"Math Question for ACW Rules (2mil Version)" Topic

Here we go: if the rules say maximum range for small armes fire is 6cm, and for artillery fire is 30cm, I have a presumed ground scale of 1cm=50 yards, my artillery stand (15mm frontage) takes up 75 yards and my infantry stand (30mm frontage) takes up 150 yards, as does my cavalry stand. In no case is a second stand behind the first allowed to take part in fire or melee.
Question: how many guns, infantry and cavalry are prepresented by each stand? There is no right answer as such, but I'm very interested in the reasoning behind the answers.

Thanks.

Infantry – maybe an average of 150 per base? A couple of ranks at 2 yards per file.
Cavalry – a guess, but 50 – 75.
Artillery – should be able to work this out from manuals, but 2-3 guns.
300 yard effective range for infantry seems reasonable.

I suspect it is the ever popular "it feels about right" rather than any mathematical considerations.

martin

Your artillery would be 6 guns, and your infantry would be around 450 or so. Call it 500 if you want to deal in easy numbers. Regulation frontage for a 6 gun battery was something around 80-some yards, so 75 yards is close enough for government work.

But almost all of the Confederate batteries were only 4 guns. And as the war went on, it was similar for the Union batteries, especially in the Western Theater.

Jim

Perfectly true, ColCampbell, but at this scale, I think the best I can do is get the number of guns attached to a division or corps about right, just as I'll (hopefully) get the right number of infantry without being able to replicate the different regimental strengths.

No one's mentioned cavalry. I was intrigued, looking through various rules sets, to see that a specified distance contained either as many cavalry as infantry, two-thirds as many, or half as many, and I was especially hoping people would walk me through their reasoning.

Cavalry is a yard per file, with 12 yards between squadron when deployed in line.

The problem with cavalry is that it could form in line either in one or two ranks, dependant on what drill book the units were trained in. In the East most cavalry, both Union and Confederate, used Poinsett's Tactics and formed up in two ranks. In the West the Union cavalry used either Poinsett or Cooke, whereas for the most part the Confederates used a variation of Cooke. Cooke's Tactics called for the use of a single rank. How to depict these different frontages is going to be a question of what unit you are depicting and in what theatre it fought.

Thus a 150-yard frontage could be two squadrons of about 70 men/yards each with one 10-yard gap between the squadrons. This would fit with a unit using the single rank of Cooke's Tactics. The stand would accordingly represent 140 men.

But if using Poinsett the 150-yard frontage would be taken up by 4 squadrons of 60 men in two ranks each (30 men/yards x 4 + 3 x 10-yard gaps). The stand would then be 240 men strong.

I agree with 79thPA. A single soldier took up 2 ft of frontage so a stand of figures representing a two rank line would have a frontage of 1 foot = 1 soldier. So 150 yards = 450 feet and 450 soldiers. If you want to account for the officers or NCOs who were behind the two ranks, then you can add 2-4 per company or 20-40. That would give your grant total for a stand to be around 500.
Artillery was supposed to be deployed with 14 yards between the centerline of each gun's bore so 84 yards for a 6 gun battery. Using 75 yards is a bit tighter of a spacing, but not unreasonable. Crew needed room to move through that space and so limbers and caissons might when limbering an unlimbering.
I normally use a yard per horse and assume a two rank line for the figures on a base. So 300 mounted cavalry in two ranks.
The rules sound like each stand is supposed to be a regiment (or a portion of a brigade if the brigade is the lowest unit meant to be represented on the table), a gun stand a battery, and a cavalry stand a smaller cavalry regiment or a battalion if using two battalions to a regiment.
That's my reasoning.

Thank you all. For what it's worth, I'm working from John Stafford's old ACW rules for Gettysburg for his daughter's fifth grade class, using centimeters in place of inches. Problem was, he didn't describe scale--other than saying he'd bathtubbed Gettysburg a bit--or his basing beyond "stands." You can generally work out ground scale from ranges, but I wasn't going to rebase my ACW 2mils, and I very much wanted some unbiased assements of what my stands represented before I started looking for scenarios to test against. So now I'm satisfied that my 2' square board will represent a square just under two miles on a side, and that my infantry stands should make up brigades or sometimes weak divisions.

More news as I make more progress.