| abstract | - These skirmishers and scouts carry almost-silent airguns and are well suited to stealthy sniping and tactical ambushes. Windbüchsenjäger are woodsmen, hunters and poachers – men with a good grasp of field craft. Their speciality is skirmishing, to disrupt enemy formations with harassing fire, or to stop the enemy doing the same to their comrades. Unlike other light troops, however, they carry airguns. These weapons give them a distinctly unfair advantage! Apart from the fact that is silent, with no muzzle flash or smoke, the windbüchse (“wind rifle”) has a 20-round magazine and fires as quickly as the jäger can pull the trigger. The gun can drive a ball through a plank (or a man) at 100 paces, but the velocity of shots drops as the air reservoir empties. Austrian gunsmiths have produced a deadly, if delicate, weapon in the windbüchse! However, it needs a highly trained and very fit man to use it properly: pumping up the air reservoir is a huge effort. Historically, these airguns were not a success. They were quiet, but they did not work after rough treatment, something that was inevitable in battle. Napoleon Bonaparte hated them and decreed that any captured “assassin” with an airgun was to be executed, not treated as a soldier.
|
