Rifled Musket Research Paper

Weapon number one is The Musket Rifle, the primary weapon for the Union and Confederate soldiers for fighting in battlefields fair in this deadly war. The rifle barrel now has a curved cylinder inside so the bullet will have more accuracy and better range. (www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/civilwar )

IntroI am doing this report on the M1 Garand for Mr.Walker 182's History Class. The Garand is a fascinating World War II semi-automatic rifle. In the sub-sections below I will describe the developement history of the gun, the service history, and info on different versions. I wanted to add diagrams of the M1 rifle but the pictures are copyrighted and I was not able to download but the diagrams could be found at <a href="http://www.chestnutridge.com/gchart.asp">http://www.chestnutridge.com/gchart.aspDevelopment HistoryThe origins of the United States Rifle, Caliber .30, M1 begin around August, 1900, when Captain O.B.

Early bullets were designed to be placed in this new loading system. The classic way of having the powder and pellets separate was too slow and messy. This early design of the bullet is very similar to the simple modern one. It had a metal casing with powder placed behind the pellets or in some cases one large pellet (Hogg 54). With these being loaded from the side on the new rifles they were capable of firing a shot much faster then the gun of a hundred years earlier. Even though the gun had become more powerful the Civil War was still a political war.

The musket revolutionized weaponry during the Elizabethan era. This weapon was a muzzleloader which means in order to load the gun, the user must put the musket ball in at the end of the barrel (Britannica). It was approximately five feet long and weighed 20 pounds (Britannica). The musket had a matchlock system on it that used a lit match to light gunpowder on fire and the explosion caused a musket ball go sailing out (Norman & Pottinger 168). The musket balls weighed 57 grams and came in calibres between .69 and.75 inches in diameter.(Britannica) The musket balls could fly up to 175 yards, which is almost the length of the 2 football fields (Britannica). The early muskets were not very accurate but England was able to fix this and allow them to hit a person at 80-100 yards (Britannica). The musket will go down in history as one of the most famous weapons of the Elizabethan

Rifling was lining inside the barrel of the gun which made the bullet go much farther and faster. Rifling made the bullet not move in the barrel of the gun. With muskets, the soldier had to push the bullet into the barrel of the musket, taking a large amount of time because the musket and the ammunition was the just about the same size. While with the minie ball fit easily into the gun because the diameter of the bullet was smaller than the barrel. Some of these guns also had different technology. The Spencer Rifle had a very quick reload, and was very dangerous in war. There were also repeating rifles, these could shoot multiple bullets in a row. This was an upgrade of the Spencer Rifle and the musket because it was the first gun to be able to shoot more than one bullet in a row. Most of the repeating rifles that were used in the Civil War could shoot up to seven bullets, making it not just a skill of who could reload faster, but who had a better shot. The Union in the north had repeating rifles, while the Confederates in the south did not have them. This is because the North was much more industrialized than the South, so the North could make many more guns than the South. Ships were also used in the attack at some points, but sips were mostly used for transporting cargo and blockading the

The Texas State Rifle Association (TSRA) is an interest group that represents tens of thousands of members throughout the state of Texas. The TSRA’s objective is to protect the rights of a law abiding citizen to keep and bear arms under the constitution of the state of Texas and under the constitution of the United States. The TSRA uses its influence through it’s members and currency to consistently attain their objective.

A Rifle could shoot a bullet up to 1,000 yards–and were more accurate. However, until the 1850s it was nearly impossible to use these guns in battle because, since a rifle’s bullet had roughly the same diameter as its barrel, they took too long to load. (Soldiers sometimes had to pound the bullet into the barrel with a mallet.)

The Civil War is a harsh part of American history but the life of the soldiers was a real struggle. Most people know that the soldiers had a miserable life but it was far worse than people assume. Weapons weren’t easy to use, training was like starting from scratch and the camp life was miserable. Whether is was the North or the South, life wasn’t easy. Therefore, during the Civil War, the soldiers continued the courageous and daring fight in spite of poorly constructed weapons, labored training, and dreadful living conditions.

In wars prior to the Civil War, soldiers wielded weapons such as the musket which shot only one bullet at a time. Though these types of weaponry could shoot as far as 250 yards, they were inconvenient and wasted time. To even aim at the target accurately one had to be 80 yards away. Similarly to muskets, rifles were inconvenient because they took a while to reload because the bullet was almost the same size of the barrel and again, wasted time. Bullets with a pointed tip were created in 1848 by Claude Minie. Because the diameter of the bullets were smaller than the barrel, soldiers could put them into the gun quicker and more effectively. With Minie’s bullets, rifles were simpler to reload but still had to be reloaded with one bullet at a time. That unprotected gap of time made soldiers more vulnerable so in 1849 a repeating rifle called the Volitional Repeater was patented by Walter Hunt. They were popularized in 1863 during the Civil War. By this time many models were being sold but the most common one was the Spencer Carbine which could shoot seven bullets in just 30 seconds. These, like most Civil War era weapons, were produced and used by the North, but not

All firearms larger than small arms are known as artillery or cannon. Although there were dozens of different types of cannon used during the Civil War, they all fell into one of two categories: smoothbore or rifled cannon. They were further designated by the weight of their projectile (12-pounder, 24-pounder, 32-pounder, etc.), the caliber or size of their bore diameter (3-inch, 8-inch, 10-inch), method of loading (breech or muzzle), and often their inventor or the factory in which they were made (i.e. Dahlgren, Napoleon, Rodman, Parrott, Whitworth). A further distinction involved the path of their trajectories: guns had a flat

The U.S. civil war was the most bloody conflict that the U.S. had ever been involved in. It brought over 1,100,000 casualties from both sides, with over ninety percent of these casualties resulting from small- arms fire (Howey “Weaponry, the Rifle-Musket and the Minié ball”). The Minié Ball has been widely attributed to a majority of these cases. The Ball was a bullet developed by Claude-Étienne Minié and Henri-Gustave Delvigne in 1849 after the two French officers decided to improve on a currently existing design (HistoryNet “Minié Ball”). The pair also designed a rifle, a gun containing a barrel with grooves running in a corkscrew fashion along the length of the barrel. These grooves caught the bullet as it traveled down the barrel and spun it, greatly increasing the velocity and accuracy of the bullet as it left the barrel. Compared to the earlier musket balls, which bounced around in the barrel and exited at an unpredictable angle, it was much more accurate. When the bullet arrived in the United States, James Burton at the arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, simplified the bullet into the .58 calibre widely used in the Civil War (Leonard “The Bullet That Changed History”). The ball, made of soft lead, featured a conical shape and a hollow center. This allowed it to expand to fit the barrel when shot out of the gun and easily engage the rifling, making it more aerodynamic and capable of flying at

During the time of the Civil war, Pistols, and other basic handheld, guns were very popular, for a soldier to have. It was known for its capability of hitting a target from a short distance. Before people started changing the way weapons were, a small handheld pistol gun, that held one bullet, was considered, “the best” before, innovations, were performed. infantry soldiers would use muskets with one bullet at a time, shooting as far as 250 yards. However, if exact persistent location for the bullet to hit is needed, 80 yards would be the furthest distance to shoot from. If a soldier had a pistol as his main weapon, commanders, and generals, taught them different war tactics on getting closer, to your target to be within the 80 yards, with a pistol.

A smooth-bore musket is a type of gun that is smooth on the inside. The bullet is pushed through the smooth barrel and can be launched about eighty yards. A rifled musket has a groove and is spiraled in the inside. The actually bullet is closer to the trigger and can shoot four hundred yards. These two different guns bring their own importance to the war because of the new, easy way killing someone became. The rifled musket seemed more effective in the long run, but the smooth-bore musket was just as useful. 620,000 Americans died (although a majority of the death was caused by disease) during this tragic war.

By December 1941, Finn was stationed at Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. As a chief aviation ordnanceman, he was in charge of twenty men whose primary task was to maintain the weapons of VP-11,a PBY Catalina flying boat squadron. On the morning of 7 December 1941, Finn was at his home, about a mile from the aircraft hangars, when he heard the sound of gunfire. Finn recalled how a neighbor was the first to alert him, when she knocked on his door saying, "They want you down at the squadron right away!" He drove to the hangars, catching sight of Japanese planes in the sky on the way, and found that the airbase was being attacked, with most of the PBYs already on fire.[3][5][6]

In any time period, wars rely heavily on having weapons at one’s own disposal. During the colonial era, the main weapon used in war were muskets. Although Muskets were relied upon, muskets were slow to be made, and repairs were timely.There was no system for making “batches” of muskets. Each musket was individually made by a gunsmith where each part fits only that specific musket. A man named Eli Whitney, born in Westborough, Massachusetts, 1765, changed that. Whitney innovated the musket making system, making parts interchangeable from one musket to another. This made musket making and repairs less costly and more speedy, inspired machinists to make interchangeable parts for other products, and paved the way for mass production.