The 75 was a great weapon for field fighting. The problems start when everyone gets Genre Savvy about it and start digging trenches, and the 75mm cannon just didn't have the power needed in that situation.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.I think callsigns are for flights of aircraft, and they change in-theatre day by day. Since squadrons are more permanent administrative fixtures, I don't think they have radio designations.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.Yeah, but their powder was seven degrees of shit. You needed big rounds to have the mass to do actual damage at more than a couple dozen yards away because their propulsion sucked.
(Well, okay, maybe "seven degrees of shit" is hyperbole, but not by all that much.
)
edited 14th Aug '11 4:06:36 AM by Nohbody
All your safe space are belong to TrumpYeah–muskets were also really inaccurate, and the Rocket Ball didn't look like it could hit anything more than a couple yards away, or even travel very far, because it had so little powder. Interesting concept, though–kind of like that steam engine thing
that was invented in Ancient Greece.
edited 14th Aug '11 7:00:38 AM by PulpoOscuro
If I remember correctly, rifled muskets were just converted smoothbores. I think it was only when breechloaders came about that the difference in terms emerged, I could be wrong though.
edited 14th Aug '11 2:17:53 PM by pagad
With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.Ok some quick reading. The early rifling was for the purpose of trapping soot and fouling meaning the weapon could be fired more before needing cleaning of the various parts. As for when it was noticed that the grooves enhanced accuracy that is apparently not entirely known.
Yes the fouling did slow down the load times because the cartridge has to be jammed down into the barrel and push against all that grime and build up. This would be solved by using a slightly smaller mini ball style bullet which made it easier to load. What really helped was switching over to breach loading weapons and cased ammo.
Who watches the watchmen?As Tuefel said, rifling was originally inteded to aid in reducing the fouling from clogging the bore up so much that you had to stop firing and clean out the whole thing, way back in the muzzle-loading days.
Breech-loaders were recognized as being the ideal solution to this problem, but the problem then presented itself of not having a good gas seal at the breech-end.
Rifling was cut straight. Some nut-job in Germany probably decided that it was easier to cut them at a spiral pattern and bam, we get rifling in the form we recognize it today, way back in the late 1500's. However, in order to form a nice gas seal and to actually engage in the rifling to impart spin, the musket ball would have to be a real tight fit - look at how hard it is to get a Kentuky Rifle loaded up, and you'll appreciate the military decision to rely instead on smoothbore muskets instead - volume of massed fire out of a block of troops, all timed to reload and fire at a regular interval, as opposed to designated marksmen that had a reload time half that (or worse) of a typical line infantryman. If you got four lines of men, staggered so that the first two rows kneel and are off set, and the last two ranks are staggered and standing, you can get a nice constant rate of lead being tossed downrange by having the ranks firing in staggered intervals.
I forget the name of the guy, but there's some old videos of a West Point instructor shooting a Brown Bess at a cluster of 100-meter targets. Not very accurate at all, for the individual infantryman...
Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.I've previously wondered why balls were used rather than buckshot back when large-scale rifling was impractical. Modern shotguns are smoothbore and as noted on Short-Range Shotgun are not as inaccurate or short-ranged as videogames would have you believe, plus you get a large damage radius that a single ball doesn't provide, so why wasn't buckshot preferred? I'm sure I'm missing something...
With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

The French leadership after 1870 was quite stupid.
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