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Warmatrix

War Matrix - Rifled musket

Geopolitical Race 1830 CE - 1880 CE, Weapons and technology

Robbins & Lawrence Model 1841 'Mississippi' rifled musket
Robbins & Lawrence Model 1841 'Mississippi' rifled musket
Rifling was a major advance for guns, both hand-held ones and artillery. It made traditional non-gunpowder weapons decisively obsolete. The first rifled weapon, the rifled musket, was a short-lived intermediate stage towards the development of the true rifle.
Traditional muskets were smoothbore weapons that fired round balls. These tumbled and turned in flight, making their trajectories unstable and musket fire inaccurate. As early as the late 15th century CE engineers invented rifled gun barrels, which contain spiraling grooves. The grooves cause the ammunition to roll around its forwards axis, increasing stability.
However in order for the grooves to do their work, the ammunition must fit the barrel tightly, which is hard to achieve with round balls. Musket barrels tended to accumulate grease and ashes with every shot, fouling them. This affected rifled guns more than smoothbore ones, prompting frequent cleaning and lowering the average rate of fire by a factor of 3. Combined with higher cost, this confined the use of rifled guns to small groups of hunters and sharpshooters. These were far outnumbered by the main units armed with smoothbore muskets.
The situation changed with the invention of the Minié ball in the 1849 CE by Claude-Étienne Minié, who built on earlier experiments by Henri-Gustave Delvigne and Louis-Etienne Thouvenin. The "Minie" was not a ball but a real cylindrical bullet. It had a skirt that expanded when the bullet was fired, causing an automatic good fit in the barrel. Suddenly effective range was increased from some 50 meters to 200. The invention was a great success and soon existing smoothbore muskets were converted to rifled muskets; new guns were almost all rifled.
Soon after the introduction of the rifled musket, the caliber of guns was made smaller. Barrels were also made shorter, but that development took longer because commanders stuck to the trusty long length for a long time. The greater range and accuracy of the rifled musket called for less emphasis on close combat, more on shooting and looser formations. Cavalry, bayonet charges and even short-range field artillery were rendered mostly obsolete. However due to military conservatism, gun tactics, like gun barrels changed slowly.
Though the rifled musket had superior range and accuracy over the smoothbore musket, in many other respects it was the same as its predecessor. Within but a few decades after its introduction other improvements were made, leading to the true rifle.