"Influence of bullet caliber" Topic

I've been reading about the evolution of tactics in 16th and early 17th century and although much is discussed on type of weapons used as well as changes in maneuvers especially of infantry, it's hard to find anything on caliber of bullets. I have read that caliber changed and had an influence on armor as well as tactics but I wonder specifically how heavy the caliber was and when?

I don't think caliber is the deciding factor, the gunpowder and weapon is more important. Getting the fps rate up was the demise of armor.
I have a reproduction Brown Bess a 75 cal, so know while a very large bullet also doesn't take much to stop it after too far down range.

I agree with 14Bore. I'm a black powder hunter/shooter. It is surprising how fast a .75 ball looses velocity. I have often wondered how one would work, if it was dimpled like a golf ball.

Interesting, I've read that muskets were initially very heavy and made to penetrate heavy armor. They were much heavier than the arquebus.

MikeTJ I cast my own, certainly could but not sure how uniform I could make it.
Weapon weight became less as barrels thinned and became shorter

There was a major shift to heavier calibers as the musket was introduced and then began to replace the arquebus.

At the time caliber was measured by how many shot you would get from a pound of lead and since the pound was anything but standardised (the English pound was different from the Saxon and Nürnberg pounds used by German gunmakers and so on) you ended up with a lot of small differences between weapons that on paper seemed to be the same caliber. To make matters even more confusing guns were bore to one caliber but the bullets were cast slightly smaller for easier loading. So a musket firing 8 shot to the pound would actually be loaded with bullets cast 10 to the pound "rolling".

Early arquebus typically had a a caliber of 30-40 shot/pound
but had increased to 20-30 shot/pound by the end of the 16th Century. (24/shot pound was quite common)

Muskets on the other hand started out at 8 shot to the pound and only slowly went to lighter shot with 10 or 12 to the pound.

Modern day test by the staff of the Graz Armoury and the Austrian armed forces laboraty using the vast collection of original firearms stored in Graz have shown a marked difference in effective range between the the arquebus and the musket.

The arquebus they tested had a "lethal range" (i.e highly effective) of 10 meters, for the muskets that range was extended to 30 meters. When looking at the effective range the differnce was just as great, the musket was effective out to 110 meters (matching the 150 paces mentioned by period military writers) while the arquebus only achived the same effectiveness out to 30 or 40 meters if I remember correctly. Of course shot could be dangerous beyond those ranges but both accuracy and shot energy would be a lot more erratic at longer ranges.