Rifled musket
Rifles have the advantage of long range accuracy, because spinning bullets have far flatter and more stable trajectories than balls fired from smoothbore muskets.
Their greater accuracy and range made rifles ideal for hunting, but the slower rate of fire was a significant impediment for widespread military use, along with the fouling caused by normal firing which made them steadily more difficult to load.
For example, in the British Army, light infantrymen armed with ordinary muskets were trained for 200 to 300 yards (180 to 270 m).
[4] The relative inaccuracy and short range of the musket was not considered to be significant on the battlefield, because smoke from the black powder used at the time quickly obscured the battlefield and rendered the longer range of the rifle useless, especially as a battle progressed.
[5] Rifles were more expensive to make than muskets, and were typically used by small units of specialized riflemen trained not to fight in closed ranks, but in open order, spread out as either skirmishers or sharpshooters.
Since they were not fired over other men’s shoulders or designed for close-combat bayonet fighting, military rifles could be much shorter than muskets, which also made loading from the muzzle easier and reduced the difficulties associated with fitting the bullet into the barrel, although the rate of fire was still slower than that of a musket.
[8] This potential accuracy, however, required skills only acquired through advanced training and practice; a rifled musket in the hands of a raw recruit would not have performed very much better than a smoothbore, and may have performed worse due to its lower muzzle velocity and greater drop with range.
At the beginning of the American Civil War, some infantry regiments chose to keep smooth-bore muskets, preferring them because they could shoot "buck and ball".
For example, the Springfield Model 1861 with its percussion lock mechanism and long barrel was called a "rifled musket".
Considerable numbers of armory-stored smoothbores were converted in this way in the 1850s upon adoption of the Minié ball as the standard projectile.
Military commanders at the time also believed that bayonet fighting would continue to be important in battles, which also influenced the decision to retain existing barrel lengths.
[10] In the British forces the distinction was retained between the full-length musket issued to the infantry as a whole, and the shorter and handier version of the Enfield produced for specialist rifle regiments and marines.
They typically consisted of rolled-up tubes of paper containing a premeasured amount of black powder and a greased Minié ball.
The Maynard tape primer system attempted to speed up this last step by using paper strips similar to those used in modern toy cap guns in place of the percussion cap, but this proved to be unreliable in field service and was abandoned on later weapons.
The American-made Springfield Model 1861 was the most widely used weapon in the war, followed by the British Pattern 1853 Enfield.
In the Italian War of 1859, Austrian troops armed with rifled muskets, but insufficiently trained and practiced in their effective use, were defeated by French forces using aggressive skirmishing tactics and rapid bayonet assaults at close range.
