The guns were quite accurate. They had rifling etc long before the Maxim gun.
Being a top grade British rifleman required hitting a 3 foot wide target at 900 yards or something. That’s pretty fucking good without glass optics.
They were slowish to fire, but they had paper cartridges that made it not too slow. Lower casualty rates probably have more to do with soldiers not being brainwashed yet, lots of people didn’t actually shoot to kill. Compare the casualty rates of the colonial campaigns where soldiers didn’t consider their enemy human.
I don’t think that sort of accuracy or equipment was common in the revolutionary war, tbh.
They had about a thousand Pattern 1776 Rifles made in 1776 and a few Ferguson Rifles but the British Army still commonly used the Bakers flintock until the 1840s, and all of the above still used standard ball projectiles. It was so impressive when Tom Plunkett shot the French General Colbert-Chabanais at 370 meters (400 yards) it got recorded as a great feat.
I’m not a usian but I do know that in one of your various wars some dude bought heaps of pom guns but not the right bullets for them so they got some terrible reputation for being unreliable because the bullets didn’t work.
The Baker’s was rifled, hence the name. I mean tbh from standing/crouching with ironsights on a real day it would be impressive today to shoot someone at 370 meters with one shot using a modern gun and these things were heavy as fuck. Idk specifically how that gun performed but we have a tendency to assume past tech was much worse than it actually was.
The guns were quite accurate. They had rifling etc long before the Maxim gun.
Being a top grade British rifleman required hitting a 3 foot wide target at 900 yards or something. That’s pretty fucking good without glass optics.
They were slowish to fire, but they had paper cartridges that made it not too slow. Lower casualty rates probably have more to do with soldiers not being brainwashed yet, lots of people didn’t actually shoot to kill. Compare the casualty rates of the colonial campaigns where soldiers didn’t consider their enemy human.
I don’t think that sort of accuracy or equipment was common in the revolutionary war, tbh.
They had about a thousand Pattern 1776 Rifles made in 1776 and a few Ferguson Rifles but the British Army still commonly used the Bakers flintock until the 1840s, and all of the above still used standard ball projectiles. It was so impressive when Tom Plunkett shot the French General Colbert-Chabanais at 370 meters (400 yards) it got recorded as a great feat.
I’m not a usian but I do know that in one of your various wars some dude bought heaps of pom guns but not the right bullets for them so they got some terrible reputation for being unreliable because the bullets didn’t work.
The Baker’s was rifled, hence the name. I mean tbh from standing/crouching with ironsights on a real day it would be impressive today to shoot someone at 370 meters with one shot using a modern gun and these things were heavy as fuck. Idk specifically how that gun performed but we have a tendency to assume past tech was much worse than it actually was.