Considering how long it takes to reload a musket, why didn’t soldiers from the 18th century simply carry 2-3 preloaded muskets instead to save time?
In: Engineering
they did but not in the way you are thinking. british cavalry would carry two pistols which were in effect brown bess muskets with no stock and a short barrel. Blackbeard was said to have carried six pistols going into action, but a lot of that sort of thing is made up. Full length muskets werr expensive and heavy. you also can’t store them loaded, so you have to load anyway.
Instead of having one soldier carry 3 muskets
Why not just have 3 soldiers carry one musket each?
Weight is the major factor, as others have pointed out. However, it was _not_ uncommon a little later for people to carry multiple preloaded service revolvers.
Because its incredibly clumsy and you dont save any time if you have to reload all of them one by one anyway. So what they did was have rear ranks reload muskets and pess them to front ranks to shoot. Its way more convenient, achieves the same but each soldier only has to carry and care about one musket at a time.
In the past many things had been tried, some units, especially cavalry, had carried multiple pairs of pistols with them, shoot them all, then go back to rear to reload. But it turned out to be no match to infantry firing steady volleys in massed ranks.
Generally, everyone is right, with muskets being expensive and heavy.
But I want to highlight that it actually happened.
In the battle of Nagashino in Japan, 1000 soldiers fired 3000 pre loaded muskets to defeat their enemies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Nagashino?wprov=sfla1
I always wondered why they didn’t use archers, medieval style. A barrage of arrows while your enemy is reloading seems like a good strategy.
A well trained soldier was supposed to be capable of firing 3-4 aimed shots in one minute. There wasn’t enough downtime to necessitate multiple long rifles, if you weren’t shooting, you should be loading.
I believe it wasn’t uncommon to do this with single shot pistols. Pistols are cheaper and lighter than muskets. Even still, I’ve only ever heard of ship captains doing it so it probably wasn’t a cheap practice either.
It took a well trained soldier 15-20 seconds to reload a flintlock musket. Carrying multiple muskets would not have made that faster as it would now be three guns to carry, three guns to maintain, three guns to reload.
By the time you had grabbed another musket and got it ready a professional soldier could reload – until the black powder fouled things up.
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