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Old 19th July 2020, 05:55 PM   #11
Philip
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As previously said, this is the first such bow/gun combo out of India that I've seen. Haven't yet encountered reference to any such example out of Europe.
India was fertile ground for imaginative weapons combos such as pistol barrels on armor-piercing punch daggers, and features ranging from innovative to simply weird, like automatic pan-cover opening on matchlocks and triangular bores on hunting guns.

You might be interested to know that centuries before the familiar Elgin cutlass-pistol, the Europeans did some interesting things using wheellocks. There are two German battle-axes with pistol barrels and wheellocks mounted on the side, the handles are hollow for storing bullets and spare pyrites and the trigger is fitted with a rotating safety that blocks it as required. These are preserved in the Armory of the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, and date to the 1530s.

Then there is the pair of Spanish lances with double-barrel pistol setups, in the Armerķa Real in Madrid (cat. I.20). Date is uncertain, best guess is ca. 1600. Significant is that the locks are proto-miquelets in that the mainspring pushes up on the heel of the cock, whose spade-like toe engages the horizontal sear. But -- the frizzen surface is slightly convex, like the arc of a (very large) wheel. And it has a manual safety (no half cock sear) identical to that on many German wheellocks...
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