The Fire Lance was a 10th century Chinese weapon that looked like a normal spear,

which contained at its business end,

the end with the spearhead, a separate piece of bamboo that was filled with gunpowder.

That gunpowder was connected to a slow-burning wick, which, when it reached,

the gunpowder-filled bamboo tube, would shoot out flames in the direction that it was pointed.

It's a fair assumption that this sort of effect would have been terrifying to 10th century people,

soldiers or not, who were on the receiving end of that burst of explosive flames.

But we need not assume there is recorded evidence of these weapons being

used in battle, first in the year 950, then again in 1044. They were eventually used on

scale, named as having been used in big battles rather than smaller fights in 1132, and they were later mounted on

carts, which allowed them to be used several at a time, and to be more mobile so as to be more

capable of defending siege equipment when necessary. They also had bits of broken porcelain and

small iron pellets added to the gunpowder mix, which allowed them to wound

enemy soldiers rather than merely startling and burning them, and their bamboo tubes were eventually

swapped out with a type of sturdy, reusable paper tube, which allowed fire lancers to replace spent

barrels mid-fight in favor of new unspent ones. From there, the salt

peter ratio, saltpeter being a vital component of old-school gunpowder, in the gunpowder that

they were using, was eventually adjusted to increase its overall explosiveness and the amount of

damage it could cause. To survive this new and improved

combustibility, the barrels were out of necessity, replaced with metal barrels, and eventually the

shrapnel that they contained was replaced with larger pellets, which then became, with time,

just one large pellet, which occluded, meaning blocked,

...