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Old 10-18-2017, 04:52 AM   #11
dcarson
 
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

British training with a musket was pretty much could hit the broadside of a barn and they were well trained compared to others. In the Sharpe's Rifles books the author references a incident where a Spanish unit panicked and abandoned a fort after firing the first volley because that was the first time they had used gunpowder instead of just loading drills and the noise and smoke spooked them.
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Old 10-18-2017, 05:43 AM   #12
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

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Originally Posted by dcarson View Post
British training with a musket was pretty much could hit the broadside of a barn and they were well trained compared to others. In the Sharpe's Rifles books the author references a incident where a Spanish unit panicked and abandoned a fort after firing the first volley because that was the first time they had used gunpowder instead of just loading drills and the noise and smoke spooked them.
Yep, on the british they are a great case in point for describing how the use of firearms changed and training and tactics changed with it.

End of the C18th / beginning of the C19th the british army were drilled to fire 3 volleys a minute, which was generally speaking one more than most.

(and it why I had speed loading perks be part of such training rather than say squeezing out another +1 skill point on muskets)

Now obviously not every british formation in every battle did this but the point was volley speed was important. In terms of hitting a mark they were likely not much better than anyone else. But that's because accuracy isn't that big of a deal

Fast forward 100 years to WW1 the BEF were famous for being able to shoot accurately and quickly. See stuff like "the mad minute" training, and the oft heard quotes of German mistaking British rifle fire for machine gun fire.

Now in that hundred years gap individual marksmanship had become more important. Both due the capability of weapons to allow for it and how battlefields had changed in response to that and other weapons.

But there are other factors than just some universal shift in how wars were fought in that period, because not everyone's fighting the same wars and we raise our armies in different ways for specific reasons.


The British had generally speaking relied on small professional (i.e well trained) forces to face larger less well trained forces, were each individual's firepower had to be maximised. But that's because we try not to do conscription and compared to some of our traditional enemies in mainland europe we have a small population and we tend to operate outside our borders in combination with the navy. Later when we went for empire building we continued this. Also when your empire building or empire maintaining in large areas of the world you are never going to have the advantage in numbers so don't try. Equally when you trying to tie down a large area you might not be able to ensure that your infantry will have lots of nice artillery etc along sides them so you end up relying more on your individual infantryman and his rifle.

However that general plan is why we had some issues with conflicts that didn't quite match the usual fighting, like the Boer Wars. Where the Boers didn't obligingly form up and charge british rifles.

Similarly those stories of awesome british rifle fire being mistaken for machine gun fire, tail off a bit once you get into 1915. Because that lovely well trained but small BEF with all those great scores in their mad minute training are largely dead, injured or rotated home by then. And there no time to replace them with the required numbers and similar training.

Ironically of course that big Empire does theoretically give a huge population pool to draw from!

Finally some of these factors build on each other. Take the point about live fire training. Even if you have the time to train your huge conscription based army with live powder and shot, that takes a lot of powder and shot as well as other resources. But a smaller army is less resource intensive to train.

Last edited by Tomsdad; 10-18-2017 at 06:41 AM.
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Old 10-18-2017, 07:51 AM   #13
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

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Originally Posted by dcarson View Post
British training with a musket was pretty much could hit the broadside of a barn and they were well trained compared to others. In the Sharpe's Rifles books the author references a incident where a Spanish unit panicked and abandoned a fort after firing the first volley because that was the first time they had used gunpowder instead of just loading drills and the noise and smoke spooked them.
At Talavera an entire Spanish brigade was scared off the field by the sound of its own fire.
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Old 10-18-2017, 02:52 PM   #14
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

In addition to the +1 Acc actually being an effective 50% increase in range that others have mentioned, it might also be reasonable to limit the ways to improve Acc more on muskets than on rifles. For instance, Precision Aiming (High-Tech, p. 84) can potentially give up to +5 to Acc for spending a long time carefully accounting for wind factors, range, and all the other things that affect long-range shots. Capping that bonus at only, say, +3 for muskets gives rifles another distinct advantage for sharpshooters.
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Old 10-18-2017, 03:32 PM   #15
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

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Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
In addition to the +1 Acc actually being an effective 50% increase in range that others have mentioned, it might also be reasonable to limit the ways to improve Acc more on muskets than on rifles. For instance, Precision Aiming (High-Tech, p. 84) can potentially give up to +5 to Acc for spending a long time carefully accounting for wind factors, range, and all the other things that affect long-range shots. Capping that bonus at only, say, +3 for muskets gives rifles another distinct advantage for sharpshooters.
Precision Aiming with muskets probably shouldn't be a thing at all. Nobody, to my knowledge made range cards or adjustable sights for muskets, ever. If you do allow it, it really ought to have at least a -5 penalty for improvised tools (and IMO that is generous).
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Old 10-18-2017, 04:31 PM   #16
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
Precision Aiming with muskets probably shouldn't be a thing at all. Nobody, to my knowledge made range cards or adjustable sights for muskets, ever. If you do allow it, it really ought to have at least a -5 penalty for improvised tools (and IMO that is generous).
Seems like Precision Aiming might be a good schtick for a PC sniper, though. It's the kind of thing that an eccentric gunsmith/adventurer might come up with.
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Old 10-18-2017, 05:21 PM   #17
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

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Precision Aiming with muskets probably shouldn't be a thing at all. Nobody, to my knowledge made range cards or adjustable sights for muskets, ever.
Unfortunately, I lack the real-world experience with any type of guns to judge what's really realistic. I guess the question is, if someone did make that sort of equipment for a musket, would it be capable of achieving the same sort of accuracy as a rifle? My impression is that it probably wouldn't - smoothbore vs. rifling is just too big a difference. But I'm certainly willing to be corrected!
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Old 10-18-2017, 07:31 PM   #18
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

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Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
Unfortunately, I lack the real-world experience with any type of guns to judge what's really realistic. I guess the question is, if someone did make that sort of equipment for a musket, would it be capable of achieving the same sort of accuracy as a rifle? My impression is that it probably wouldn't - smoothbore vs. rifling is just too big a difference. But I'm certainly willing to be corrected!
It's difficult to find numbers, but some previous research I did indicated muskets typically had MoA 36, while rifled muskets were MoA 18 or better. In GURPS terms, that works out to muskets having a maximum skill cap (before modifiers for Range and Size) of 22, while for rifled muskets it's 24 or better. Beyond 50 or so yards, smoothbore-fired musket balls start to deviate more from their aimpoint than predicted simply by MoA, however, thanks to the unpredictable spin placed on the ball gives it a slightly curved trajectory. This can be approximated by increasing range penalties - 50 yards is still -8 to hit, but after that each +1 SSR (70, 100, 150, etc) becomes -2 to hit instead of -1 to hit. See this thread for further discussion (I opted to have the penalty start after 70 yards there, but 50 makes for cleaner math, and I suspect the musket reproduction used for the tests may have been more accurate than period weapons).

So, yeah, if someone made the appropriate equipment for it, Precision Aiming would work just fine for a smoothbore musket, you just likely wouldn't get quite as much use out of it as you would with a rifle.
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Old 10-19-2017, 07:37 AM   #19
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

Another point of note - muskets are going to loaded as quickly as possible, but a distant rifleman sniper may have time to use Careful Loading to get some more accuracy out of his weapon. So while the muskets are Acc 2, the rifle is often going to have Acc 4, thanks to both its higher innate accuracy and the +1 for Careful Loading.
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Old 10-19-2017, 09:07 AM   #20
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Default Re: [Low Tech] TL4 Rifles

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Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
Unfortunately, I lack the real-world experience with any type of guns to judge what's really realistic. I guess the question is, if someone did make that sort of equipment for a musket, would it be capable of achieving the same sort of accuracy as a rifle? My impression is that it probably wouldn't - smoothbore vs. rifling is just too big a difference. But I'm certainly willing to be corrected!
I seem to recall a chap on YouTube doing some comparison shoots and finding that you had a reasonable chance of hitting things with a musket if you knew what you were doing...
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