"Canister / grapeshot" Topic

Which guns were designed to fire canisters ?
Only smothbores or rifles also ?

Was there any difference between canister shot from 3" Rifle and lets, say 12lb Howitzer ?

This might help

link

Rifles fired canister as well but it wasn't quite as effective as smoothbores.

Yes to rifles also firing Canister, also nazrat is right that they weren't as good at it as smoothbores.

-Will

The main reason rifles weren't as effective when firing canister is that they had smaller bores. Or put the other way around, even a 6-pounder smoothbore had a slightly wider bore than a 3-inch/10-pounder rifle. The wider bore let the small shot from the canister spread over a wider area.

A 12-pounder howitzer had a 4.62" bore.

The lesser effectiveness of the rifled guns was primarily because they had a much smaller bore than the smoothbore Napoleons (2.9" or 3" vs 4.62"). They weren't flinging as much stuff.

Canister use is often over estimated by gamers.

At Getteysburg only about 11% of all ammunition available to the AoP was Canister.

A Battery of Napoleons had 96 rounds out 768 and Rifle battery 120 out of 1200 – when first going into action. (both for 6 guns)

However in an emergency it was possible to substitute spherical case for a canister effect, by setting the fuse to zero, giving rise to an explosion just after the round left the gun.

The muzzle velocity from a rifled gun also affected the spray pattern of the canister, which generally consisted of .58 cal. lead balls. The increased speed kept the canister pattern tighted than in a smoothbore.

canister tended to tear the rifling out of a rifled piece.

Good point on the rifling damage but I expect when you were on the point of being over run that consideration went out the window! :o)

The canister patten in general appears to have been a lot tighter per gun than a lot of wargames rules allow for.

This test gives a good visual on it. Its been posted on TMP before by me and others but for those who have not seen it the live fire is very interesting.

YouTube link

Very interesting. I wish they'd shown more of the "wall" to get a better idea of how many hits there were.

In Napoleonic games players tend to push the guns into canister range and leave them there, probably firing as many canister rounds as anything else or more.

In reality, canister was for use in self defense and the average round fired was round shot, spherical case or shell.

The only way to stop players from doing this is to count ammo – and that's a pain.

If you think it is a pain to count ammo with guns, try it with infantry. Still it can be fun sending your troops forward against an infantry line that has been banging away at long range against your skirmishers, and then watch your opponent's face when he realizes he has exhausted his ammo.

If you don't want to count you can simply have a rule that if a certain die roll is thrown, the troops have exhausted their ammo with that round, and will either need to be resupplied or do without.

The Napoleonic games point is interesting.

Although there would have been variation between nations a British 9 pdr Battery in Spain had 36 canister rounds out of 284 at first line. Which if my math is correct is pretty much the same percentage as an AoP battery of Napoleons! All be it for only five guns, the sixth British battery piece being a howitzer.

Maybe they do need to take a reality check!

A simplified book-keeping is to steal the 'Ever Decreasing Number Allocation' (EDNA) from TFL.

Limited consumables (in this case canister) is assigned a number between 1 and 5, the EDNA. Every time it is used roll a d6. If the roll is higher than the EDNA, decrease the EDNA by 1. A EDNA of 0 means no ammo available. If you are someone who accepts non-diorama markers, this could just mean a small die behind the gun.

Many thanks for interesting discussion.
Where can I find exact info on number of canisters for different types of guns ?

Where can I find exact info on number of canisters for different types of guns ?