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Rifled Musket
A rifled musket, rifle musket, or rifle-musket is a type of firearm made in the mid-19th century. Originally the term referred only to muskets that had been produced as a smoothbore weapon and later had their Gun barrel, barrels replaced with Rifling, rifled barrels. The term later included rifles that directly replaced, and were of the same design overall as, a particular model of smoothbore musket. History and development In the early 19th century, both rifles and muskets were in use. Muskets were smoothbore Muzzleloader, muzzle-loading weapons, firing round lead balls or buck and ball ammunition, that were also designed to accept a bayonet. Rifles were similar in that they used the same kind of flintlock or caplock firing mechanism, but the main difference was that their barrels were rifled – that is, their barrels had grooves cut into the interior surface which would cause the bullet to spin as it left the barrel. Rifles have the advantage of long range accuracy, becau ...
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Springfield 1861
The Springfield Model 1861 was a Minié rifle, Minié-type rifled musket used by the United States Army during the American Civil War. Commonly referred to as the "Springfield" (after its original place of production, Springfield, Massachusetts). It was the most widely used Union Army shoulder weapon during the Civil War, favored for its range, accuracy, and reliability. Overview The barrel was long, firing a .58 caliber Minié ball, and the total weight was approximately . The Model 1861 had a general effective range of but could reliably hit man-sized targets out to when used by marksmen, and used percussion caps which were much more reliable and weather resistant to fire (rather than the flintlocks of the 18th century; the last U.S. flintlock musket was the Springfield Model 1840 Flintlock Musket, Springfield Model 1840). Well-trained troops were able to fire at a rate of three aimed shots per minute while maintaining accuracy up to , though firing distances in the war we ...
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Black Powder
Gunpowder, also commonly known as black powder to distinguish it from modern smokeless powder, is the earliest known chemical explosive. It consists of a mixture of sulfur, charcoal (which is mostly carbon), and potassium nitrate, potassium nitrate (saltpeter). The sulfur and charcoal act as fuels while the saltpeter is an oxidizer. Gunpowder has been widely used as a propellant in firearms, artillery, rocketry, and pyrotechnics, including use as a blasting agent for explosives in quarrying, mining, building Pipeline transport, pipelines, tunnels, and road#Construction, roads. Gunpowder is classified as a Explosive#Low, low explosive because of its relatively slow decomposition rate, low ignition temperature and consequently low brisance, brisance (breaking/shattering). Low explosives deflagration, deflagrate (i.e., burn at subsonic speeds), whereas high explosives detonation, detonate, producing a supersonic shockwave. Ignition of gunpowder packed behind a projectile generates ...
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Metallic Cartridge
A cartridge, also known as a round, is a type of pre-assembled firearm ammunition packaging a projectile (bullet, shot, or slug), a propellant substance ( smokeless powder, black powder substitute, or black powder) and an ignition device ( primer) within a metallic, paper, or plastic case that is precisely made to fit within the barrel chamber of a breechloading gun, for convenient transportation and handling during shooting. Although in popular usage the term "bullet" is often used to refer to a complete cartridge, the correct usage only refers to the projectile. Military and commercial producers continue to pursue the goal of caseless ammunition. Some artillery ammunition uses the same cartridge concept as found in small arms. In other cases, the artillery shell is separate from the propellant charge. A cartridge without a projectile is called a ''blank''; one that is completely inert (contains no active primer and no propellant) is called a '' dummy''; one that faile ...
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Breech-loading
A breechloader is a firearm in which the user loads the ammunition from the breech end of the barrel (i.e., from the rearward, open end of the gun's barrel), as opposed to a muzzleloader, in which the user loads the ammunition from the ( muzzle) end of the barrel. The vast majority of modern firearms are generally breech-loaders, while firearms made before the mid-19th century were mostly smoothbore muzzle-loaders. Only a few muzzleloading weapons, such as mortars, rifle grenades, some rocket launchers, such as the Panzerfaust 3 and RPG-7, and the GP series grenade launchers, have remained in common usage in modern military conflicts. However, referring to a weapon explicitly as breech-loading is mostly limited to weapons where the operator loads ammunition by hand (and not by operating a mechanism such as a bolt-action), such as artillery pieces or break-action small arms. Breech-loading provides the advantage of reduced reloading time because it is far quicker to load ...
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Springfield Model 1861
The Springfield Model 1861 was a Minié-type rifled musket used by the United States Army during the American Civil War. Commonly referred to as the "Springfield" (after its original place of production, Springfield, Massachusetts). It was the most widely used Union Army shoulder weapon during the Civil War, favored for its range, accuracy, and reliability. Overview The barrel was long, firing a .58 caliber Minié ball, and the total weight was approximately . The Model 1861 had a general effective range of but could reliably hit man-sized targets out to when used by marksmen, and used percussion caps which were much more reliable and weather resistant to fire (rather than the flintlocks of the 18th century; the last U.S. flintlock musket was the Springfield Model 1840). Well-trained troops were able to fire at a rate of three aimed shots per minute while maintaining accuracy up to , though firing distances in the war were often much shorter. The most notable difference ...
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Minié Rifle
The Minié rifle was a rifled musket used by the infantry of a number of countries in the mid-19th century. A version was adopted in 1849 following the invention of the Minié ball in 1847 by the French Army captain Claude-Étienne Minié of the Chasseurs d' Orléans and Henri-Gustave Delvigne. The bullet was designed to allow rapid muzzle loading of rifles and was an innovation that brought about the widespread use of the rifle as the main battlefield weapon for individual soldiers. The French adopted it following difficulties encountered by the French army in North Africa, where their muskets were overtaken in range by long-barreled weapons which were handcrafted by their Algerian opponents. Mechanism The rifle used a conical-cylindrical shaped soft lead bullet, slightly smaller than the barrel bore, with three exterior grease-filled peripheral grooves and a conical hollow in its base. When fired, the expanding gas forcibly pushed on the skirted base of the bullet, spread ...
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Santa Barbara, California
Santa Barbara (, meaning ) is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coast of the United States excepting Alaska, the city lies between the steeply rising Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Santa Barbara's climate is often described as Mediterranean climate, Mediterranean, and the city has been dubbed "The American Riviera". According to the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, the city's population was 88,665. In addition to being a popular tourist and resort destination, the city has a diverse economy that includes a large service sector, education, technology, health care, finance, agriculture, manufacturing, and local government. In 2004, the service sector accounted for 35% of local employment. Area institutions of higher learning include the University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara City College, Westmont Co ...
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Musket
A musket is a muzzle-loaded long gun that appeared as a smoothbore weapon in the early 16th century, at first as a heavier variant of the arquebus, capable of penetrating plate armour. By the mid-16th century, this type of musket gradually disappeared as the use of heavy armour declined, but ''musket'' continued as the generic term for smoothbore long guns until the mid-19th century. In turn, this style of musket was retired in the 19th century when rifled muskets (simply called rifles in modern terminology) using the Minié ball (invented by Claude-Étienne Minié in 1849) became common. The development of breech-loading firearms using self-contained Cartridge (firearms), cartridges, introduced by Casimir Lefaucheux in 1835, began to make muskets obsolete. The first reliable repeating rifles, the 1860 Henry rifle and its 1866 descendent the Winchester rifle, superseded muskets entirely. Repeating rifles quickly established themselves as the standard for rifle design, ending the ...
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Claude-Étienne Minié
Claude-Etienne Minié (13 February 1804 – 14 December 1879) was a French military instructor and inventor famous for solving the problem of designing a reliable muzzle-loading rifle by inventing the Minié ball in 1846, and the Minié rifle in 1849. He succeeded the pioneering work of Henri-Gustave Delvigne and Louis-Étienne de Thouvenin. Minié served in a number of African campaigns with the Chasseurs, after which he was eventually promoted to captain. In 1846 he designed the Minié ball, a cylindrical bullet with a conical hollow in the base which expanded when fired. This projectile, combined with his rifle, resulted in a major improvement in firearm accuracy. The French government rewarded Minié with some 20,000 francs and installed him as a member of the staff at the Vincennes military school. In 1858 he retired from the French Army with the rank of colonel and later served as a military instructor for the khedive of Egypt and as a manager at the Remington Arms C ...
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Minié Ball
The Minié ball, or Minie ball, is a type of hollow-based bullet designed by Claude-Étienne Minié for muzzle-loaded, rifled muskets. Invented in 1846 shortly followed by the Minié rifle, the Minié ball came to prominence during the Crimean War and the American Civil War where it was found to inflict significantly more serious wounds than earlier round musket balls. Both the American Springfield Model 1861 and the British Pattern 1853 Enfield rifled muskets, the most common weapons found during the American Civil War, used the Minié ball. Rifling, the addition of spiral grooves inside a gun barrel, imparts a stabilizing spin to a projectile for better external ballistics, greatly increasing the effective range and accuracy of the gun. Before the introduction of the Minié ball, which themselves needed greasing, balls had to be rammed down the barrel, sometimes with a mallet, because gunpowder residue would foul a rifled bore after a relatively small number of shots, ...
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