Tom C wrote: > To your question... Where then are the craters from the canon balls that > must have landed *off* the road, in the likely softer soil? > > I would guess they don't really weigh THAT much and were moving at a > relatively low velocity.
How much is "THAT" much? :-) They could easily be ten or fifteen pounds each, even if they're small. However, they were most likely solid shot. Anything with a charge in it was "interesting" to harvest. Without getting into too much detail, the shot was most often fired from close to the ground on a fairly low angle. Solid shot in that situation had a propensity to skip for a while and then roll across the ground for quite a distance after the first impact, depending on what it hit in the meantime. It wasn't a good idea to have your ranks lined up very deeply when facing that sort of artillery. Even at low velocity, getting hit with a ten or fifteen pound wad iron couldn't be much fun. Heck, the muzzle velocity was low enough on some of those guns that if the shot was anywhere near right at you, you could watch the ball coming. -- Thanks, DougF (KG4LMZ) -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
