Correct. Accurate muzzle fire didn't start until the invention of the "minnie ball" (pretty sure I misspelled that but whatevers). Basically, until the 2nd American Civil War (1860-1865), muskets were smooth bore and didn't have rifling inside of gun barrels. The minnie ball changed this, by pairing barrel rifling with a projectile that …
Correct. Accurate muzzle fire didn't start until the invention of the "minnie ball" (pretty sure I misspelled that but whatevers). Basically, until the 2nd American Civil War (1860-1865), muskets were smooth bore and didn't have rifling inside of gun barrels. The minnie ball changed this, by pairing barrel rifling with a projectile that would spin along the rifling grooves. The spin-in-flight improved ballistics immeasurably and made flint-lock rifles much more accurate than they used to be. The invention of cased ammunition also changed things a lot, which enabled the infantryman to carry spare ammo on "clips" that held about 5-8 individual cased ammunition rounds each. Then the replacement of ammo clips with magazines. You used to reload 8 rounds with an ammo clip in WW1, then they invented magazines for rifles and you had guys in WW2 reloading their Thompson and M3 submachine guns with magazines that held 20-30 rounds in the magazine instead of the usual 8-round ammo clips. The M16 started out with a 20-round magazine in the 1960s. That only changed later on when the services adopted 30-round magazines as the standard. Nowadays you can get 100-round ammo drums for AR-15s very easily.
The unfortunate last words of Major-General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, moments before he was shot down by a Confederate sniper.
Civil War era rifle-muskets had an effective range of around 1000 yards in the hands of a skilled marksman.
Correct. Accurate muzzle fire didn't start until the invention of the "minnie ball" (pretty sure I misspelled that but whatevers). Basically, until the 2nd American Civil War (1860-1865), muskets were smooth bore and didn't have rifling inside of gun barrels. The minnie ball changed this, by pairing barrel rifling with a projectile that would spin along the rifling grooves. The spin-in-flight improved ballistics immeasurably and made flint-lock rifles much more accurate than they used to be. The invention of cased ammunition also changed things a lot, which enabled the infantryman to carry spare ammo on "clips" that held about 5-8 individual cased ammunition rounds each. Then the replacement of ammo clips with magazines. You used to reload 8 rounds with an ammo clip in WW1, then they invented magazines for rifles and you had guys in WW2 reloading their Thompson and M3 submachine guns with magazines that held 20-30 rounds in the magazine instead of the usual 8-round ammo clips. The M16 started out with a 20-round magazine in the 1960s. That only changed later on when the services adopted 30-round magazines as the standard. Nowadays you can get 100-round ammo drums for AR-15s very easily.
"They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance."
The unfortunate last words of Major-General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, moments before he was shot down by a Confederate sniper.
Civil War era rifle-muskets had an effective range of around 1000 yards in the hands of a skilled marksman.