Licorne

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Licorne (Russian: единорог, yedinorog, 'unicorn') is the French name of an 18th- and 19th-century Russian cannon, a type of muzzle-loading howitzer, devised in 1757 by M.W. Danilov and S.A. Martynov and accepted by artillery commander, general Peter Ivanovich Shuvalov. The licorne was a hybrid between the howitzers and guns of the era (a gun-howitzer), with a longer barrel than contemporary howitzers, giving projectiles a flatter trajectory, but longer range. Similar to the howitzers, they had a powder chamber of smaller diameter than the gun caliber, but whereas a howitzer's chamber was cylindrical, a licorne's was conical, with its base diameter the same as the gun bore. The conical chamber was easier to load and facilitated the placement of the projectile perfectly in the center of the barrel. Licornes were able to fire both the solid shot used for cannons and howitzer shells, as well as grapeshot and canister. The length of the barrel was 9 or 10 calibres, and the weight of the propellant charge to that of the missile was set at 1:5, the mean between the heaviest charge for a cannon (half the weight of the shot) and the lightest charge for a mortar (one tenth of the weight of the bomb). As introduced into Russian service in 1758 with the Shuvalov artillery system, licornes were of 8-pounder type, then 10-, 20-, 40-, and 80-pounders were produced; the Russian measurement system at the time however was in poods, thus the licornes in this list were actually quarter-pood, half-pood, 1-pood, and 2-pood. The 8-pounder required two horses to move it, while the heavier licornes required three, five, six, and twelve horses respectively. Shuvalov's Secret Howitzer Corps was equipped with 38 licornes out of the roughly 200 cannon it had in 1758; the Corps was renamed with this occasion as...