"Artillery and infantry frontage" Topic

Hi,
Quick question.
If a French infantry battalion of 600 men in 3 lines line is represented with a frontage of 180mm, should a single 6 gun battery be represented with roughly the same frontage? I'm done some math and it seems like they should, based on some previous posts here on TMP. Both come out to about 125 yards, give or take. Does this sound correct?

thanks,
Zach

Just off the top of my head, I think they can be pretty close if not the same. Just keep in mind, the artillery could be and often was deployed as sections. The distance between sections was not necessarily 'standard'.

mjc

The Waterloo Companion had a battery about 75 meters IIRC. That was about 10 meters between guns.

It is more like 10 paces (8m), which would be about 42m for a 6 piece battery.

aye,

In my own system I give a frontage for three rank deep formations of infantry a frontage per 40 man figure of 9mm. I give the exact same frontage for each gun in a battery. So 6 guns in my system is 54yds – 8 gun batteries is 72yds and 12 gun batteries is 108yds.

My scale is 1mm = 1yd

A French btln at full strength of 840 men in line would cover a frontage of 21 figs x 9mm = 189mm (189yds). So a btln of infantry will stretch out much wider than a battery of guns.

Surely this will depend entirely on the horizontal (ground) scale and figures ratio of the rules used will it not?

Bill

Clausewitz stated that: 'A battery of eight six-pounders takes up less than one-third of the front taken up by an infantry battalion; it has less than one-eighth the men of a battalion, and yet its fire is two to three times as effective.'

- Allan

@ XV –

It should be feasible to figure out what the ratios ought to be though I guess.

I'm using 27-figure battalions at 1:33 on 13mm frontage per figure. They'd have occupied 200m of frontage, but the figures actually occupy 35cm of tabletop space. So 35cm = 200m, so an 8-gun foot artillery battery on 8m per gun should be about a third of that, or 12cm.

Gamers tend to overestimate the front of a battalion in close order.

Of the 600 men 8% or 50 or so would be cadre of some sort and not be in the ranks. So it would be 550/3 ranks = 183 files x 22" (file width) = 112 yards or so I did not allow for the evil of bunching where men hide behind each other to avoid fire which would further diminish a battalion's front.

Batteries will occupy the space available with 15/20 yards between guns (the greater the distance the smaller the target. If desired the guns could be compress to 10 yards or so but this causes the battery to become a much better target while narrowing the play of the guns. Except in the movies artillerymen did not like to deploy their guns in a dressed line but rather staggered them. This made the battery a smaller target. The 15/20 yards between guns gave each greater play.

Thus, a 6 gun battery with 20 or so yards between guns would occupy about 120 yards including 10 yards allowed on each flank. Thus infantry and artillery occupy close to the same frontage.

Good gaming.

Bob Coggins

Ahh, see, here is where I get confused with this question.

Here's a TMP link that says that a 6 gun French battery should be about 120 meters or so:
TMP link

Scan down, it's the post by MichaelCollinsHimself.
Here's a quote:

"French: 20 yards. Between batteries: 36 metres. Massed batteries: smaller intervals.
Frontage of 6-gun battery: 100 yards +16 yards for the guns. (Up to 116 yards.)"

That would make the frontage of the artillery battery about the same as a 600 man French battalion in three ranks. I've done some math and it works out to about .85 meter per man, times 200 files. He has the deployment ratios of the other major nations as well in there. Most of the other nations actually deploy much closer together. For instance the Austrians deploy 6 guns across 47 yards, for example…

The reason I'm concerned about getting it right is because I'm working on a DIY 1:1 project, but I want to also be able to use the artillery in 3:1 and 2:1 ratio as well. Ideally I could do this in such a way that I can still show full gun batteries at 2:1 and 3:1. I think what I'll end up doing is using 40 x 20mm bases for the guns. When I do 1:1 I'll just have to deploy the individual gun bases with some distance between them, and for the small games close up the spaces. 20mm frontage x 6 would give me 120mm, which would be two-thirds the frontage of my 3:1 infantry battalions in line, which is 180mm (3 x 60mm x 20mm bases). So even if I wanted to space them out at that scale I could do so.

Then again, people in this topic have led me to believe that French batteries were not actually as wide as stated in the previous post. To take an average of all the answers I've seen it sounds like anything from 1/2 to 2/3 frontage compared to a battalion and allowing for terrain would be about right, but that the guns could and did contract when necessitated by battlefield conditions.

Anyways, I'll also be modeling two rows of wagons per gun plus caissons, plus all the artillery and crew, which means I'll also have to figure out depth, which is apparently even greater than the frontage of a battery. When its all finished up it should look really, really good on the battle field, with almost 30 wagons/caissons per battery, and all gunners/supernumeraries represented! Fortunately this is not so expensive when using Pico armor figures…

The key variable is this what frontage you think guns occupy.

Per DH: 8m between guns, so 6 guns = ~40m.

Per Ratisbon: 20m between guns, so 120m.

Ratisbon- point taken. I posted my last as you were posting. As I said I think I'm going to cast my gun bases singularly and then just space them out as needed.

Looking at Smola, he recommends 15-20 paces between each gun, which is 40-54ft or 13-17m roughly and he suggests more if possible. Add in the width of the gun, about 1.75m and you get 110-130m.

There's an article on link which also says 13m. it's for British 12-pounders, but hey.

Allan. Interesting quote from Clausewitz – would be interesting to know context. Sounds as if he talking about relative effectiveness.

Prussian infantry battalions were quite big (900 plus I think was common) – so this fits with the idea that a 6-gun battery would take about half the frontage of 600 man battalion.

But then again, it sounds as if there was extra space then the artillery would spread themselves out on a broader frontage. In a wargames context you would base on the narrower frontage and allow larger intervals.

Matthew