Richard Sharpe approves this message.
Richard Sharpe approves this message.
Aim small, Shoot small.
What amazes me is how a simple tool, a (button cutter) guys could build rifle barrels.
Duplicate Post Police are watching! Hahaha!
The American Long Rifle came a century before this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_rifle
Much of the article is inaccurate or misleading.
"The feathers of the arrows indicate that people in Ötzi's time understood that the aerodynamic principal of a rotating arrow could be shot more accurately."
Sharp shooters though they were good, they had the highest casualty rate in the military before the age of smokeless gun powder. They were also worshiped as heroes among their peers but in many instances their living life as a hero were short lived if they were out shooting by themselves away from the others. Sharp shooters would attract attention to them selves from the smoke from their rifles, especially if they were by themselves and not in a group of individuals shooting. Many times the enemy would bring up their cannons to deal with the sharp shooters and shot in the general direction of the sharp shooter with canister shot. The canister shot is what killed most of them and/or any other type of soldier in the way of the canister shot.
Rifled fire arms were not new as they had been around since the 1500s and were mostly used for hunting where accuracy was prized and the smoke cloud from the gunpowder was only a nuisance. Rifles in combat were more problematical for use on the battlefields due to the loading time & difficulty of forcing the ‘bullet’ down the barrel and the give-away factor of the smoke-cloud upon firing. Thus common troops used easy to load & volley-fire smooth-bore muskets while only specialists used rifles. What changed this equation was the Minié ball ammunition.
Developed in the late 1830s, the Minié ball was a conical slug with a hollowed base that was smaller than the caliber of the rifle, making it easy to load. When fired, the soft metal at the base expanded to fit the grooves / rifling and thus get the spin needed for accuracy. The first tests of battle came in the Crimean War of the 1850s. By the US Civil War of 1861-65, both sides had their common soldiers armed with either the US Springfield 1861 or the British 1853 Enfield rifled muskets, using the Minié ball.
The ‘glory days’ of the Minié ball also ended with the US Civil War as breech-loaders like the Spencer Rifle took over from the muzzle-loaders like the Springfields & Enfields.
It’s the rifled musket and the minie’ bullet that made the civil war such a bloodbath.
Cc