Low Tech cannons mortars and shells

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Yes, but they were fantastically unreliable and carried such a small mass of explosive it wasn't worth it.

Their real effectiveness was as early hollow-point bullets, which potentially made injuries from minie' balls even more horrific.

I seem to recall a lot of "exploding" bullets were actually what we would now call self-fragmenting - back drilled and loaded with mercury IIRC, so that they expanded on impact.