Explosive shells were invented 600 years ago, or even earlier, but they were generally unpopular because of the high error rate in practical use. As a result, in the history of ancient artillery combat for five or six hundred years, 90% of the time, it is still customary to use ordinary projectiles with solid cast iron balls and a large amount of iron sand. "Long-range" strikes at a distance of 2 km rely on the kinetic energy destruction effect of solid iron balls, while fan kills at close targets mainly rely on scattered iron sand. The actual combat effect is immediate and very effective, but there are always people who fantasize that they can produce a secondary explosion effect of a solid iron ball that is projected 2 kilometers away, and that would be perfect. But as already said, it is very easy to make mistakes by manually igniting the shell itself and then firing it a second time. Either it explodes first in the barrel of the cannon, or it explodes in mid-air, and it is difficult to accurately grasp the timing of the immediate explosion when it hits. Even if everything is a perfect hit, there is an explosive power,
The big problem of insufficiency. In different countries in history, there have been experiments with hollow cast iron shells, filled with black powder, and then specially left a firing hole inserted into the delay fuse, and then the side of the explosive projectile with a fuse and a firing hole was loaded towards the black powder in the breech. Or simply before loading into the breech, the propellant and the explosive shell are made into a whole, and they are loaded from the muzzle into the bore together, which is the most primitive breech full explosive fire shell. The propellant was packed in a moisture-proof paper tube, and the exploding spherical cast iron shells were placed in the front. After loading the breech, the artilleryman inserts a long steel cone at the fire door of the gun to pierce the side of the cartridge propellant, and then fills the firing fuse to prepare for detonation at any time. The fuse of the shell itself is automatically ignited at the moment of firing. In this way, in principle, there will be no mistake that the shell is detonated in advance before it is fired, and the principle of detonation is similar to that of today's two-kick detonation. But this has been substantially,
The improved cast-iron explosive projectile, which is still very primitive and equally unstable, is still an old problem of an overly simple fuse system. As a result, until the outbreak of the Crimean War in the early 1850s, more than 80% of the large number of "shells" fired intensively on the battlefield were still solid iron balls. The real "flowering shell" was invented together with the modern rifling and cylindrical cone-shell. The most typical is the Armstrong breech gun with the matching flowering shell. The rifling combined with the unconventional spherical shell was the direct cause of the projectile's maximum range eventually exceeding the historical limit of 2.5 km, a factor that predated the invention of the new smokeless nitrocellulose propellant. The rifling can bring a stable spin effect to the shell, the cylindrical cones can reduce the air resistance, and the shell itself has a stable forward direction, so the modern and reliable new fuse was also invented.
This type of fuze is an inertial fuse that is activated by the huge kinetic energy at the moment of ejection. Moreover, according to the distance of the target, the explosion time difference between the coordination distance itself can be set in advance to ensure that the explosion occurs exactly at the moment when the shell hits the target. The fuse is unplugged before firing and then loaded from the breech. At this time, the shells and detonation technology for modern breech guns were almost perfect, but the only thing that had not yet been invented at the same time was the more powerful nitrocellulose propellant and explosives. Therefore, the Armstrong breech gun and the accompanying cylindrical cone-like flowering explosion bomb have been the final swan song in the history of the use of black powder for more than 600 years. For the 30 years between the 1860s and the 1890s, it was a first-class "modern" weapon on the battlefield. The Hunan army was able to exterminate the Taiping army, and until it later recovered the entire northwest, the Armstrong flowering cannon introduced at a high price was the most convenient weapon of great destruction!