Stiffi Switch Barrel Kit Question...

[billmi]

As far as Muzzies, i build them all the time for people. they are the same deal, but the bullet is lubed so that you can ramm it down the barrel for loading. when a ball is used, you still need to uase a wad or patch to keep the ball tight, very tight. a loose ball is not accurate.

Poor fit from the projectile to the bore was why smoothbore muskets had accuracy issues compared to rifled muskets.

One of the reasons some revolutionary militia units were so effective in the US revolution was that many of them were shooting tight patched round balls in rifled barrels against troops shooting smoothbores. That's because they were armed with their own hunting rifles, instead of military rifles.

They had much better accuracy at distance. The tradeback was that when using an overbore conical bullet, or tightly patched patched round ball, it takes much longer to load, than an unpatched round ball. Yes, a revolutionary war era conical bullet is lubed, but you still have to literally hammer it into the muzzle to get the rifling to shave it into a proper fit. Similarly, a tight patched round ball takes a bit of effort to load.

If you've ever shot a Hawken and a Brown Bess on the same range, with period ammo, I'm sure you've seen you can get off about 3 times the shots in a given time period with the bess, but even with its shorter barrel, the Hawken will give tighter groupings. Military thinking of the day was that rate of fire was more important than accuracy.

It wasn't until Minie developed his underbore conical bullet with a hollow in the back (it loaded fast, but the explosive force drove its rear skirt into a solid seal with the rifling) that fast loading was combined with the benefits of a tight projectile to bore fitting, not to mention the flatter trajectory and better penetration offered by the conical shape. Look at the results, crazy high death tolls in the civil war because generals were still using battlefield tactics designed around the poor fitting smoothbore round balls.


Great history of course, but not directly applicable to paintball as projectile consistencey, velocity, and pressures involved are vastly different. That would be like saying that since dimples help golf balls overcome drag they must help paintballs. Not necessarily true, as there are issues of scale - the paintball is significantly smaller than the golf ball, but it is interacting with air which has molecules and turbulence patterns of the same size.