We each took one shot.

[John 2]

That's a great capture Trev. You would be pushed to better it on continuous shutter.

.............Our demonstrator commented that the balls would cause shattering of bones and bleeding to the point that a very high proportion of those hit had to have amputations in the field. As demonstrated by some of the photographs by civil war photographers.

cheers: Trev

For a short while, the company I worked for took over some of the Royal Ordinance small arms factories when the UK government sold them off. A friend of mine who transferred to one of them used to relate the fact that in designing small arms, one of the criteria was not to create an effective killing weapon, rather to produce a weapon that would severely wound. The logic being that a wounded combatant ate up more resources than a dead one and therefore represented more of an impediment to his own side. Not nice.

[Tronhard]

The same principle was applied during the Vietnam war. Sharpened bamboo sticks coated in faeces would be put into shallow pits and covered over. When one stepped on that spot the weight of the victim would punch sticks right through the soles of their boot and cause a painful and infectious injury. They had to be evacuated and that required the efforts of the rest of their team and a lot of resources such as helicopter retrieval, and it would disrupt the pattern of the other soldiers' patrol. It was also intimidating, slowing down the movement of each soldier.

[rpcrowe]

I have just finished a book on Braddock's Defeat at the Monongahela River in 1755 at the start of the French and Indian War (Seven Years War in the rest of the world).

Apparently the French and Indian fire was far more accurate than was the fire of the British Regulars... One Indian combatant remarked that the British would fire their muskets without bringing the weapons up to their shoulders and aiming - resulting in fire that generally went over the heads of the Indians. This was compounded by the Indians firing from cover behind trees while the British attempted to fight in parade ground formation. The result was British casualties of over 70% (there would have been more except for the rear guard action of some American companies who fought in the "Indian Style") against an Indian casualty rate of less than 1%.

This was despite the fact that the Indians were also using smooth bore trade and hunting muskets of no better accuracy (and probably worse quality) than Brown Bess muskets of the British. There was one advantage that the Indians had weapon-wise. They were firing buck and ball loads from their muskets. The buck and ball load was composed of one large round ball and two smaller "buckshot" balls. This gave the Indian marksmen three chances to hit a Redcoat every time they fired their musket.

Buck and ball loads were quite effective, especially in close range fighting and continued in use as late as the American Civil War when some Yankee and many Confederate regiments were armed with smooth-bore percussion muskets.