musket ball costs?
 

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a problem.

I'm trying to build some muskets for a magic and musket type fantasy game.

That is neither here nor there.

I'm trying to find out how in the world to price musket balls.

To my knowledge, bullets cost 20$ times the weight of the "magazine"

(For musket balls which are weighty, I don't imagine them costing some 80 cents or 1 dollar or so each. That's a little stretch since you are usually casting your own balls so you wouldn't be paying for the work or anything.)

Now. High tech has musket balls that are much much mucccch different in price. That seems more..... reasonable. But I can't find a method to their maddness.

I am confused.

Does anyone have any information?

Re: musket ball costs?
 

Starting from first principles (the Ammunition section on p. B279), the weight of one full load for a weapon is after the slash in the Weight stat. For the blunderbuss, to pick an example, that's 0.13 lbs. The cost of that full load is $20 times that weight, or $2.6.

Now, looking over at the RoF column, a "full load" gives you an RoF of 1x9, which means a single shot is made up of 9 individual musket balls. Each individual musket ball and its powder costs $2.6/9, or about 29 cents each. For other black powder weapons, you'll do the same procedure: weight of ammo x 20 / number of individual bullets/musket balls the weapon holds. The Brown Bess from HT carries a single shot weighing 0.09 lbs. (it's a large single round rather than the shotgun-like balls of the blunderbuss), which costs $1.8. So, yeah, they cost more than you apparently think they do.

(Now, that's actually a bit off. That's the price of shot and powder, not just the musket ball itself. And just as the cost of a musket ball worth of ammo varies from weapon to weapon, the ratio of powder to shot probably varies as well.)

Re: musket ball costs?
 

Low-Tech has a box on p87 pricing metal and stone ammo by weight, as well as a gear entry for the bullet-casting kit.

Re: musket ball costs?
 

I do understand the books and the like, my problem is it seems extremely wrong.

it makes no sense why the brown bess, itself ($100), costs as much as 55.5 musket balls.

lead is extremely common at TL 2, Quoting LT21, "It was also used in sling bullets (p. 74), weights for fishing nets, and clamps connecting masonry blocks, and as an ingredient in enamels and glazes."

I wouldn't think Lead would cost but somewhere between $2-$5 a pound.

that, combined with the fact that the shooter commonly made their own musket balls since all bores weren't standardized at that time frame, therefore saving on work costs. Why is it so expensive?

powder costs ~20 a pound. and you get 40 shots per pound. meaning each shot uses some 0.025lbs of powder costing roughly $.5 per shot.

theirs still no excuse for the round costing $1.8 each. a piece of solid lead the size of a marble shouldn't cost that much.


that entire arguement aside, HIghtech ammuntion tables has Brown bess amunition costs on page 177, its listed as weighing 0.09lbs, and costing $0.4 a shot.

Re: musket ball costs?
 

This list of supplies from 1622 shows 18 shillings for 20 pounds of powder, 5 shillings for 60 pounds of shot or lead, and 1£ 2s for a musket. A little bit of maths should be able to work put a conversion rate to GURPS$, as well as a ratio of how much shot can be had for the price of a musket.

Re: musket ball costs?
 

One factor you might be forgetting is fuel and possibly time. It takes a hot fire to melt lead quickly, which means a lot of high-quality fuel. Alternately, it takes a long while (~20+ minutes) for even a smallish amount of lead to melt in a typical small campfire.

That said, DIY musket balls were and should be cheap to make.

The exception is that balls for rifled weapons might be made to a much higher standard in order to get more consistent ballistics. While shape doesn't matter much since you have to pound the ball home so it seats against the rifle lands you need consistent mass. (Later black powder match or sniper rifles required both consistent shape and consistent mass.) That means that you have to weigh each bullet and possibly shave off any excess mass until you get all your balls into the right tolerance range.

Re: musket ball costs?
 

Not particularly, lead has a very low melting point, just about any campfire will do. I have personally melted lead in a ladle in a campfire as a young adult. And it wasnt that bit, or that hot.

Re: musket ball costs?
 

It seems that a 1:3 proportion of powder to lead is a decent rough average, which implies that balls were roughly 22% of the cost of each round. Also the musket would be equal to ~22.4 lbs of powder.

If we go with $20 per pound of powder as our base, that gives a price of about $450 for the musket, $0.50 for 0.025 lbs. of powder and $0.14 for a 0.075 lbs. ball. That seems quite expensive for the musket, but maybe it was a good musket (the document seems to say 'One long Peece, five foot or five and a half, neere musket bore' so possibly a rifle?).

The above also gives us $1.85 per pound of lead. This is roughly consistent with the cost of lead sling shot and prodd pellets in Low-Tech ($1.67-$2.00 per lb.) and quite a bit cheaper than the cost of 'soft metals' in LTC3 ($4.30 per lb. but that's a generic figure for many different metals) or 'metal ammunition' from Low-Tech p. 87 ($20 per lb! which is convenient for calculating cost when you don't know the powder/shot ratio, but seems very unlikely for lead). If we accept that as reasonable, we get a rough price for black powder ammunition of $6.39 per pound, including both powder and balls.

Obviously that's all based on one document of prices which might not be typical even for it's time and I'm sure cost varied a lot with time and place, but overall I think it's reasonable to say that using the generic $20 per pound figure is going to overprice black powder ammunition a bit.

Re: musket ball costs?
 

It appears that, for a ~.75 cal "Brown Bess" musket, you get 14.5 balls per pound of lead or 32,480 per ton assuming a ~.68 to ~.71 caliber ball:

https://www.napoleon-series.org/rese...ry/c_ammo.html

Charge of gunpowder in a typical cartridge was 100 grains, or 1/70 of a pound:

http://www.rifleshootermag.com/rifle...s_bess_092407/

Using Dalillama's schedule of prices (and assuming that inflation wasn't that great over the intervening 60 years) that gives you a price of:

0.0128 d of powder per shot + 0.0057 d of lead per shot = 0.0185 d total.

That gives you that gives you ~54 shots per shilling or 4.5 to the pence, where 12 pence (p) = 1 shilling (d).

To account for labor and other parts required to assemble the cartridge, let's double the cost (paper for the cartridge and tallow for waterproofing were a more than neglible cost back in the day). That would give you 2.25 cartridges per pence, or 27 to the shilling.

Given that a mid-18th-century general laborer made ~£20 a year, or ~13 p/day, ammo wasn't cheap!

Still hunting for contemporary prices for the musket itself.

Re: musket ball costs?
 

High Tech gets its prices from 19th and 20th century catalogues (or Amazon!), Low Tech calculates them from first principles and other prices in GURPS books (or again, Amazon!) Based on pages 81, 85, and 87 of Low-Tech, it looks like a price for black-powder ammunition of $5-10/lb would be a bit more consistent with the prices of powder and shot, but in GURPS prices, 1 = 3, and it could just as well be that black powder is too cheap as that powder + shot + priming + wadding are too expensive. Any price in a GURPS book is just a rough average, actual prices at any specific place will often be three times higher or lower.