Could you strap shotguns to the back of a centaur to be fired during a charge?

Question

Thinking about the possibilities a centaur has over traditional cavalry, I was considering the fact they can be cavalry without a rider. Therefore, their backs would be free to mount something else. I immediately considered weapons.

The idea is fairly simple. You strap guns to your back or flanks, then pull the trigger when you're close to a thick formation of enemies, ready to be shotgunned. This would take place in an 18th century style theater of war, so you have shotguns and you have thick formations of troops to charge.

The question is whether this would be practical. Can you strap guns to a horse, with the intention of shooting them? Or rather, can you do that with a centaur?

Answer 1

Johnny walked the two pairs of shotguns over to Stormhoof and Cloudwing. “So, you strap these on so they are on either side. Then when you get to their line, pull these strings and they’ll shoot. Good?”

Stormhoof made no move. He looked at the guns. “Why do you not strap these guns on to the humans?” He gestured with his chin to the infantrymen standing at some distance, watching.

“Well…” Johnny thought for a moment. “Because we are carrying guns in our hands.”

Stormhoof looked at him impassively. “I too have hands.” He displayed them. They were large. “I too can carry a gun.”

“You are stronger than we are,” countered Johnny. “You can carry one in your hands and two on your back.”

“I see that you are carrying four guns now,” observed Cloudwing. “Certainly you could carry one in your hands and two on your back as well.”

“The thing is,” said Johnny, “we humans aren’t used to carrying things like that on our back. But you centaurs…” Johnny looked at the faces of the two centaurs and realized his mistake. Too late.

“Yes, our large empty backs,” said Stormhoof through gritted teeth. “Wasted space. Perhaps in addition to these guns, we could each carry a barrel of fish for you, or pull a plow.” The centaurs wheeled and galloped off.

Johnny set down the gun rigs and looked them over. Maybe strapping them to humans was a reasonable idea? He looked over to where the infantrymen had gathered to watch his interaction with the centaurs. As if reading his mind, their sergeant smiled and slowly shook his head.

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Summarizing: it is possible to strap guns to centaur backs. It is possible to strap guns to humans too but it is not done. The centaurs would know this and would be reluctant to participate in some gun-strapping endeavor that humans do not do. They would suspect that the endeavor had been proposed because the humans see them as glorified horses. They would decline and likely take offense.

credit where due: Stormhoof and Cloudwing are centaurs I lifted from Brandon Mull's The Shadow Plague

Answer 2

You could, but you'd be missing one of the big benefits of a centaur: the human half.

Instead of strapping the shotguns to be fired at random, why not holster a number of shotguns (the centaur could certainly carry a whole bunch), and the centaur's human part can grab them and fire them in any direction as the need arises?

That would give you the speed of the horse, combined with the dexterity and intelligence of the human.

Answer 3

It would be possible to strap shotguns to a centaur but it would be very ineffective to fire them without being able to aim them properly.

Traditional Approach

The shotguns are placed on the sides of the centaur, evenly and pointing forward. When charging into the enemy, the centaur fires the shotguns for maximum effect. While this seems nice, its rather ineffective. The centaur must firstly be in range and facing the enemy to have a chance of hitting them. This means they are in the range of enemy fire and being much larger, have a much greater risk of being hit. You could probably shoot several shotguns at once, including the centaur holding one, but the centaur would fall quickly, and all the guns would be lost.

Side Facing

Instead of forward facing shotguns, the shotguns are placed on the centaurs back and face sideways. Instead of charging into the enemy, they would make flanking runs and shoot sideways as they run past the enemy. This puts them at the edge of the enemies range, with them firing blindly into the enemy mass and hoping to get a hit. This would be safer than forward charging as you are on the edge of the enemy range. It would be fairly difficult to hit a moving target, but you could only utilize a small number of centaurs, as it would just become a shooting match once you increase the numbers (the First centaur runs by and stray shots will be fired and most likely hit centaurs behind them).

Carrying Multiple Guns

The other approach mentioned by tj1000 is to have the centaurs hold several shotguns. This means the centaur would aim a gun, shoot, holster it and draw a new gun. You would have much better accuracy, and it would be better than just having a single gun. Rather than a shotgun, I would imagine this would be more effective with muskets or longer ranged rifles, allowing the centaur to move and shoot several times before retreating and reloading. This doesn't work if you are charging into the enemy. In that case, you will want to shot, drop the gun, draw new guns and repeat. This is because you will likely die, so better get out maximum value rather than save the guns.

With a Rider

A centaur doubles up as a horse and this allows you to have mounted cavalry with an additional pair of hands. This can be combined with the Traditional Approach, with guns placed on the side of the centaur (might be uncomfortable for the rider, I don't actually ride horses around), or the "Carrying Multiple Guns". In the multiple guns case, the rider could help the centaur reload and holster the gun improving the rate of fire. I believe this often happened in earlier gun fights, with one person reloading the gun and a second better trained person firing them(can't confirm, I just read stories about this).

Carry a Cannon

A horse is pretty strong and so is a centaur. Instead of a shotgun or musket, you could place a small cannon on its back which it could fire. There would need to be a way to aim the cannon so the centaur doesn't just blast itself when it pulls the trigger. They could be mounted evenly on the side or a larger one on the back.

Supplies

You don't always need your centaurs to form the front lines. They could also carry important supplies for soldiers, while doubling up as a guard for the supplies.

Answer 4

Here's my shot at an answer, and further analysis. I hope others answer to, so I can see if my perspective is correct.

You have a few problems to consider, here.

1. Aim

Your aim will be grossly limited. You could try to put a swivel gun on your back, theoretically, and a very flexible centaur might be able to manipulate it. But is such aim even necessary?

Largely, no. Your intention is to charge into a thick line of men, shooting shotguns. As long as the guns are aiming in their general direction, you should surely hit something.

2. Safety

You don't want to kill yourself with a shotgun, inadvertently. So, you need to make sure the shotgun is mounted properly, so that when it goes off, none of the buckshot will hit you.

You might do this with specially long barrels, and by packing filler-material between the shotgun barrel and your body. This will cause the shotgun to point several degrees away from you. This will also prevent a hot metal barrel touching your skin. You might also want to angle the shotgun down, both so it will hit the enemies in the guts, and so it isn't pointing near your arms.

You also need to make sure the guns hang loose-enough towards the butt that you can turn and articulate your horse-body, without the guns restricting your movement. You might need the butt to go across your back, or the shotgun to be towards the front of you (and be short).

3. Trigger

You can probably trigger it with something as simple as a fuse or string. Either a matchlock, or a flintlock. You'd need to make sure that during your charge into the enemy, the powder didn't bounce out of the flash-pan.

Once you've fired the shotguns, you may want to loose them. This might be possible by cutting or unbuckling a strap, designed for a quick-release.

4. Set-up

It'd take some setup to arrange this. If you have ready-made harnesses with shotguns, and a trained person to fasten the harness onto you, it might be done in a few minutes.

It's had to estimate whether you could have these put on at the last second, before you charge into battle. You might need to wear them for hours, just in case a sudden charge is needed. More than likely.

Conclusion

It seems weird, but it doesn't seem impossible in terms of engineering.

Is it practical? ...Could be. It might not be, due to minutiae, such as being unable to activate the shotguns at the right time. Or even worse, you accidentally set them off and hurt someone. A safety system for the shotguns may be necessary.

If it does work, that's going to be a nice touch. Hitting the enemy with shot-gun blasts as you pour into them. You could even consider the possibilities of using this to try and break into a British Square.

In the end, I'd call it plausible. Worthy of plausible fiction, which explores these difficulties and oddities.

Answer 5

You're thinking too small.

This is an idea that might work, but you shoudlnt' be thinking shotguns on a charge. You should be thinking Zamburak - fielding what we would think of as crew-served weaponry. A single centaur can carry a crew-served weapon and the ammo to support it by himself, and travel relatively quickly over even rough terrain. You exploit that extra carrying capacity to turn them into highly mobile light artillery. Various techniques can then be worked out for faster dismount/remount cycles. If they're flexible enough about the waist, they might even be able to fire the thing while it's still on their back, but that's probably pushing things a bit too much.

To clarify, the centaur starts out similar to a standard man on horseback, and then gets the notable advantage of 100-150 lbs or so of extra carrying capacity, because they're not having to carry a rider as well. Actual gains depend on how much weight overhead the human half adds. Depending on the centaur in question, they might also have more raw arm strength to work with. That lends itself to pretty large weapons - large enough that the knockback is going to be significant. You won't want to deal with that on the charge, which means that you won't want anything as short-range as a shotgun (or blunderbus). As artillery, though, they're excellent.

Answer 6

Thinking about the possibilities a centaur has over traditional cavalry, I was considering the fact they can be cavalry without a rider. Therefore, their backs would be free to mount something else. I immediately considered weapons.

Back-mounted weapons would be poorly aimed and difficult to serve.

It would be much better to engineer some weapon that could be wielded by the centaur's hands, and kept supplied from the back; humans cannot go much farther than bandoleers and backpacks, but a centaur? Depending on their upper-body strength, they might make impressive grenadiers ("At that time grenadiers were chosen from the strongest and largest soldiers").

Another, albeit in my opinion less promising, possibility could be light auto-cannons or mortars. Fit them with pantographs on trunnions and base, and a centaur could be exactly like an infantryman with a gun - except the gun is way larger (and complex. And difficult to manage). The centaur would have to train on how to position himself to best handle the recoil.

Answer 7

Horse

As a rule, guns are expensive and important (and ammunition relatively cheap).

If you put a gun on an animal then you will get a single, un-aimed shot from it during a battle which would be a very poor return on your investment. Much better to have the cavalry charge and leave the guns with the infantry, who can aim and re-load them. Or mix the two and have dragoons ride the Centaurs, so that they can be dropped off and operate the guns whilst the Centaurs attack.

Centaur

As pointed out by others, why not just arm the human half of the Centaur?

Answer 8

If you look at the evolution of warfare, certain features tend to crop up repeatedly, such as the importance of logistics or mobility and manoeuvre.

Using Centaurs as shock-troops might seem effective, but it seems like a waste compared to what they're capable of. Their size might make them ill-suited to the task as defenders would be able to generate a much larger volume of fire in return. Cavalry (centaur or not) are large units that can't pack in nearly as well as people.

Instead, their horse half grants them increased mobility compared to your standard issue human, which makes them excellent skirmishers. They're capable of carrying large amounts of supplies and crossing large distances which also lends them towards reconnaissance. Neither of these roles really lend themselves to heavy weapons.

However, if you want to make the most of their abilities in a heavy battle, you might consider arming them with a Gatling gun. A pair of centaurs could carry ammo on one and the gun, mounted on a swivel, on the other. Like this, they could perform shoot-and-scoot type manoeuvres, placing very heavy fire onto flanks and being able to reposition without any time needed to setup or tear down the weapon. A Gatling gun also doesn't have the recoil issues that you would have with heavier artillery like cannons.

Answer 9

The benefit of cavalry isn't in head on attacks. A head-on charge of cavalry is generally suicide against a well trained and prepared infantry unit. Horses (and centaurs) are huge targets and it doesn't take much effort to hit it with a musket. Charging is generally only done against inexperienced troops that are likely to break formation out of fear.

The infantry already prepare to fire at a normally farther than normal range. The cavalry needs to be close enough to be likely to hit (but being large this is farther than normal) but even more importantly needs to be far enough away that a dead horse's momentum doesn't carry it into the formation. A dead horse creates a hole in the formation pretty quickly and could be exploited by cavalry.

The centaur are very unlikely to make it close enough to get any effective shots off with a shotgun.

The real benefit of cavalry is their mobility. They can close with and kill unorganized infantry groups with a lot of speed. Giving them something that decreases their mobility (both because of weight and flexibility of whatever saddle you are using for the shotguns) will reduce their effectiveness at what they are good at.

Centaurs real advantage over normal mounted troops is that they are one mind. A relatively inexperienced centaur would be able to fight with coordination that no trained warhorse and rider would be able to accomplish. They would also have much better balance (because they are used to the weight of the human half) and so would have even more flexibility than regular cavalry units. They would also likely be faster since they weigh less than horse+rider.

Answer 10

It's certainly a plausible idea, but I doubt it would be as effective as using them akin to mongol archers.

As shock troops, your centaurs have the advantage of being effective in close combat and leveraging their superior strength and bulk in the melee. the disadvantage is that you're then exposing valuable mobility based troops to higher risk.

As skirmishing archers or musketmen, you have all of the advantages that mongol archers had, with less drawback with regards to size, weight and strength. One idea could be that they have multiple smaller guns to fire without reloading, before retreating out of range to reload. You could even have them inventing cartridge based weaponary and belt fed munitions faster as a result. A centaur with a belt fed weapon and a sack of ammunition would devastate the flanks and rear of a melee to great effect.

Answer 11

Have a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse-drawn_vehicle#War_vehicles - but I guess the Centaurs would still prefer that normal horses pull these mobile weapon platforms, with humans operating the guns (smaller targets for enemy fire).

Centaurs might be more useful as messengers in battle.

A gun carriage would be an option for Centaurs fighting without horse/human support. They could pull their artillery pieces and machine gun carriages (and possibly also very heavy sniper guns) to tactical advantageous positions, unbuckle and then operate them from these positions.

Answer 12

Centaurs due to the nature of their movements i'd say the best weapons they could use/have are : spears(trust based weapon) and shield for the front part and in the back a rider with a bow.

Centaurs don't need guiding like traditional horses, where to run and when to stop and the rider would be free to atack long range or close if a threat comes to near the pair.

In the 18th century these things were still a thing in some parts...

As of more modern style ... armor/kewlar ,spear and shield ,gunman in the rear Guns need reloading a pointy stick won't run out of ammo so the idea is to delegate the rider with defense and the centaur worries about the offense.

Edited: As per autonomous weaponry the complexity and weight would be 2 much remember it's on his back not pulled by it , as sturdy as a horse may look it has a limit of total carry weight.