"Canister fire and Battlefield Archaeology" Topic

Some of you may remember my post about canister fire and battlefield archaeology.

Here is the video to remind you of what I posted:

YouTube link

Here is the academic paper that it produced:

PDF link

This is certainly more interesting than most of the thesis I read!

Well done!

Wow, great paper. Hope it aids immensely in you getting your archaeology degree.

Jim

Interesting paper. What is the arc of fire for canister shown by your experiment? What sort of shape of 'beaten zone' would a battery produce?

The paper said that the cardboard targets at 100 and 300 yards showed a pattern width of 11 meters and 24 meters. The downrange spread of recovered balls (at about 400 yards downrange- the range of the max spread was not noted in the paper) was about 130 meters. Doing the trig, the angle of the width of the shot is 3.1 degrees at 100 yards and 2.3 degrees at 300 yards. That is not very wide. Note that the astronomer rule of thumb is that your thumb, held out at arm's length, covers about a 2 degree angle……… The usual wargaming templates for cannister are often 30 degrees or 45 degrees wide. I'm not sure that represents.

Another interesting thing from the paper is that they only recovered about 44% of the canister shot within the 400 to 600 yard range that they could examine well. Most of it went a lot further.

Another is that the top (nearest the muzzle) layer of shot (painted red) was only recovered at a rate of 26%, whereas the orange, white or pink shot was at 44,47 & 49%. The stuff in the front went further.

Well done, sir. D/Led the document and look forward to reading it.

FWIW, I recall reading in an elderly reference text that the cone of dispersion for a discharge of canister round was approximately +/-10deg from the axis of the bore.

B

From somewhere I have the following notes

"…..Although they are a little later, there are some data from tests near (Buda)Pest in 1826-7 from the second edition of Smola's artillery work (called the Taschenbuch in its first edition and Handbuch in its second) books.google.co.uk/books?id=Oqk … ie&f=false

p147: Showing firing in slow time at a target measuring 6 Fusse x 35 Schritte (a bit over over 6 Feet x 70 feet) across ground favourable for ricochet. The two figures are the number of hits and the width of hits in Schritte (just over 2 feet); a Loth is roughly an ounce. The results are the average of 6 shots at each range.

3pdr (28 x 3 Loth): 200 Sch 7/14; 300 Sch 6/23; 400 Sch 5/26

6pdr (60 x 3 Loth): 200 Sch 24/19; 300 Sch 20/27; 400 Sch 12/28

6pdr (28 x 6 Loth): 200 Sch 9/16; 300 Sch 9/20; 400 Sch 9/26; 500 Sch 7/-

12pdr (114 x 3 Loth): 200 Sch 37/16; 300 Sch 30/26; 400 Sch 16/28; 500 Sch 8/30 "

So for the first 12 pounder gun at 133 yards the angle containing all shot i 4.3 degrees and at 266 yards it is 3.4 degrees. Still not 10 degrees or 30 degrees or 45 degrees. Note that at longer ranges the shot that got banged around with other shot might have lost energy and hit the ground before hitting the most distant target.

Hi 1968Billsfan -
The data in the Baehr paper (greatest width of recovered projectiles versus range appears consistent with a +/- 10deg cone. I wonder if the different results suggested by the Austrian data might relate to length of gun tube (i.e. caliber).

FWIW.

B

Oh, man, I remember that youtube clip from when you posted it!

You guys really had a 'blast' (pun fully intended ), are you going to work with some archeology types again?

(q)You guys really had a 'blast' (pun fully intended evil grin ), are you going to work with some archeology types again?(/q)

Not at the moment, but I'd love to do it with a longer range, ie. no trees next time.

You could try firing at a square 600 yards away and find out how easy it is to hit :-)

Now I feel old.

I keep reading this thinking "cannister", not "canister".

So I checked it out. The two Ns version is described as "obsolete". OK, but if Mercer had been writing about it he would have written…….oh never mind, sob.

Bills fan,
The 30 degree or 45 degree convention in rules is to show that the gun line has some ability to rotate the guns in place as part of the aiming, not just the spread of shot from the line of aim. The rotation helps account for the fact that gunfire resolution is for a period of time, not just the specific granule of frozen time allowed in the turn sequence.

Beware of literalism.

Bills fan,
The 30 degree or 45 degree convention in rules is to show that the gun line has some ability to rotate the guns in place as part of the aiming, not just the spread of shot from the line of aim. The rotation helps account for the fact that gunfire resolution is for a period of time, not just the specific granule of frozen time allowed in the turn sequence.

Beware of literalism.

Of course they could, but many rules allow a narrow arc for far range (ball) and a wide range for canister. ??? Why have a close range "canister" template at all?

Agreed. I always thought the idea a bit pedantic.