Matchlocks, wheellocks, flintlocks, goldilocks and male birds. · 12:09am May 6th, 2022

I'm not sure why I decided to write this. Probably because I've written about 10000 words in the last 3 days and I may be going insane, using my free time to write more than I should.

If you go back on chapter 7 of Piece of Parchment you'll find a description of Rarity's pistols that say they are wheellocks. That is because the first idea I had was that ponies would use wheellock firearms and the griffons in the Griffonian Standing Army would use matchlocks. Meanwhile, the northerner griffons would use flintlocks (widespread use). The difference, for the people that don't know, is that matchlocks required that you had a lit 'match' to lit the powder while the wheellock used a ridiculously complicated mechanism to lit the powder and shoot the gun. A flintlock weapon would've used a piece of flint to create the spark, sliding it over a metal piece.

Basically, in the real world people realized that walking around with a lit anything near powder was a bad idea. The wheellock mechanism replaced the matchlock as the gun could generate sparks to lit the powder on its own, but was too complicated to operate and manufacture. Then the flintlock came and was eventually replaced by the percussion lock systems that involved a primer to generate a spark and it really was the initial idea of modern firearms. It involved replaceable primer to make the spark, powder and bullet. Applejack's revolver has a percussion system.

The idea behind all that was to illustrate different stages of stagnation. The Griffonian army was to have simply outdated weapons while the ponies stagnated on the wheellocks because they were good enough, and their weapons are simply meant to deploy magical bullets anyway. The really fancy stuff on the pony side was supposed to be percussion lock systems. But with the northerners deploying such advanced weaponry, I decided that it made no difference and would just turn to a pointless word salad and the weapons would all work in the same way in the situations in the story. Mostly the difference comes down to reliability, ease of use and delay between pulling the trigger and the gun actually firing. There were also some intermediary stages and regional variants between, but not really worthy of note. And as Fólkvangr has demonstrated (and still will), magic is where it's at.

In the end everything ended up being wheellocks in the story, even if people usually imagine flintlocks when they think of 19th Century muskets and pistols. Except for AJ's revolver. In reality, all the systems coexisted in real world and slowly replaced each other, so... Meh.

Revolver muskets like the ones the northerners use in the story did exist in the real world, and as far as I know, they mostly used flintlock systems. The real issue was low reliability and weight. The former because the revolving mechanism would break or lock up due to residue of incomplete burn. Black powder was bad. Those things existed before the percussion caps, and when those became a thing, they invented the actual revolver. In the magicpunk-ish world of the story, they perfectly reflect that idea that the griffons are bigger, meaner and scarier.

Although I don't think that a flintlock would fire in a situation like the in the rain in the next chapter of Piece of Parchment, or when the thugs cornered Gilda in the the alley in Fólkvangr. But a wheellock would. Maybe it was a good idea to just make everything a mishmash of everything and not give it importance. I think that I didn't even notice, but when Shining Armor takes down the sniper at the roof, back in Ponyville, the militiapony had a weapon which was a flintlock in real life. So there.

With this rant over, I want to talk about something else. The words griffons use for male and female griffons. The 'bird and cat' terminology. The idea was that the northerners use cat words like tom, queen and cub and the southerners would use bird words. But it ended up being that the northerners just called the southerner females as hens and it was meant as pejorative. Because the story mostly stayed with the northerners I didn't really have a lot of chances to use words like hen of fledgling (which northerners also use, but to indicate a much younger griffon). I'll go through the stories fixing grammar mistakes, for example and I'll also add a better use of these words. I'll also try to use them more often, because I think it adds to the quirkiness. Like Gil telling Gilda that Gia is a molly, not a bitch.

The whole thing really came from the idea of The Harpy using such words to refer to griffons of breeding age because she's creepy like that.

Anyways, I just wanted to put that up. If I got anything wrong about the firing mechanisms or cat and bird words, kindly correct me. None of this is really important, but I like it. Even though if it makes no difference what kind of firing mechanism your gun has when there is an angry griffoness (hen or queen) slashing past your armor with a magical sword.

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