Rifling refers to the act of adding spiral grooves to the inside the barrel of a firearm. The grooves would cause a projectile to spin as it traveled down the barrel, improving range and accuracy. Once rifling became easier and practical, a new type of firearm was introduced, the rifle. It gave combatants the ability to specifically target an enemy combatant, rather than have large numbers of combatant’s fire in a general direction. It effectively broke up groups of combatants into smaller more maneuverable units.

 

Artillery is large gun designed to fire large projectiles a great distance. Early artillery pieces were large and cumbersome with slow rates of fire. This reduced their use to sieges, by both defenders and attackers. With the advent of the industrial age and various technological advancements, lighter, yet powerful and accurate artillery pieces were produced. This gave rise to field artillery which was used on a tactical level to support troops.

 

Machine guns are fully automatic guns. In this era of warfare they only existed as mounted support weapons, as automatic firearms were not yet developed. Early machine guns as invented by Gatling were hand cranked but evolved into truly automatic machine guns by Maximizing at the end of the era. Machine guns were valued for their ability to smash infantry formations, especially attacking enemy formations when they were dense. This, along with effective field artillery, changed tactics drastically.