While artillery shells in the Western world at the time relied primarily on kinetic energy for lethality, the artillery of the Shun Dynasty had already begun deploying shrapnel on a massive scale to strike the enemy.
In fact, fragmentation-based lethality similar to hand grenades had already appeared as early as the Song Dynasty. However, due to a lack of stability, it was never widely adopted before the dynasty fell. The barbarism of the Yuan Dynasty severed that technological lineage, and though the Ming Dynasty picked it up again, further development stalled under the constraints of the institutional framework.
The West had not advanced very far along this path either, held back primarily by barrel pressure, shell shape, and most importantly, the limitations of gunpowder detonation methods—progress only began to flourish following breakthroughs in gunpowder technology in the mid-nineteenth century.
Chapter 169