this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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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 colonial campaigns didn't have an organized or well equipped enemy
Um people in India were well equipped and organised at least, idk about the rest. Hell the 1857 war for indepence was using the poms own training and weapons against them but long before that the various and sundry kingdoms did alright.
The British empire and their trade companies were just absurdly bloodthirsty and inhumane.
They made about a thousand 1776 pattern rifles all at once when things really started to take off, but yeah the average soldier probably had some shit flintock.