Swedish Hussars

Gustavus Adolphus is known of course for reforming almost all aspects of military and war. He is one of those credited for bringing back shock cavalry after it's decline against the spanish tercio. His inspiration largely came from polish hussars, who fought with long lances and sometimes achieved success but sometimes were defeated by pikes. His solution was arming cavalry with firearms instead of lances.

What if he had witnessed more successes of polish hussars and less failures, thus becoming convinced that lances needed to make a come-back. Does this change the outcome of any major battles in the 30 years war? How does it affect the development of cavalry in general?
 
Gustav II Adolf's solution to the problem of pikes was to attach small units of musketeers to the cavalry and use them and mobile light field artillery to "open up" pike formations instead of the caracoll (in which the cavalry used their own pistols ina revolving formation to create a machine gun to the front).

Swedish cavalry if the era used firearms against heavily armoured Imperial Cuirassiers, but were instructed to fire only when they were able to touch the armour with the barrel of the pistol for max chance of penetrarion.

Lances or no lances will not make a huge difference in the 30 years' war - cavalry will still be unable to take on organised pike formations from the front.

Swedish cavalry using lancesmight inspire Austrian, French and German cavalry to do the same - but then again. Poles and Ottomans did use lances and it did not cause the Russians to adopt them.
 
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Polish Hussars required life long, expensive training. Gustav Adolf would not create similar units ad hoc and he would rather not wait whole generation to see fruits of his job.
 
Swedish cavalry using lancesmight inspire Austrian, French and German cavalry to do the same - but then again. Poles and Ottomans did use lances and it did not cause the Russians to adopt them.

The Polish/Lithuanian hussars used very expensive horses (IIRC, usually imported from Turkey) not easily available in Sweden (or Russia).
 
The Polish/Lithuanian hussars used very expensive horses (IIRC, usually imported from Turkey) not easily available in Sweden (or Russia).

Also, didn't Cossacks in Russian service use the lance?

I think the big impact might actually be at Lutzen. If the use of lance-charges rather than pistols takes off, there might be enough butterflies that Gustavus Adolphus is not killed leading a cavalry charge depending on how the battle plays out with the lances. But that's happening by such random chance that, whilst depending on the dynamics of cavalry at the time the use of lances might make it more likely it's still more of a second POD in its own right.
 
Also, didn't Cossacks in Russian service use the lance?

Yes, this was their traditional weapon. But their lances (the same goes for the uhlans) had been considerably shorter than those of the Polish hussars and they were a light cavalry with a tactics substantially different from one used by the hussars.

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