"A general ACW artillery rules question." Topic

With Confederate battery's having usually only 4 guns and a Union battery has 6 do some rules still count tubes and multiply for the results, somewhat giving a advantage to the Union? Example 4 x .25 = 1 casualty.

Many rules give the Union an advantage with + to hit or firing on a better row of achart. I have not seen this specific mechanic in any recent rule sets I canthink of.

Depends on how the rules do combat. In rules where you roll a number of dice (say, looking for 5 or 6 to hit), the number of dice rolled are usually based on the number of guns. In rules where 1 gun artillery stand represents the whole 4 or 6 gun battery, the number of artillerists mounted on the base is the number of dice you throw (2 figures on the base means the base represents 4 gun, 3 figures on the base means the base represents 6 guns). In Larry Brom's ACW rules, 1 gun model represents 2 guns, so a 4 gun battery has 2 bases and a 6 gun battery has 3 bases.

Union + to hit takes care of differing number of tubes and less than stellar Confederate ammunition. Home manufactured ammo had more duds than foreign imports or captured rounds.

The usual approaches are to represent batteries by groups of sections (2 guns) at the tactical level, or to represent something similar to artillery battalions/brigades (usually 12-16 guns) at the grand tactical level. I'm not aware of any rules off-hand that simply represent a "battery" of 4-6 guns as a single base, but that could be handled by treating 6 guns as the average and giving "small" batteries of 4 guns a negative modifier.

In the case where sections are represented, each section usually has its own firepower factors etc., so the effect of the number and type of guns is taken care of by the tabletop mix. Despite this, factoring in the poor quality of CSA long range ammo (terrible fuses with astounding failure rates) is a good idea regardless, but not seen so often.

When your grand-tactical artillery unit represents a larger number of guns and multiple batteries, the numbers of guns per battery doesn't usually factor in (i.e. a unit of 12 guns would be 2x 6 gun batteries or 3x 4 gun batteries). At this more abstract scale it's probably more appropriate to have the option of simply treating them as "artillery" rather than rifled/smoothbore etc., i.e. recognizing that we are dealing with groups of guns that are probably mixed types regardless. In this case, recognizing the greater number of Union rifled guns and the poor CSA long range ammunition is also appropriate.

Cheers,

Christopher

Peter Pig,s "Civil war battles" gives an advantage to union batteries

martin

To explain , I'm going to do another Gettysburg Napoleonic style again having recently finished all my Prussian (Union) battery's to 3 models each converting to 1 4 figure stand and 2 2 figure stands. My Russians have 1/2 of there battery's to 4 gun models but doesn't change breaking them into 4 gun battery's. Having done this before I found the "union" side had a big advantage counting tubes as the "Confederates" fired a lot but never seem to hit anyone and wonder how ACW rules work.

We got round for our DBA-style rules this by giving almost all Union batteries and a small number of Confederate batteries a leader figure who gives a '+1'. If he battery loses, but is not destroyed, in a counter-battery fight or against infantry the leader figure is removed.

I've read that Confederate powder was superior to union powder.

From what I`ve read it was the fuses that was the problem

Brigade level Fire & Fury gives the advantage to Union artillery as part of figuring fire factors. It incorporates both the larger batteries and the better ammo. Regimental F&F has each section represented, so a Union battery has three stands and a Confederate (usually) has two.

The problem with the CSA ammo was the fuses – they were documented to have failure rates around 4/5 (early war smoothbore shell fuses, the vast majority of the CSA guns) to 3/4 (rifled shell fuses), and the problems were really only sorted out for the smoothbore ammo late in the war (after Gettysburg) and never for the rifles, which the South simply lacked the industry for before the war and was never able to develop.

The effect of this critical ammo failure should not be underestimated, and I recall reading estimates of really terrible early war fuses that had a failure rate of 19/20! For instance, CSA artillerists were very soon ordered to never fire over the heads of their own troops for fear of the shells exploding prematurely. However – this does not apply to short range canister ammo, so the CSA penalty should be on fire over 300 yards or so.

Here's a link to comments on CSA artillery by Gen. E. P. Alexander, Chief of Artillery of Longstreet's Corps, who should know his business! ;)
link

Cheers,

Christopher

In Brigade Fire and Fury a stand of artillery represents 8 guns (or 6 if playing the 'smaller' scale), regardless of the number or size of individual batteries.

The Union artillery has better fire power, reflecting the better ammo it usually had.

It's a simple but effective and easy to play mechanism.

I haven't played regimental so I can't comment.

Certainly in the Trans-Mississippi the Confederates suffered adversely from using inferior powder imported from Mexico

….. I looked into the Confederate fuze problem in some detail. As I understand it, it related to time fuzes. This meant that the ammunition affected was smoothbore explosive shell and both smoothbore and rifled case (shrapnel), while smoothbore round shot, percussion-fuzed rifled shells and all canister/grape generally worked as advertised.

B

The big problem for the Confederates was that they couldn't reproduce the Borman time fuse with their limited production capability. The Union just had better industrial processes to knock out large amounts of what for the time was a fairly complicated item in massive numbers.

….. Spot on, Trajanus. The Confederates were trying to make do with old-fashioned (Napoleonic-type) wooden plug time fuze and were having huge difficulties in manufacturing them properly.

B

Leadership wins battles; logistics wins wars.

The Confederates were trying to make do with old-fashioned (Napoleonic-type) wooden plug time fuze and were having huge difficulties in manufacturing them properly.

Yeah it was quite a drawback. If you think about it, in infantry terms it was a bit like fighting percussion armed troops, when yours have matchlocks!