"John B." wrote in message
...
On Mon, 13 Mar 2017 21:20:14 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:


True, but even today's artillery, which one assumes are more
accurate
than a weapon built in the mid 1800's doesn't have the accuracy
claimed for the Whitworth. In fact at the end of WW II the standard
of
accuracy for light artillery which approximates the 12 pound horse
drawn artillery used the field in 1860 was "1 in 500" so for 1600
yards the standard, in 1945, would be 2.3 yards.
(which is a bit different than 5 inches :-)

--
Cheers,

John B.


I've seen evidence that the allowance was 1 in 400 for battleship guns
which had the added problems of the rolling of the ship and
interfering with each other through their toilet-shattering vibration
and the leading shell's shock wave. The middle barrel was delayed by
50 milliseconds to help.

They determined barrel life from the numbers of shots fired at various
charge weights. It was a fairly small multiple of the number of shells
they carried.

This shows how closely pairs of shells from new barrels hit:
http://www.navweaps.com/index_lundgr...e_Analysis.pdf

The barrel of the WW1 Paris Gun wore so quickly that the shells had to
be fired in numerical order of increasing diameter.
http://www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/parisgun.htm

-jsw