(June 20, 2020 at 8:48 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Just checking. A friend had a TVA .57 caliber muzzle-loading rifle. I only fired it once, too tedious.
In those days, one's life depended on reloading rapidly. They got surprising fast at it.
And the objective was not to aim at a particular target at all, but to create a "hail of lead". Bound to hit something if one hurls enough lead down range, hence the mad mass formations of troops.
Makes sense in context of the time and technology. Seems utterly nutty from a modern perspective. "Skirmishers" were an attempt to work around that.
