A new weapon?

With the sharp smell wafting in the air, look from the jagged, ruined metal of the breastplate back to Meiyue, who is calmly cleaning the residue from the flared muzzle of the bronze prototype.

Her future husband is staring at the hole, his fingers tracing the torn edges of the iron as if he couldn't quite believe his own eyes.

"A new weapon," I murmur, "But conceptually... it operates like the fire lances of the East, does it not? Why call it entirely new?"

Meiyue pauses her cleaning, looking up. "A fire lance is a psychological terror, Your Grace. It showers sparks, it burns, it frightens horses. But this? This throws iron with the **** of a strongest archer. And it can completely rewrite how your wars are fought."

"It's loud," Vikram notes, "And the smoke is blinding. If a hundred men fired these at once, we wouldn't be able to see the enemy after the first volley."

"A fair criticism," Meiyue acknowledged, setting the cleaning rod down on the wooden table. "It requires cleaning and it's slow. A skilled longbowman can loose ten arrows in the time it takes to clean, pour, ram, and prime this single tube. And if the sky turns to rain? It will become useless."

You look back at the shattered armor. Fifty paces. "And yet, look at the result. It will take a decade to train a knight to wear that armor and fight effectively on horseback.

A lifetime for a bowman. This? A few weeks to train."

"Exactly," Meiyue said. "Spend two weeks teaching a farmer how use it, and use him accordingly, and a knight or bowman couldn't even compare."

It was indeed, an epochal weapon, one you must quickly learn to wield. "We must produce them immediately," you say. "And God help us all if the spies find out what we're making."