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Keep it together, soldier! (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/historymemes@piefed.social
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[–] 16 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I mean, in the age of muskets and field cannons they didn't really shoot at anybody in particular since the guns were not very accurate. They probably did try to hit the bagpipe dudes, though.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Fun fact. Rifling wasn't invented until right before the Civil War. That spiraling in a gun barrel helps the bullet keep aim and hit the target. Before that the balls just bounced out of the musket any old way.

    That is one of the reasons the Civil War was so bloody. The armies still lined up, but this time the rifles shot straight.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    No? Rifling was around muuuch longer than that, but was primarily for specialized divisions (the Kentucky Long Rifle being a notable example). It was becoming more commonly issued at the outset, but at the time, smoothbore muskets were still pretty widely issued due in part to vast stockpiles and sudden need.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    I'm not sure what you're No-ing. Rifling was around longer but the Civil War introduced it as a standard.

    Smoothbore muskets were issued in the Union and Confederate armies during the beginning of the Civil War, though both armies quickly adopted a rifled musket; this was the first time in military history that most infantry soldiers were equipped with a rifled musket

    https://historymaking.org/textbook/items/show/275

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Rifling wasn't invented until right before the Civil War.

    My bad, I took this bit to be saying that rifling was new to the scene, rather than new to industrial-scale manufacture.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Oh yeah. My bad. I guess I said that wrong. There were more advances in the rounds that made the rifling better, but I was trying to simplify it.

    I was interested in the Civil War cause the weapons advanced faster than the way we fight wars. You wouldn't see people lining up and walking toward another army now.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Though I think WWI is an even better example. The machine gun wasn't even that new at the time and had been used in the british colonies, but no European power had themselves faced them and turns out they not only didn't have any idea how to approach them, but apparently didn't even spend much time thinking about it because they started the war with fucking calvary charges. And I mean calvary as in aristocrats in expensive armor riding horses, riding out into what would later be known as "no man's land" to get mowed down by machine guns.

    Followed by three years of pretty much just trying that only without the horses and more men until Germany ran out of bullets and had to surrender.

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