There’s some show that’s just ending, which looks into ‘werewolf’ killings in France a couple hundred years ago. They test the accuracy and killing power of silver bullets.
Now, I’ve known for a long time that silver bullets are poor projectiles. They’re too hard for the rifling to ‘bite’ and set them spinning. But in the show, the guy who killed the ‘werewolf’ is shown using a flintlock rifle. Balls of that era were typically patched. That is, they had a lubricated piece of ticking or other material that wrapped around the ball to A) provide a seal; and B) to allow the rifling to spin the ball. The test done on the show used cast silver long bullets fired from brass cases from a lever-action Marlin rifle. The spread was much greater with the silver bullets than with the lead ones.
How accurate would a patched silver (ball) bullet be, fired out of a flintlock rifle, compared to a patched lead ball fired from the same gun?
I would imagine very similar - lead and silver are close enough in density to not really matter if the firearm itself has that level of variability (wrapping the ball in cloth).
Silver is 10.5 g/cm^3 and lead is 11.34 g/cm^3, so for the same size ball they are going to be almost identical weight.
I agree with JoeH2O. A round ball isn’t going to be gripping the rifling itself. The patch is going to be doing the gripping.
A French rifle isn’t going to be the best thing to kill a werewolf with in France 200 years ago. What you want is an Jezail from Afghanistan, if you can get your hands on one in France. While there is no one “jezail” (they were all custom hand made weapons), jezails in general were much longer than European rifles. The American Kentucky and Pennsylvania rifles were also very long and very accurate for their time, but the American rifles were used for hunting and tended to be smaller caliber. French rifles would have also been for hunting, and would have been smaller caliber.
Jezails were military weapons and were much higher caliber. It will cost you a bit more silver, but I’d much rather shoot a .75 cal. round ball at ye ol unfriendly werewolf than a .45 caliber hunting rifle. French military muskets were all smooth bore, and therefore even though they fired a big heavy ball they were less accurate. Unless you’ve borrowed 30 or so musketeers from Napoleon, a Jezail is what you want.
Out of a typical European flintlock, I’d guess your range to be about 200 yards. You’d get 300 or 400 out of a Kentucky/Pennsylvania rifle or a Jezail.
Years ago I read about why silver bullets are inaccurate. The program tonight made me realise that every werewolf movie I’d seen used cartridge-loaded guns. Seeing the flintlock made me say, ‘Hey, wait a minute…’ A poor test on the producer’s part, IMO, using a cartridge rifle with semi-wadcutter ammo whilst investigating a mystery that took place more than 200 years ago.
I did not know that. I knew smoothbores were prevalent at the time, but rifles were not unheard of. Still, a person who wasn’t exactly well-to-do (I think they said he lived on the fringes) would be unlikely to have one.
FWIW, the ‘werewolf’ was determined to be a hyena that the guy owned and used as a murder weapon. Since it was a ‘pet’ it was easy for him to shoot it and be hailed a hero for stopping the terror.
The lubricated patch is put over the muzzle, and the ball is put on top. When the ball is rammed down the barrel, the patch wraps around it. On firing, the patch falls away.
You’re losing me here. I’m see (per your description) a small section of cloth wrapped around a ball inside a rifle barrel. When fired how is the cloth wrapping the ball not going to seriously interfere with the flight of ball down the barrel, much less impart spin to it? Where is my visual failing?
The balls are undersized, and the patch covers them, acting as a gasket. Since it’s a tight fit, the patch grips the lands and grooves. Thus, when the patched ball travels down the barrel, it is rotated by the rifling via the patch.
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If you are having trouble visualizing the patch, watch this video:
He loads the patch and ball right around the 39 second mark.
Everything up until the 1 minute mark or so is ok. After that he does a lot of things that you shouldn’t do. I prefer to push the ball and patch down to the bottom of the barrel with one solid firm push. I don’t like it when people whammity whammity the ramrod over and over like that. And you really don’t want to ever whack down on the ramrod with your hand over the end of the ramrod. If there’s an accidental discharge it will take a good chunk of your hand off.
And when you put the ramrod back under the barrel, you slide it into place with your pinky finger so that your hand is never over the end of the barrel. Again, this makes sure your hand doesn’t get blown to bits if there is an accidental discharge.
:smack:
But aside from doing a couple of things wrong, that is basically how you load a flintlock.
Interesting. I had assumed that they were testing some sort of werewolf legend, not an actual event.
Yeah, Napoleon didn’t like rifles. The French played around with them a bit in the early years of the Napoleonic wars, but quickly switched back to smooth bores. Rifles get too hard to load once the powder starts fouling the barrel, and their longer range doesn’t mean much when the battlefield gets obscured by black powder smoke.
The British had some units armed with Baker rifles though, and some other armies of the time used rifles (not as their main weapon), so rifles certainly weren’t unheard of on the battlefield.
Did the guy actually use silver bullets, though? I thought that was a 20th-century addition to the werewolf legends. As I understand it, medieval werewolves were regarded as tough to kill, but not different qualitatively from a bear or wolverine or any other natural animal that’s tough to kill.
Yeah, there was actually a British unit during the American Revolution that was primarily riflemen, IIRC. Not sure if they ever saw much action using the rifles, but they were equipped at the expense of their commander, who had designed the weapons in question himself (a breech-loading rifle, very advanced for the time). When the commander was killed in battle, the unit was re-equipped with standard muskets (easier on the supply train, I imagine. Plus, the subject matter expert on the weapon was dead.)
The wikipedia article on silver bullets disagrees with nearly everything in that program. It also points out that silver is more malleable that copper and copper bullets work just fine.
I wasn’t watching the show with more than one eye, and I landed on the channel late. Bewildebeest’s link contains a link to the Beast of Gévaudan. I’ve linked to the bit that talks bout the show.
Using identical loads, the silver bullets produced a much wider grouping. This is also what I read years ago. The Wiki segment does not contain references, so I lean toward believing the empirical evidence.
However… Mythbusters tested silver bullets in regards to the Lone Ranger myth that silver bullets are ‘more effective’ than lead ones. They pointed out that silver shrinks more than lead when it cools. That would mean that a silver bullet would not fit the barrel (and the lands and grooves) as well as a lead bullet would; and that would cause accuracy to suffer. So I stand corrected on the issue of silver being too hard to effectively use the rifling. It appears that the issue is shrinkage.
But the Mythbusters and HI tests were using cartridge-loaded firearms and ‘bullet-shaped’ bullets. My question was prompted by seeing the muzzle-loader that uses patched balls. ISTM that a patched silver ball should be as accurate as a lead one. engineer_comp_geek points out that it was unlikely for the Frenchman to have used a rifled firearm. For the purposes of my question, whether the accuracy is the same, I think it’s better to stick with a rifled muzzle-loader. The reason being that, unlike in the show, the question is not ‘Could a guy 250 years ago have killed a “werewolf” with one shot?’, but ‘Is a patched silver ball as accurate as a patched lead ball?’ So I think to test whether that is true the best tool would be the most accurate muzzle-loading firearm that uses a cloth-patched ball.
probably pretty similar; round ball projectiles have poor ballistics and penetration in general, so accuracy for either silver or lead round balls would be crappy. I think silver would be a tiny bit worse due to its lower density.
I can’t see how the lead vs. silver would make much of a difference. If you fired them both out of a smooth bore musket they are going to be accurate to about 50 to 75 yards, and if you fired both out of a rifle they are going to be accurate to about 200 yards.
If someone really wants a definitive answer though you can send me a few silver balls and I’ll be happy to fire them out of my muskets.
