How far back in time can we go?
 

Firearms underwent a loooonngg phase of being big, unwieldy, and unreliable as man-portable weapons before they became more user-friendly. I noticed we have pages for the Jezail musket and wheellock/matchlock guns. Would even earlier "man-portable cannons" (AKA "handgonnes") be permissible for this wiki or not?

One such piece of media featuring these primitive firearms (aside from the infamous "bamboo and blackpowder cannon" from the original Star Trek series episode titled "Arena") is the video game War of the Roses, a third-person medieval combat game focussing on the titular conflict. You can watch a video of them in action.

The question is, if I were to make a page about this game, would the handgonnes (and similar "hand cannons") count? I'm sure there are plenty of historical dramas (most likely China-focussed) that might be included if the gates were opened on that.

We don't allow improvised firearms, so Kirk's cannon from "Arena" is out.

I think the earliest weapon we have is the matchlock musket, and I'm okay with that. As with flintlocks and wheellocks, since all we're doing is IDing the type, it's a bit pointless.

Didn't Mythbusters check that out once, concluding that it would have been better used as an oversized hand grenade (the "barrel" having too little strength to focus the explosion to propel a projectile effectively)?

But we still have those pages for these "old-school" firearms. If some of us could make "enough" (your call) pages featuring these old "Hand Cannons," would that merit inclusion on the wiki?

Wheellock and matchlock weapons can be very easily be mistaken by the normal observer for a more modern flintlock or caplock weapon so it is worth listing them when they appear in something.

TBH I'm not crazy about the generic wheellock and matchlock pages as these weapons tend to pre-date standardisation and arsenal production so they cannot be classified into specific types (even the terms like "musket" "carbine" and "arquebus" are non standard and change depending on time, place and random whim), and it would be even worse with handgonnes. Flintlock weapons were the first weapons that were mass produced and can be classified (and therefore stand and chance of being identified by us) as a specific model.

Another thing to bear in mind, is that if the media includes a realistic depiction of a handgonne, then it likely predates modern shoulder arms so would have no other eligible weapons, making inclusion of it questionable in the first place.

I'm starting to understand.

If we want to talk about Categories that are too inclusive, I already brought up the "Carbine" category since it refers solely to barrel length and has nothing whatsoever to do with cartridge or firing modes. But we could classify Handgonnes (once enough pieces of media featuring them had pages on the wiki) according to where they are being depicted in, such as Asian and European to start.

We have a page for Akira Kurosawa's Ran, which only had the pre-modern Tanegashima matchlock. Anyway, the War of the Roses game I mentioned earlier has some fortification-mounted cannons that aren't usable by players that could also be included in a potential page for that game.

I only made the Ran page because you created the tanemashima page with its red link.

I think starting a page with a single generic entry like "Matchlock Musket" or "Tanegashima" would be against the rules. They state that:
With generic classes of pre-standardisation firearms like this the weapon is not identifiable. It is akin to creating a page where someone uses a "rifle". There are some cases where an exception could be made, such as it being part of a series of films or if it is used by an actor who has other pages on the wiki, but in the case of a game that only has one firearm that cannot be identified as anything but a general class and fortification mounted cannons (which again are unidentifiable and ineligible on their own anyway) I don't think it is worth making a page for it.

My thanks once again. But I put Ran there because it was the only movie I could think of that had the Tanegashima. As it turned out, I clearly hadn't watched enough historical Japanese cinema. Oh well, Ran was clearly a "significant motion picture" anyway. If could afford it, I would get a console-compatible screen capture device and buy some more titles to fill out the red entries on the Tanegashima page.

Well, the Tanegashima was pretty standardized for its time. The Japanese did not export the weapon either (it was a major military asset of theirs, first in intra-national conflict, and then again when it came time to invade Korea during the Imjin War), so it behooved the Japanese to keep it to themselves. From what I can tell, unlike their European and American counterparts, they stuck with the Tanegashima for a long time instead of fiddling with and improving the design or adopting new firearm technologies (such as wheellock and flintlock guns) until their 19th Century intra-national Boshin war, where they imported foreign firearms en masse, and then afterwards started copying foreign designs for their upcoming Imperialist endeavours.

And we already have pages for Wheellock and Matchlock guns right now, those being rather un-standardized. If more pages for works with Handgonnes come in, then what's one more firearm page compiling the appearances of "western" and "eastern" ones?

From what I have seen there was a lot of variation with the Tanegashima over time. Both this and this are Tanegashimas but as you can see there is a big difference between the two. I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that Tanegashima was simply the name applied to Japanese matchlocks (which tended to look vaguely similar due to the style, just how European ones would look similar), hell, you even find stuff described as a "Tanegashima Pistol" which is very different in form and appearance.

I'll refer you to my earlier post (post #4) as I have already given my opinion on this before, but the difference between a wheellock musket and a handgonne/hand cannon/hand bombard/whatever you want to call it is pretty big. The general observer will look at a matchlock or wheellock and think it is a gun, so it is worth categorising them on actor pages and media pages where they appear, if for no other reason than to educate people and to prevent misidentification. Nobody is going to look at a hand bombard and think "That's a Brown Bess right?".

Also, there is never going to be a real handgonne in a film or TV series, it is always going to be a mock up so essentially a tube that someone is holding a match to.

It isn't so much the prospect of having a page for handgonnes that I have a problem with, it is the fact that I do not think we want pages on the wiki where the only handheld firearm that is listed is a handgonne, which is questionable at best and in my opinion inelligible. If there are otherwise eligible peices of media that feature handgonnes then they can be listed on that page, but I am dubious of the need for them to have a page of their own at this point.

Thanks for the info. The Japanese, being a largely insular culture during that time, clearly didn't progress to Wheellocks and Flintlocks on their own, but it's interesting what they accomplished within the "wiggle room" of the matchlock.

No, but I'm sure we can categorize handgonnes by "Eastern" and "Western" designs.

The funny thing is, matchlocks aren't that far removed from handgonnes. You're still using a match, just held by an external device, to ignite gunpowder in a flash pan leading to a tube with a touchhole.

Besides, with modern pyrotechnics technology and CGI, we can make cannons mockups (handheld or otherwise) give off a lot of flash and smoke on film without an actual projectile, making it look realistic in most circumstances. An exception is the 1993 film Gettysburg where the large wheel-mounted cannons are clearly seen to not recoil as much as they would have if they were firing real projectiles (this could have been fixed by pulling the cannon carriages back with wires each time they fired to simulate the "appropriate" level of recoil, or installing a hidden motor on the carriages to do the same).

Yeah, I still remember back when there was some resistance to allowing movies/games/TV shows that only had a single gun in them (there used to be a discussion about this on the page for The Family Man).

I've always tried to be a "straight shooter" on this site. If and when I start getting screenshots of media with handgonnes on them I'll make "prototype" pages for them and run them by the mods here.

It's too bad there don't seem to be many users with access to "for distribution in East Asia only" TV shows that aren't anime on this website right now. East Asians have had a soft spot for historical TV dramas for a long time, and I'm sure many of those productions (being focussed on the feudal eras of Japan, or Korea, or China) would have featured handgonnes and primitive matchlocks for the "higher-class" productions.