A.) Musketry

1.) Range

All sources agree that the usual 300 pace distance between the first and second lines of battle, which remained standard even through the Napoleonic era, was intended to allow the second line to remain untroubled by musket balls aimed at the first, even when the enemy that fired them was very near (Nosworthy, pages 82-83).

Esposito states that the musket's "effective range against formed troops was 200-250 yards; against small groups, 150 yards; against individuals, 100 yards," [a figure cited also by Nosworthy (page 12)], although the physical maximum range is given as 1065 yards, and "some soldiers, by practice, got to be excellent shots and could pick a guerilla from behind a rock at 300 yards." Duffy (-A, page 404), quoting an Austrian officer, states that infantry in assault column, presumably marching at the Austrian double pace [of 120 paces (?) =80 yards per minute], would require four minutes "between coming within effective range and closing with the enemy," which would be consistent with a maximum effective musket range against intimtry of 320 yards. Against cavalry, Duffy (A, page 407) cites the opinion of the same officer that there existed a "worthwhile chance of hitting riders or beasts even at five or six hundred paces" [=500 Prussian paces = 400 yards].

2.) Rate of Fire and Endurance

Again, there is remarkable unanimity among sources consulted that the standard sustained rate of fire, until ammunition ran low and/or muskets became fouled, was 3 rounds per minute Prussian, versus 2 rounds per minute Franco-Austrian, a ratio also reflected in the supply of cartridges that the soldiers carried into battle - 60 Prussian (Osprey #240, page 15) versus 40 Austrian (Osprey #276, page 18), or 20 minutes-worth for each. The oft-quoted statement of the Prince De Ligne, that the Prussians "can get off three rounds to the Austrians' one," appears to refer only to the first minute or so of fire, when the Prussians might fire as many as 6 rounds before settling into their normal 3 per minute. 

It is claimed on behalf of the Russian infantry that they, in turn, outshot their enemy "at a ratio of three shots for every two of the Prussians" (Osprey #297, page 37). On its face, this would give the Russian infantry a rate of fire of 4 1/2 rounds per minute, which would cause them to empty their 18-round cartridge boxes - not increased to 40 rounds capacity until 1761 (Osprey #297, page 23) - in only 4 minutes! Is this realistic? Duffy (-A, page 409) points out that "at Leuthen, the Prussian soldiers' ammunition pouches were refilled up to twice over by a systematic supply from extra ammunition carts." Perhaps the Russians had similar arrangements; indeed they must have, in order for their ammunition supply to have outlasted the Prussians' at Kunersdorf, to which their victory thereat is partly attributed (Showalter, page 247).

Even so, a sustained 4 1/2 rounds per minute would seem a tad high. I think it more likely that the observed 3-to-2 ratio of Russian to Prussian musket discharges resulted from the fact that in all their major battles, the Prussians were on the attack, which must necessarily have reduced their average rate of fire below their usual 3 per minute, while the Russians fired from a standstill. Moreover, while the Prussian ranks were thinned by losses incurred during their advance, Russian casualties would have been made up from each battalion's 3 platoon "reserve" held 50 yards behind the firing line (Osprey #297, page 37), thereby allowing said line to maintain its original volume of fire albeit at the cost of shortening the front-per-battalion originally occupied, and of exposing the "reserve" to losses even while and where it waited].

Sources available to me do not specify a rounds-per-minute standard for the Anglo-Hanoverians, although Nosworthy (pages 234-235) does note the growing popularity of Prussian rapid fire doctrine among British officers after 1748. The superior fire effectiveness exhibited by the Anglo-Dutch infantry visa-vis the French in earlier 18th-century wars is attributed by Nosworthy to French adherence to clumsy fire-by-rank methods. It is not clear whether this British advantage persisted into the Seven Years' War, by which time the French had converted to the platoon fire method long in use elsewhere.

If not sooner due to exhaustion of ammunition, an infantry's fire must later fall off, to perhaps only 1 1/3 rounds per minute (Esposito), as a result of the muskets' becoming fouled. For those infantries using the dirtier gunpowder -- Austrian (Duffy-A, page 247) and French (Duffy's introduction to Corbett's England in the Seven Years' War, page xxii) -- this point must come after fewer rounds than for their enemies; but then, since they fire fewer rounds-per minute anyhow, it may be that this point arrives no sooner in time.

3.) Lethality Alike to the wargamer and to the real life commander in the field, his infantry's rate of fire, the plenitude of its ammunition, the quality of gunpowder, etc. are given values. The one factor bearing upon the lethality of fire which he can affect by his maneuvers [and that imperfectly] is the range at which firefights occur. But beyond the obvious truth that the percentage of hits increases as the range decreases, there is little agreement among our various sources as to just how steep the rate of ascent should be.

The contemporary trial shoots reported by Duffy (-P, page 128; -A, page 409) neither replicated battle conditions nor yielded consistent results. Esposito, speaking of the effect of battalion volleys at different ranges, states that within 30 or 40 yards "massed fire was murderous, the soft lead slugs knocking over whole ranks, often with 50 per cent casualties." A very different opinion regarding the lethality of fire at this same range is that attributed to Frederick by Thomas Carlyle (SYWAJ, Vol. VI No. 2, page 34): "If you step sharply up to an Austrian battalion (50 paces) [= 40 yards] and pour in your fire well, in about a quarter hour [emphasis added] you will see the ranks begin to shake and jumble toward indistinctness."

Bucholz (page 88), reporting the results of research utilized by the German General Staff in the late 19th century to estimate the effect of casualties upon the morale of a 250-man infantry company, states that it might "lose 40 men without flinching," but "had to be considered shaken" after having lost 60 to 90, and "a loss of 120 men even under the most favorable circumstances put a company out of action and a loss of 150 men was equivalent to its complete destruction." If this standard be applicable also to the 18th century, and generously interpreted to require the same 50 percent casualties to produce Frederick's "shake and jumble" as Esposito asserts might be achieved by a single massed volley, then Frederick's "quarter hour" translates into 45 times [15 minutes x 3 rounds per minute] the volume of fire supposed by Esposito to be required to produce the same number of hits at the same range. [Actually not so much, since the Austrians would be shooting back, and so reducing the number of Prussians firing as the quarter-hour progressed, but you get the idea.] How are such divergent figures to be reconciled? It must be left to the taste of the game designer to determine some expected value between these extremes.

4.) Relative Lethality: Grenadier vs. Musketeer Fire

It is sometimes said that the fire of musketeers should be counted less effective than that of grenadiers. Young & Lawford (page 64) assess musketeer fire effect at only 3/4 that of grenadiers, man-for-man. Davis (S&T No. 49, page 8) is even more disparaging of the musketeers' marksmanship, guessing that they "probably performed about half as well" as the grenadiers. Is this credible?

If grenadiers were indeed elite troops in other than name, then certainly they must have had capability of some kind superior to that of the musketeers. The question is whether the grenadiers' superiority is to be found in effectiveness of fire, or, as I think more likely, in effectiveness at melee. We are told that men were selected for the grenadiers for their strength and aggressiveness (Duffy-R, page 63; Duffy-P, pages 108-110; etc.), qualities relevant more to brawling than shooting. 

The real test is how the grenadiers were used on the battlefield. If the superiority of grenadiers lay in their firepower, then we would expect to find grenadier battalions occupying positions in the line of battle such as would give the fullest scope for the employment of their muskets. On the other hand, if their true forte were hand-to-hand combat, then we would expect to find them at the start of the battle either held in reserve, or, if in the front line, deployed behind and as supports for artillery batteries, or used to spearhead attacks. It being notoriously the latter roles to which grenadier battalions were assigned, we must conclude that it is the latter hypothesis with regard to their comparative advantage [to borrow a term from the field of economics] that is correct.

With regard to French army usage, it is necessary to distinguish between the "grenadiers" organic to line battalions, typically employed along with the "picquets" thereof as skirmishers, and those grenadiers belonging to homogeneous grenadier battalions - the Grenadiers Royaux and the Grenadiers de France - serving the tactical role more typically associated with the grenadiers of other armies. Skirmisher fire, being aimed, was undoubtedly the most effective form of infantry fire, whatever the sort of troops using it. Quite possibly it was the employment of grenadiers as skirmishers that first gave rise to the idea of the fire superiority of grenadiers per se.

5.) Infantry Against Cavalry

If the cavalry must build momentum over some distance for its charge to attain full power, and if this distance may be assumed to exceed the effective range of infantry muskets, it follows that the wargamer will rarely have occasion to assess musketry's effect upon cavalry other than in connection with a charge thereof. And it seems clear, before considering other influences, that the losses suffered by cavalry in the course of an 8 mph [240 yards-per-minute] charge-atthe-trot against a defending infantry force would be only 1/3 those suffered by an attack force of infantry advancing through the same killing zone at 2.67 mph [80 yards-per-minute assault march]; for cavalry charging at a 12 mph gallop, the ratio would be only 2/9.

What other influences need be considered?

(1) The higher profile of a line of cavalry compared to a line of infantry gave to the defending infantry a "worthwhile chance of hitting riders or beasts" at a distance somewhat greater than muskets' maximum effective range against foot targets (Duffy-A, page 407), and probably an increased chance of hitting at lesser distances as well.

(2) Set against this would be the "truism among cavalry officers that not all who are hit are disabled" (Nosworthy, page 136). Also, "some heavy cavalrymen wore body armor and had some protection against glancing balls" (Young & Lawford, page 22).

(3) Riders night remain unscathed though their horses were hit, and vice versa. Although having one's horse collapse might be an "unpleasant experience troopers whose horses had been shot had a chance of catching and remounting riderless horses" (Young & Lawford, page 22).

(4) In seeming contradiction to the thesis that the fall of a cavalry horse was merely "unpleasant" to the rider, Nosworthy (page 180) quotes the contemporary account of an unsuccessful charge by cavalry upon infantry, describing the appalling consequences of a chain reaction pile-up of cavalry horses moving in dense formation at high speed: "The horses made desperate efforts to break away outward and avoid the fire [of the infantry]. The pressure now became so great that men and horses overturned each other and rolled about in helpless confusion. Few were killed by gunshot wounds, but.... were torn from their horses, trampled to death, or had their limbs broken."

It seems to me that these four other influences might well be deemed to cancel out one another. Here is the place for another judgment call on the part of the game designer.

In any case, the main security for infantry against cavalry was not fire, but massed bayonets (Nosworthy, pages 33-35, 132, 137-139, etc.). Bayonet density sufficient to deter frontal attack by enemy cavalry might be maintained in the face of firefight-induced attrition by either of two methods, each with its advantages and drawbacks.

The first method, used by the Russians (Osprey #297, pages 36-37), was to withhold a portion of the original strength of each battalion in a non-firing fourth rank or multi-platoon reserve immediately behind the front, from which losses suffered by the firing line might be made good as fast as they occurred. Because this method exposed the fourth rank/reserve itself to losses from enemy fire while and where it only stood and waited, it required troops of stolid temperament to be employed with success. Even then it remained wasteful of life. Further, it proportionately reduced the initial extent of front that each battalion could hold.

The second method, used by the Prussians (Showalter, page 215), was to have each battalion contract its width as losses were incurred, in order to preserve a 3-rank depth over the frontage remaining. The gaps thereby opened in the firing line were to be filled by the advance of whole units from the second line, a safe 300 paces to the rear. But any delay in filling these gaps could leave the infantry just as vulnerable to an enterprising enemy cavalry as had the battalions passively accepted the thinning of their ranks on their original frontwidths. And even when working properly, the repeated lateral shuffling of frontline formations required by this method must have caused interruptions in the delivery of fire.

B.) Artillery

1.) Range

Just as the 300-pace interline standard furnishes us with our best clue as to the effective range of musketry, so also the surest indication of the effective range of artillery is the behavior of a savvy enemy in its vicinity. Although marching in column-of-route allowed an army to cover distances more quickly than when deployed in line, the plowing of a cannonball down the length of such column marching toward the cannon would cause so many more casualties than would that same missile's passing-thru a 3-rank line marching in the same direction that commanders were loath to prolong the march by column into the hostile artillery's effective range.

Accordingly, we may know that range by the distance, minus some safety margin, at which an army advancing against it would typically deploy from column into line. This distance was 1500 to 2000 Prussian paces (Nosworthy, page 287) or 1200 to 1600 yards or 7.5 to 10 battalion-widths. For purposes of tabletop wargames, the smaller figure is the more convenient to employ, especially given its happy consistency with the following table of effective ranges in yards furnished by Esposito:

Type	Cannon shot / howitzer shell	Canister
12-pounder gun	920 to 1050	600 to 700
6 or 8-pounder gun	820 to 920	500 to 600
4-pounder gun	820 to 920	400 to 500
6-inch howitzer	750 to 1300	450 to 600

These figures would be for Napoleonic-era French "Gribeauval system" pieces. We may speculate that the "Valliere system" guns still employed by France during the Seven Years' War as heavy field artillery - otherwise criticized for their inferior mobility relative to the proto-Gribeauval guns of Austria and, later, Prussia - may have had a greater effective range and/or smashing power for their throw-weights due to their longer barrels. Surely the Valliere designs must have offered some compensating advantage for their inferior mobility, such as might justify their retention to persons other than the devoted son of their originator!

After all, the 3200 pound weight of the Valliere 12-pounder (Osprey #304, page 39) was no greater than the 3200-3800 pound weight of the Prussian "Brummer" 12-pounder (Duffy-P, page 173), and we read nothing but praise for the latter. One cannot help but wonder whether their respective reputations are not the result of some 18th century spin-doctoring.

We have better evidence concerning the effective range of howitzers relative to that of guns, thanks to the special circumstances of the Russian artillery. We know that (1) the artillery arm occupied a place in the overall force structure greater in the Russian army than in any other, "giving them artillery support far beyond that expected by other European armies" (Osprey #298, pages 42-43); and that (2) this artillery "was absolutely unique among the artilleries of Europe in that fully 75% of it was howitzer, rather than cannon, in type" (SYWAJ, Vol X, No. 2, pages 49-50).

From this it follows that if the performance of howitzers were undifferentiated from that of guns, then, other things being equal, the better method of attacking a Russian army from the front [if do so one must] would be to rush in to close quarters as swifly its possible, minimizing the time spent in the killing zone of its numerous missile weapons. This was the method used by Wedell [a commander characterized by Duffy (-P, page 286) as "stupid"] at Paltzig, with very poor results. On the other hand, if howitzer design traded away the cannon's effectiveness at long range in exchange for improved killing-power at short, then we would expect an army condemned to making a frontal attack upon the Russian to stand-off for an hour or two while its cannons expended their ammunition from a range at which an opposing artillery composed mostly of howitzers could make little reply. This was the procedure used by Frederick at Zorndorf.

Because the Gribeauval system, once finally adopted, was not replaced by the French until 1825 (Kennett, page 140), and because the Russian Seven Years' War "unicorn" gun/howitzer hybrids "remained in service until the second half of the nineteenth century" (Duffy-R, page 72), it may be instructive also to consider Esposito's account of the battle of Borodino in 1812: "The shift of Russian troops from both flanks toward the center, and the advance of part of the Russian Guard, gave the French artillery an increasingly massive target ... so effective was its fire that some critics have suggested that this was Napoleon's real plan - to force Kutuzov to concentrate his army under the muzzles of Napoleon's massed guns ... the Russians themselves worked their masses of guns enthusiastically, but with much less effect; their gunners were less skillful, and much of the French army was still under cover or out of range." [Emphasis added.]

If truly the best indications of the capabilities of a weapon are the tactics of intelligent enemies there toward, then we can conclude that it is the latter hypothesis regarding howitzer vs. cannon performance which is correct.

A word must be said about canister. Notwithstanding the ranges given therefor in the table above, Young & Lawford (page 17) assert that even the heavier, farther-flying grapeshot "was not much used at ranges greater than 350 yards." Duffy (-P, page 176), while citing the following Prussian official ranges for canister, warns that the effective ranges were shorter, "as little as 100 paces for the battalion pieces."

Canister Ranges in Prussian Paces
24-pounder gun	1000 [= 800 yards]
12-pounder gun	800 [= 640 yards]
6-pounder gun	650 [= 520 yards]
3-pounder gun	550 [= 440 yards]

2.) Rate of Fire

Express information on the rates of fire for Seven Years' War heavy field artillery being scarce, it is necessary to extrapolate from data for siege, naval, and Napoleonic field guns. Duffy (-F&S, pages 142 and 148), speaking of fortress rampart-breaching fire, for which "nothing less than a 24-pounder would do," states: "A rate of fire of twenty rounds per hour was considered a safe average ... a well-trained crew could fire thirty rounds an hour." Eighteenth century 12-pounder naval cannon are said to have had a rate of fire of 2 rounds per minute in the British and American navies, one round per minute in others (Isby, Strategy & Tactics, No. 44, pages 30-31). Esposito, speaking of Napoleonic field pieces, declares that "good gun crews could get off two rounds a minute from the lighter guns, one from a 12-pounder."

Indirect support for the one-round-per-minute figure for 12-pounders is provided by events of the Battle of Zorndorf. In a tactical situation [described above] which invited the Prussians to exhaust their roundshot ammunition before advancing into canister/musket range, they required something less than two hours so to do. Compare this time span to the ready-supply of 100-120 rounds, two-thirds to three-quarters roundshot, available to each heavy gun from its organic ammunition carts, plus what might be brought up from army trains - which, in the French army at least, carried additional ammunition sufficient to bring the combined total to 200 rounds per gun (Kennett, page 118).

To fire a battery piece more than 100-120 times a day would cause the barrel to droop from over-heating and the bore to erode (Duffy-A, page 290), which may explain why the ready-supply of ammunition was limited to that quantity.

All things considered, it seems proper and convenient to suppose that each battery piece, of whatever per-discharge throw-weight, hurls the same 12 pounds of roundshot or 150-160 canister balls per-minute, for a maximum number of minutes-per-day proportional to the weight per shot, thus:

The rounds per-minute figure for the 3-pounder is relevant to the Austrian service (Duffy-A, page 290), wherein even such small pieces were employed as battery guns.

This equality in per-minute throw-weight per piece across pieces of varying per-discharge throw-weight, considered in combination with our earlier insight regarding the equality of per-discharge throw-weight per given frontspace [as a result of the heavier types requiring wider frontages per piece], means that, against soft targets at short ranges for short periods, a given width of frontspace is better-defended if filled with lighter guns.

However, it is the greater range and smashing power of the heavier pieces that constitute artillery's comparative advantage. No state can afford pieces enough [or the horses to pull them] for artillery to serve as a front-filler; that role must be left to the infantry. The real utility of the lighter guns in [mixed] battery is to provide close-in defense for the heavier guns against oncoming enemy cavalry and infantry, much as the quicker-firing light guns on an early 20th-century battleship were intended to fend off torpedo boats and other pests, and so keep the big guns free for long range hitting.

But it is not a case of simply adding light guns to the heavy. Frontspace [not to mention space in the army's horse-and-fodder budget] taken up by the one type is frontspace thereby made unavailable to the other. This is why I propose to calculate the relative firepower of standard battalion-width artillery batteries using a mix of types for each army consistent with the totals - by-type available thereto for battery work. For example, I might assume a nine 12-pounder equivalent Austrian battery to consist of four 12-pounders, six 6-pounders, and eight 3-pounders - a mix consistent with the [late-war] numbers available [60 - 90 - 120] for each type (Duffy-A, page 250) after subtracting about 240 3pounders for battalion guns [60 regiments x 2 battalions x 2 guns]. Such a battery of 18 pieces would have double the throw-weight per-minute at very short range of a per-discharge-equivalent battery consisting of nine 12-pounders.

Cogswell (in St. Paul, R&M, page 32) comments that the inclusion of pieces as small as 2-pounders in the Austrian artillery park at Prague in 1757 "bespeaks desperation," but the same cannot be true of the modem Liechtenstein 3pounders, developed only since 1748 (Duffy-A, page 283) and mobilized in quantities well in excess of those required purely for battalion gun purposes. I rather believe their admixture in the Austrian positional artillery to have been a deliberate policy, entirely in keeping with the defensive cast of the Austrian military mind, and entirely reasonable too, in view of the growing capability of the Prussian cavalry as a long-arm weapon.

3.) Relative Lethality: Artillery vs. Infantry Fire

Whatever the game designer's taste may require with respect to fixing the absolute lethality of the fire of an infantry battalion, it subsequently becomes necessary to determine the lethality relative thereto of an equal front-width of artillery. Comparisons between infantry and artillery firepowers are meaningful only within musket range.

As noted above, guns hurl the same 12 pounds of roundshot or 150-160 canister balls per piece per minute, regardless of the throw-weight per discharge. While this 12 pounds of iron will fly-straight over greater distances and impart greater kinetic energy ["smashing power"] at any given distance when in the form of a single 12-pound mass than two of 6 or four of 3 [hurled by guns of like design family], this advantage of the heavier pieces loses its relevance at range sufficiently short, where it is canister that is being fired. 

Our proposed standard Austrian battalion-width mixed battery of 18 guns would emit 2700-2880 canister balls per minute, while a Prussian battalion of 600-640 muskets firing 3 rounds per minute would emit 1800-1920 musket balls in the same time span, or about 2/3 the missile count of the Austrian battery [rising to 7/9 if the fire of the two battalion guns be added].

This ratio is not the end of the story. The misfire rate for flintlock muskets was as high as 33% (Nosworthy, page 40). Canister balls were heavier than musket balls [3 ounces (Duffy-P, page 176) vs. "15 to the pound" (Duffy-P, page 115)], affording an extra measure of stopping power of particular utility against cavalry. On the other hand, at whites-of-their-eyes range the infantrymen could point their muskets directly at individual enemies; the Austrian infantryman was even provided with four (Osprey #276, page 18) to twelve (Duffy-A, pages 407-408) rounds of buckshot for use up close. [Was the Russian infantry provided with any such ammunition? If so, it might explain the Prussians' sensation of "being pelted with peas" by "a final outburst of Russian fire" at the close of the battle of Zorndorf (Duffy-R, page 90)].

Recall, moreover, the datum of Clauswitz quoted earlier that eight 6-pounder guns, occupying 1/3 the frontage of a Napoleonic-era battalion, had firepower two to three times as effective, which is to say that for equal frontwidths of infantry and 6-pounder artillery, the fire effect of the artillery would be six to nine times that of the infantry! Can this be reconciled with the musket-tocanister ball ratio computed above?

The substitution of a homogeneous nine 12-pounder-equivalent battery of eighteen 6-pounder guns for our putative eighteen-gun mixed battery would cause no change in the number of canister balls emitted per minute. The reduction of the assumed rate of infantry fire from 3- to 2-rounds-per-minute would lower the musket ball vs. canister ball ratio from 2/3 to 4/9. That done, switching our focus from missiles-per-minute to missiles-per-discharge would lower the ratio no further, given a 6-pounder rate of fire equal to the 2 roundsper-minute of the infantry. A 33% misfire rate for the infantry would reduce the ratio from 4/9 to 8/27. Finally, even supposing that our Frederician infantry battalion were fully equal in frontage to the Napoleonic battalion used by Clauswitz, such that twenty-four 6-pounder guns would fit onto the width thereof; we might further lower the musket ball to canister ball ratio from 8/27 to 8/36 [or 2/9] - still well shy of the 1/6 or 1/9 ratio for fire effect claimed by Clauswitz.

Clearly, either the effect of canister relative to musketry fire was out of proportion to the plain count of missiles emitted, or [as I suspect is more likely] Clauswitz was speaking not specifically of the fire of artillery at musket/canister range, but more abstractly of the worth of artillery fire over its entire range, including that of roundshot, some two-thirds of its total ammunition supply, to which infantry fire would not extend at all.

4.) Relative Power: Howitzers vs. Cannon, and Design Family vs. Design Family

Steve Carpenter in his most excellent article, "Russian Artillery in the Seven Years' War" (SYWAJ, Vol. X, No. 2) attempts to put howitzers on a basis comparable to guns through characterizing the former's would-be solid shot throw-weights in terms of iron, in place of the stone weights customarily employed. Unfortunately, this only replaces one misimpression with another: for although it is true that the howitzers did not actually fire stone shot, neither did they fire shot of solid iron, but rather "shell" of hollow iron spheres filled with explosive, of actual weights about midway between the iron and stone figures [double the stone weight (Duffy-P, page 175) or 3/4 the iron weight, if stone be 3/8 as heavy as iron by volume]. In any case, shell acts by fragmentation, not smashing as with solid shot. Therefore, comparisons-of-worth between guns and howitzers based on the sizes of their projectiles, whether expressed in diameters, stone weight equivalents, or iron weight equivalents, are without meaning.

What common denominator, then, can be used to gauge the relative worths of howitzers and guns?

As with other goods in a market economy, the best indication of the value of a howitzer relative to that of a gun, or, for that matter, of one gun to another, is what an informed consumer is willing to pay for the use of either. Duffy (-P, pages 95-96) demonstrates that the initial acquisition cost of eighteenth century weapons hardware of all kinds was "proportionately very cheap by modern standards," comprising but a tiny share of the state's war budget. Where the money went was toward fodder and food for horse and man, clothing, soldier/employee pay and benefits, and horse purchases. There-fore, the best and most convenient index of relative cost/value for any piece of artillery is the number of men and, especially, horses required for its operation and maintenance in the field, which is related most directly not to muzzle bore, but to barrel weight.

Barrel weight was not simply a burden to be minimized, as Frederick learned the hard way (Duffy-P, pages 172-174). Rather, at any given level of metallurgical science, it determined the explosive force of propellant the barrel could contain, and/or the time this force might act upon the missile before being dissipated by the missile's exit from the cannon mouth. The distance and straightness-of-flight thereby imparted to the projectile was fully as important to the artillery's effectiveness as the weight or blast of the projectile itself. With this in mind I have compiled the following table of barrel weight classes, showing the pieces characterized by per-discharge throw-weight [in pounds except where noted otherwise] by design family contained within each: 

This table refines and extends that appearing in Part (II. B.) of this paper. It will occur to the thoughtful reader that this table can be used to find frontspaceequivalent pieces for design families other than the "Austrian" (protoGribeauval) there discussed, and also to assemble inter-family battalion-width artillery groups as desired (e.g., Prussian Brummer with Prussian light].

The figure for horses required is in each case for "loot" as opposed to "horse" artillery, and is appropriate for gun-and-limber alone. The transport of' any substantial portion of the piece's ammunition supply on a caisson [instead of in separate wagons] will tend to inflate this figure.

The barrel weight classifications as the old Austrian "fieldsnake" and "falcon" designs, as well as those for the Russian common howitzers and original version "unicorn" gun/howitzer hybrids, are based on their required horse teams as reported by Duffy (-A, page 283; -R, pages 68 and 72). The required horse teams reported lbr the original version unicorns seem suspiciously low relative to those for the common howitzers. In the normal course one would expect that of two pieces of equal diameter bore, that with greater barrel length and using the more powerful propellant - the unicorn - would be the heavier. It is no wonder that it was soon found necessary to replace the original unicorns with heavier models (Dully-R, page 72).

The barrel weight classification for the later, more robust version of the 1-pud unicorn is perhaps a bit on the low side, being reported as 139 puds [at 36 pounds to the pud equal to 5000 pounds!], up from only 40 puds [1440 pounds for the original version thereof (Duffy-R, page 72).

It is claimed on behalf of the proto-Gribeauval Austrian system guns that the halving of their barrel weights by throw-weight relative to the older "falcon" types was accomplished "without any sacrifice of robustness or performance" (Daffy-A, page 283). This I doubt very much. Absent significant advance in metallurgical science, there can have occurred nothing more revolutionary than a shift along the accuracy-vs.-throw-weight continuum in favor of greater throw-weight per-discharge for any given number of horses - that is, for any given operating cost and/or frontspace occupied. Whether such a trade-off should have yielded better value for the money is at least debatable. A three-pound ball that hits its target is of infinitely greater worth than a six-pound ball that flies astray.

In the same vein, it seems nonsensical to say that the French Valliere system guns were made less mobile for being too heavy. A thousand pounds of bronze is a thousand pounds of bronze. How is it that the requisite traction power might be found for an Austrian 6-pounder [or two 3-pounders] but not for a Valliere 4pounder of equal weight? If indeed the French gun were more difficult to move, it must have been for reasons other than plain barrel weight - perhaps carriage and/or wheel design. Or perhaps it is just that "history is written by the victors," in this case the champions of the successor Gribeauval system, modeled on the Austrian.

Such would not, after all, be the only instance of the triumph of "official truth" over objective truth. We have it from Duffy (-R, page 72) that in 1761 the Russian Master General of Ordnance, Peter Shuvalov, caused it to be decreed that his own "unicorn" designs were superior to conventional cannon - as if saying it could make it so, and notwithstanding the contrary results of sideby-side shooting tests. Anyway, if the emphasis on range and accuracy [over sheer throw-weight] that the Valliere system embodied were such a bad idea, then how is it that wartime experience caused the Prussians not only to mobilize the equally-heavy [or heavier] per-unit-throw-weight "Brummer" 12-pounders, but even to develop a complementary 6-pounder, the "heavy Dieskau"? (DuffyP, page 173)

Clearly, we need to disabuse ourselves of the simplistic fixation on perdischarge throw-weight as the measure of artillery power, and to acknowledge that gun barrels which are longer and heavier per-unit-throw-weight do have their advantages.

More Notes Relevant to the Simulation of Seven Years War Scenarios

I. Introduction
II. Tactical Unit Dimensions
III. Marching Distances Per Unit Time: Infantry and Cavalry
IV. Weapons Ranges, Rates of Fire, Endurance and Lethality

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