Teppo are for peasants, epic samurai charges teppo peasants with his sword. :)

Originally posted by KWMatsu Crunch:

Teppo are for peasants, epic samurai charges teppo peasants with his sword. :)

Be that as it may, I'd still love to be able to use a rifle on horseback.

First of all, these aren't rifles, hell, they aren't even muskets, they're most likely arquebuses. These are far too heavy and hard to use. It's already hard to fire and reload them on foot, on horseback it's near impossible.

It's also a gameplay decision by the mod. You know how in Napoleonic Wars you can shoot from horseback, but you have to be standing still to reload? Well, in the historical period depicted in Gekokujo Japan was still pretty isolated from the world, and firearms were kind of a novelty, so making them too powerful against more traditional weapons more prevalent in the world would be unbalanced and even unrealistic to a point.

Originally posted by FelipeFritschF:

First of all, these aren't rifles, hell, they aren't even muskets, they're most likely arquebuses. These are far too heavy and hard to use. It's already hard to fire and reload them on foot, on horseback it's near impossible.

Aren't muskets heavier? By the way, there were some gun variants for mounted samurai in form of pistols and carbines. There's no shame that guns really were more powerful than "traditional" bows, and some clans used them a lot.
Oh, and Japan became really isolated after Sengoku, not before.

This limitation is for both historical accuracy and balance purpose, but there are sub mods that allow the use of firearms anyway.
I can't remember of one, but you will surely find them by reading the bug and suggestions post on the taleworld forum

Originally posted by Dark MAvL:

This limitation is for both historical accuracy and balance purpose, but there are sub mods that allow the use of firearms anyway.
I can't remember of one, but you will surely find them by reading the bug and suggestions post on the taleworld forum

Thanks, I'll look into that. I get that this is supposed to be as realistic as possible, but I hate that I have to choose between horses and guns, which are both very important and useful in battle.

So just to give you a practical insight into the firearms present in Japan from the period after Tanegashima and until the Meiji revolution:

For this entire period, the Japanese used the matchlock technology introduced to them. Elsewhere in the world, gun technology progressed with snaphances, wheellocks and for the longest period, flintlocks, but until Japan caught up with Western technology around the fall of the Shogunate, they were stuck with the matchlock.

Not to say they didn't come up with their own innovations (Europeans never invented a cover to protect the flashpan from rain), but they were restricted by the limitations of the basics of this firearms technology.

The matchlock, as its name implies, uses a slow-burning match, a long cord which is attached to the firearm with a clamp known as a serpentine. The match touches down to a flashpan, upon which gunpowder is laid to act as a primer to create a flash travelling through the touch hole into the propellant in the rear of the barrel. When reloading the gun, the match would for safety reasons be removed from the serpentine until gunpowder and bullet had been stuffed into the barrel, and more gunpowder added to the flashpan.

The match, of course, had to remain lit during the whole period of its intended use (the entire battle, hopefully), and any sudden movements of the gun could shake the priming gunpowder out of the flashpan. Without a lit match, the gun would be useful only as a club.

Now, just imagine having to keep the gunpowder from falling out of the flashpan with a burning match inches away while being mounted. Imagine actually acchieving this, and then having to remove the burning match from the serpentine and placing this burning cord somewhere on the horse, whereafter you would muzzle-load gunpowder and ball, prime the flashpan and reattach the burning match to the serpentine clamp, sitting on horseback.

I hope I've made a proper explanation which shows why there were no mounted gunners. The rest of the world never fired matchlocks from horseback; this was a practical impossibility until the advance of snaphances, wheellocks and flintlocks, and so it was for the Japanese also, who did not receive the technology to conduct mounted fire until the Edo period ended, when foreigners introduced new and vastly improved guns to Japan.

Wow a lot of interesting information! Thanks everyone.

How very educational.