"OHW Ranges and Scale" Topic

I was playing around with ranges for artillery and muskets in One Hour Wargames and this is what I found. Please take a look at my initial assumptions and point out any HUGE missteps. Also, I'm interested in what anyone else might have done with house rules vis-a-vis shooting ranges in OHW. Cheers. sixpluswargaming.blogspot.com/2018/04/of-muskets-cannon-scale.html

I thought that the realistic effective range of a napoleonic musket was 80 yards max. It could go out to , maybe 120yds, but hitting anything was more by chance. ????

Well OHW is a drastically simplified set of rules and justifiably so looking at it's aims. I have no real problem with the ranges as written- are they "accurate"? Well I have no real idea and working out the proper ratio of distance, a definition of what effective fire means and whether you are looking at a massed unit firing or the capabilities of a single weapon make this all very problematic. FWIW I would think that the "effective" ranges of units armed with muskets or 6/8pdr artillery should be about 50 metres for muskets and somewhere around 300 metres for the guns and a useful ability at double those ranges. Of course (especially with the artillery) it may also vary depending on the target- a nice big column of troops can be hit and damaged at a much longer range than a single dispersed company could be by artillery so you could in some cases probably extend their ranges even more. Is this right? Don't know and I guess we'll never really know either.

parrskool:
Definitely the case for a single musket. You're right. But I was looking at the stats from Nafziger's "Imperial Bayonets" as reported here,napolun.com/mirror/napoleonistyka.atspace.com/infantry_tactics_2.htm in trying to arrive at a generalization for massed fire on a "target" the size of a battalion. Perhaps I should be a wee less generous?

bruntonboy
There's much truth to your comments. The effective ranges I used for cannon primarily come from here napoleonguide.com/artillery_ranges.htm which I am aghast to now admit are without a source citation! While I do love OHW for what it is, if the "simple truth" inherent in it's mechanics can be tweaked to maximize my enjoyment, I'm all over that! OHW pretty much assumes your targets are roughly "the broad side of a barn" so I'm thinking poor aim is as good as proper aim? Great comments, Cheers!

Other sets of rules have similar issues – they are tweaked to get "Napoleonic feel". You may find that fixing the ranges breaks something else.

Effective range of a battalion shooting at another battalion is about the length of that battalion (in line)

John

A useful rule of thumb is that musket range is about the same as the frontage of a battalion and artillery range is 6 times that.