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Originally Posted by Icelander
Well, my problem is that I don't know what baseline assumptions were made when the pistols were statted for High-Tech. There were many possible loads and I don't know if this represents an average of some kind, a fairly weak load, a fairly strong load or what.
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Did 19th century factories produce multiple loads for army-issue firearms? I did not know that, so I would be interested in a source!
I thought that people who wanted to hand-load black-powder firearms mostly did it themselves, except in that brief interval after brass cases and before smokeless powder. That avoided problems like the cartridge factory cutting the powder with inert material to save money.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
Before I plug anything into Doug's spreadsheet, I'd have to have data on pressure, burn length, fps and suchlike, which I don't know for these muzzleloading black powder weapons. I can look up powder charges, but I don't know which powder charge the HT stats are modelling and I have no idea about the velocity of black powder pistol balls.
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I don't know of any tests of low-tech weapons which try to measure the first two things, since if you have the weapon to hand its so much more practical and precise just to measure v0 and bullet mass. You would need someone who has spent a lot of time and money researching early firearms for the powder charges.
The pistol racks at the Landeszeughaus Graz fill whole walls the length of the building, and
I think they tested some of them too (but you would need to find and read the book to decide whether they used a reasonable amount of modern black powder). People who study Napoleonic warfare love publishing weapons data, drills, and other minutia.
I think that Bert S. Hall talks about the problems estimating the REF of early gunpowder in his book. The explosion of a ship full of powder in Leiden in 1807 let an engineer compare Napoleonic and modern black powder in the International Journal of Impact Engineering 2001.