The largest cannons remained siege weapons; smaller ones became portable field artillery.
Another application was on ships, which provided excellent firing platforms.
New heavy ship types like the carrack could carry heavy guns and this revolutionized naval warfare.
It was not just improvements in barrel casting that made guns more usable.
Gun carriages were improved, which allowed the guns to be moved around.
These also helped to absorb the recoil when a shot was fired.
Carriages were upgraded both for and naval guns.
Early bronze guns could fire about 8 times per hour, until they got overheated and needed to cool down.
By the late 18th century, after several improvements in barrel casting,
this rate had increased to about 12 shots per hour for heavy guns, twice as many for light ones.
Medieval and Renaissance guns came in many sizes.
Every cannon was handmade and cannons with the same caliber varied slightly from each other.
Nonetheless by the mid 16th century CE a few broad types were established:
- Ribauldequins: 'organ guns' made up of many small guns bundled together, anti-personnel weapons
- Cannons: short, wide-bore guns, suitable for battering down walls at close range
- Culverins: long-barreled guns with better range and accuracy than cannons, used both in sieges and on the battlefield
- Mortars: short-barreled guns that fired at a high angle, useful to shoot over enemy walls and heights
In the 17th century CE these were joined by a Dutch invention: the howitzer. This was a medium-barreled gun that fired at a medium angle, something in between cannons / culverins and mortars. Howitzers were first employed as siege weapons, by the 18th century CE also as field guns.
Guns were also classified by caliber. Different sizes were recognized not just by number, but also by name. This is a list of the most common ones:
- Falconet: 1 - 2 pounds
- Falcon: 3 pounds
- Minion: 4 - 5 pounds
- Saker: 5 - 6 pounds
- Demi-culverin: 8 - 10 pounds
- Culverin: 14 - 20 pounds
- Demi-cannon: 32 pounds
- Cannon: 42 pounds
Other sizes, in-between sizes and supersizes existed too, like the "Bastard culverin", "Cannon serpentine", "Royal cannon", "Basilisk" and others.
Various systems were designed to standardize cannon sizes, but they varied between states and over time.
Iron guns were not completely made obsolete by bronze ones, because iron casting was much cheaper.
However, it was also more difficult and a failed barrel could explode, killing the people around it.
Therefore iron guns had to be made thicker and heavier.
That, and the advantage of bronze guns that they could be melted down and recast,
resulted in a co-existence of iron and bronze guns, with the latter being dominant.
Only when steel guns were developed in the 19th century CE, did iron retake its place of prominence.