We’ve had a number of threads here concerning the “stopping power” of various firearms. We’ve even discussed which one has the best stopping power for personal defense use.
My question is about old flintlock weapons, say of the Napoleonic era (~1800). What was the stopping power of the musket of a typical private soldier in Napoleon’s armies? Likewise, what was the stopping power of a junior officer’s flintlock pistol on a ship such as Nelson’s HMS Victory? Would a chest shot from either disable a hellbent attacker, say, at 25 yds?
Well, the standard issue musket for the French army during the Napoleonic wars was the 1777 Corrige An IX. It had a .69" bore, 45" barrel length and threw a soft lead ball at somewhat less than 1000 fps (about 850-900 I would estimate). I guarantee you that if you were hit in the chest at 25 yards, you were going down… managing to hit you accurately was the problem because it was a smoothbore and it’s use was most effective in massed volley fire. A pistol of the day would be somewhat different, even lower velocity, less accuracy and in variable calibers… you might still close distance after taking a pistol shot if it skipped along the ribs or missed anything really vital. Pistols are not long arms, and are last resort weapons for a reason.
A 0.69" ball is 2.8187 cubic centimeters or so. Lead has a density of 11.34 grams per cubic centimeter.
That comes out to 31.964058 grams, which is 493.280797 grains. Using Lokij’s estimates on muzzle velocity, that gives somewhere between 791.3 and 887.1 foot pounds of energy.
That could be totally off - I could be incorrect in assuming that they were made of lead, or that it was pure lead.
Large stopping power. Poor range, accuracy and load time.
For a while, one dude had calculated that a modern version of the .58 Harpers horse pistol, with a triple-powder load (that’s 3 kinds of powder,not 3x the powder) loaded to max, was the most powerful pistol ever commonly made. With some of the next pistols out there, likely no longer true, but still shows the power of those big slow bullets.
Because of the slow moving bullet(round ball) there was very minimal to no-existent hydrostatic shock. The bullet would produce a small wound channel and if it exited, the exit hole would likely be similar to the entrance hole.
A shot that didn’t hit a bone wouldn’t slow down an attacker. Of course this would also depend on the amount of Adrenalin pumping through the veins.
Health care was as crude as the guns, and nearly every wound would be life threatening.
Why, just last night, I caught a bit about the history of sniping that showed a comparison between an old-school flintlock firing a lead ball (.54 caliber, I believe), a Civil War-era weapon firing a minie bullet, and a WWI-era rifle firing a .30 caliber modern cartridge. All were fired at blocks of modeling clay.
The lead ball put a relatively small hole in the clay block, but it was the only one that knocked the clay completely off the target log. Clearly, even though it didn’t put a big hole in the target, it gave it quite a shove, because the slow bullet transferred a lot of energy right into the block. By contrast, the modern cartridge put a huge hole in the clay, mostly due to cavitation caused by the high-velocity round. The clay itself hardly moved, but the damage caused to it in the area of the hit was substantial. The minie bullet, if you’re interested, was right between the two; smaller hole than the modern bullet, but still bigger than the lead ball, and didn’t knock the clay off the log.
Basically, it looks like a lead ball was good at pure “stopping” because of the force the ball exerted on the target, but a modern bullet does far more damage to what it hits. It’s kinda like the difference between being hit with a hammer versus a pick-axe.