Historical facts repository

[Kellerman]

JaM = I appreciate your attention to detail and the use of historical sourcing. With respect to the accuracy information you gave, I would very much like to have the source.

As I said in a previous post, it was indeed quite common for musketry to begin at double the "effective range" (which is basically a modern term) of the standard flintlock musket - which would be about 150m. Musketry would also occur at longer ranges, but it was not very effective materially at that range - meaning very few balls hit anything at all. However, musketry in that era was not about material effectiveness, it was as much morale effectiveness - that is, affecting the cohesion and discipline of the targetted unit. If, for example, a battalion opened fire against a unit from the rear, even at long ranges, the target unit could very easily become disordered due to loss of cohesion (panic or confusion). I think your range adjustment is fine - so long as the accuracy curve is also realistic. I'm not quite sure about the accuracy figures you cited, these are much higher than the sources I am familiar with - and as you point out these figures are not those one would expect in a real battle. During a real battle several factors aside from basic cohesion and morale would affect accuracy and rate of fire - these include, despite what you seem to have said, general fatigue (especially for the poorer quality units made up of not entirely fit men, as compared to experienced campaigners, quality or elite units which had a good general fitness level); musket fouling (I don't know if you've ever tried to load a flintlock musket which has been fired about 15 times, but crud and granules are lodged in the barrel, and ramming the damn bullet and wad down it can be a taxing thing (IDK if wads were used in this period)- when you are tired and have to move around a 12 pound musket and then push on a narrow rod against significant friction, let's just say it slows you down; friction in the Clauswitzean sense, meaning that any unit that has been engaged for a while will have men without muskets, without ramrods, without musket balls, without flints, and so on (things get dropped, lost, soaked, etc.). So I would tend to come down on the lower ROF across the board. The ultimate test would be to use the best historical sources and come up with an average casualty rate in a testable sort of engagement (like, a musketry duel between 2 fresh regiments) and work from there. Unfortunately, systematic records of battle performance were not captured, so we have to guess a bit.

Russian performance was poor due in part to the fact that Russian powder factories didn't make very good powder in comparison to their western counterparts. This also affected the performace of Russian artillery.

I will have to re-check some of the historical information myself based on what you have presented.

Incidentally last night I did a 1 vs 1 test battle with French Fusilier vs British Fencible (vanilla version), for the purpose of seeing how many volleys an attacking unit gets during a march to close combat. It took 1min 8sec for the fusilier to close, during which time it took 2 volleys and sustained about 30 casualties. Incidentally, the fusilier made 90 steps during that movement (yes, I counted) - about 1.5 steps per second. Since this is a realistic speed and movement, I'm not sure why time scales need to be altered; something I don't understand here. With modifications to ranges, without a time scale change, the unit would have taken 4 volleys and probably, imo, sustained slightly more casualties (perhaps 5 to 10 more).

[JaM]

current version of NER is quite old, there is a new version in works which contains tons of new things and new combat mechanics. I'm currently finishing with release notes for Empire Realism mod, once that is done, i plan to release new NER version.

[St Vincent]

There is also a design difference. French ships tended to be lightly built, but generally faster. Being caught in the scantlings of a french warship was not a pleasant experience. On capturing French vessels and placing them in RN service, the Admiralty spent some time reinforcing hulls to make them more rugged and seaworthy. By contrast the Spanish built very tough ships, often out in Havana where they had access to tropical hardwoods from South America. To quote Nelson: 'The Dons can build ships, but they can't build men'.