End date 2030, 100 years...

[Firestorm]

Originally Posted by IronDuke99

The reason I say that is that that would have SG WWII - MBT covering 100 years or, to put it another way, roughly the difference in time between the battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Somme in 1916, or from the Somme to today.

Food for thought on many different levels...

Have things changed more or less? Has weapons and technology advanced more quickly or more slowly? What do you think?

In 2030, there will probably still be people using Mosin-Nagants or Lee-Enfields in places like Donbass and Syria. Did anyone have a Brown Bess in World War I?

(some of TE Lawrence's people probably had muskets, but I think even those were generally rifled)

[jivemi]

[quote=Firestorm;836401]

Originally Posted by IronDuke99

(some of TE Lawrence's people probably had muskets, but I think even those were generally rifled)

Sorry to get finicky, but isn't "rifled musket" an oxymoron? The term has been used to describe muzzle-loading rifles during the US civil war, but technically if the firearm's barrel is spirally grooved and it fires a pointed cylindrical bullet isn't it a species of rifle?

Anyway Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or just plain Happy Holidays folks!

[Firestorm]

[quote=jivemi;836402]

Originally Posted by Firestorm

Sorry to get finicky, but isn't "rifled musket" an oxymoron? The term has been used to describe muzzle-loading rifles during the US civil war, but technically if the firearm's barrel is spirally grooved and it fires a pointed cylindrical bullet isn't it a species of rifle?

Anyway Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or just plain Happy Holidays folks!

Depends. Before the 1840's, there was a definite dichotomy between a "musket" and a rifle because they both had their strengths and weaknesses. Rifles were more accurate but slow loading; you can just drop a musketball down the barrel and fire it, where an early rifle-ball had to fit so tightly for the rifling to actually work that you had to take your time to hammer it down the barrel. R. Lee Ermy explains it well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ2JdkG2Yi4

The invention of the minie ball changed that, it removed almost all of a muzzle-loading rifle's disadvantages. By 1865 almost everyone had a "rifled musket" of some kind—and some of these were literally smooothbore muskets that had grooves cut in the barrels to turn them into rifles— so they just started calling anything muzzleloaded a "musket" to differentiate them from the next wave of technology: breech-loading and lever-action guns that were becoming more and more common.

Interestingly enough, I've seen sources from World War I refer to old guns that were still in limited military use (lever-action Winchesters, breach-loading Martini-Henrys) as "muskets". Might have once been a fairly generic term for obsolete service weapons, though I don't know for sure.

[jivemi]

[quote=Firestorm;836404]

Originally Posted by jivemi

Depends. Before the 1840's, there was a definite dichotomy between a "musket" and a rifle because they both had their strengths and weaknesses. Rifles were more accurate but slow loading; you can just drop a musketball down the barrel and fire it, where an early rifle-ball had to fit so tightly for the rifling to actually work that you had to take your time to hammer it down the barrel. R. Lee Ermy explains it well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ2JdkG2Yi4

The invention of the minie ball changed that, it removed almost all of a muzzle-loading rifle's disadvantages. By 1865 almost everyone had a "rifled musket" of some kind—and some of these were literally smooothbore muskets that had grooves cut in the barrels to turn them into rifles— so they just started calling anything muzzleloaded a "musket" to differentiate them from the next wave of technology: breech-loading and lever-action guns that were becoming more and more common.

Interestingly enough, I've seen sources from World War I refer to old guns that were still in limited military use (lever-action Winchesters, breach-loading Martini-Henrys) as "muskets". Might have once been a fairly generic term for obsolete service weapons, though I don't know for sure.

Thanks for the video and explication. So now I know that early rifles (Kentucky Long and British Baker of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles fame) fired ball instead of conical bullets. Learn something new here all the time. Cheers!

[IronDuke99]

Early muzzle loading rifles needed some kind of patch to grip the rifling, this made them slow to load. Also early riflemen would often hand measure and load the powder (to aid accuracy) rather than use premade up cartridges (cartridge paper is a term we still use) hence they could never fully replace smooth bore muskets, until the invention of the expanding -minie- bullet in the 1850's.

In an emergency you could load a early muzzle loading rifle without the patch, but with nothing to grip the rifling you had no more accuracy than with a smooth bore Musket.

Smooth bore muskets, fired in a volly by massed soldiers, were accurate enough out to about 100 yards, but pretty well useless at much over 200 yards.

Rifled Muskets like the Minie and the Enfield pushed the effective range, again for volly fire, out to maximum of up to 400 yards and one of the things that meant was that infantry could now engage artillery at beyond canister range (anti personnel round, of lead balls packed in a tin, that turned a smooth bore field piece into a giant shotgun).