NHBL wrote:How far away could a crack shot, with the best gun and scope that is Safehold made (or made by Merlin in such a way that it can't be proven by the church to be other than locally built, anyway) reliably kill a selected target? (Not a PICA, just a really, really good sniper)
Long range assination may become important. Of course, the church knows that people can be shot from rediculous ranges now, anyway,
I think it's going to come down to the powder rather than the gun. Super long range sniping needs very reliable propellant.
Also, the bigger the bullet and the more powder the longer range you can shoot--ordinary sniper rifles are limited in this regard by recoil. Put too much oomph into the bullet and you break the shooter's shoulder. Modern rifles are accurate enough that the shooter becomes the limiting factor, there's no need to get fancier with the gun.
However, this suggests another approach that might be useful in the Safehold world. Lets cross a gun with a bazooka.
Big bullet, big powder. That means a flat trajectory and thus more accuracy (Safehold doesn't have good rangefinders) and less sensitivity to the powder quality. It also means less chance of a miss due to the target moving.
The recoil of such a weapon is completely unacceptable in a rifle--so we build this like a bazooka. There are two separate parts of the weapon--the grips and sighting system and the actual barrel & firing system. The actual firing system is allowed to recoil like with artillery.
If the recoil is small enough you absorb this with a spring that has a damper on it's return speed so the innards don't slam back into position. If even that isn't enough you have the inner part actually eject--you have it tethered to something so you can retrieve it. Alternately, you put a small cannon on the back of your gun that is set off by the recoil from the useful part of the gun--it's very short-barreled and loaded with a packet of sand.
If we want to go even farther we can make a crew served weapon. It sits on a base rather than being held by the operator at all. It's aimed by turning wheels that have gearing to provide even finer control. (Yes, they can't make anything like perfect gears. There will be a lot of slop in the system but since we are aiming by eyeball through optics rather than by a servo this doesn't matter.) It will have to very quickly come apart into pieces one person can carry, though, so they can quickly get away once they have revealed themselves by firing. Targeting for such a weapon would clearly only be on those who are stationary.