece of artillery which uses gunpowder to shoot a bullet. Cannons have several calibres, they also can vary in reach, mobility, shot cadence, shot angle and fire power. We can affirm that some different kinds of cannons combine and balance those atributes in a range of degrees, depending on the use we give them in the battlefield. It was used for the first time in China.
Machine-gun is an automatic gun designed to shood a huge number of bullets from a chamber or an ammunition belt, which normally in a glimpse of an eye it can shoot a hundred of bullet per minute, due to its mechanism of automatic shoot. Machine guns are usually heavies, bulkies and they are set over a shaft. The modern use of this word is connected to automatic machine guns, which came before manual machine guns with some automatic details.
A pistol is a short gun fire designed to be handled and shot with only one hand, though it has not to be necessarily in that way; it also shoots short reach bullets. It also exists the automatic pistol which uses gas or compresseed air instead of using the gas produced by gunpowder combustion; this gun is rarely used to attack people because of the limited stop power related to the low depart speed low calibre munitions are shot. They are commonly used in sport shooting competions or for hunting.
Rifle is a word with anglosaxon origin used to design any long weapon, like carebines (either muzzle loader, breechloader, lever, lock, semiautomatic or assault) which has a cannon with a lightly scratched bore in ordr to stabilize the bullet during the shot. In fact, the bore is scratched to make the bullet come out at a very high speed, spinning around itself behaving like a gyroscope. We can produce a gyroscopic effect whic avoids the bullet to be diverted if crosswind is blowing.
Blunderbuss is a high calibre muzzle loader gun fire, with a short canno and usually bell-shaped. It´s a shotgun predecessor, adapted to militar service and defense. For Middle-Age existed a siege weapon, also calle blunderbuss or more frequently, trebuchet, is a kind of catapult unrelated to this specific firearm.
It consisted in huge lever that balanced over a point very close to one of their sides where there was hanging a huge weight. When this weight was released , it threw a projectile placed into a sling suspended in the other side. As it worked with a soft and progressive movement, the structure was never damaged; the opposite happened with the catapult.