VolkStudio Blog

…a heavy musket was like an RPG. It didn’t give a guarantee of a win, but required armor to get so heavy as to be physically nonviable and prohibitively expensive.

A real musketeer would have had a sword or a knife, wooden cases for pre-rolled paper cartridges (“Twelve Apostles”), and some sort of a helmet and body armor. However, even a peasant wench could have been trained to handle a musket or an arquebus well enough to pose a deadly threat to an armored knight, something that the same peasant with a spear or a poleax would not have been able to do nearly as effectively.

Using the forked rest as a melee weapon is definitely a desperation move. It’s better to have numerous friends with pikes nearby. Having armor would also be a big plus.

This rifle would pretty much guarantee a tag out to 400 yards. With a little bit of effort, 600 isn’t out of question. Yet the journey to the repeating rifle started with the matchlock musket.