alternatehistory.com

5 June

A trial takes place at Hythe, examining the various small arms available to the British Army - comparing muzzle loaders with breech loaders, and also using recently-captured Union smoothbore percussion muskets and percussion rifles as a comparator.
Among the muzzle loaders being put to the test are the old Minie and the new Enfield - with the two-band and three-band compared separately - and the Whitworth rifle. The P1861 short Enfield and Lancaster rifle fill out the muzzle loaders.
For the breech loaders - the true purpose of the trials - a Sharps rifle is present from the many the British government purchased before the Trent War, as are the Terry, the Westley-Richards, the Leetch, the Prince, the Nuthall and the Boileau.

The testing regimen is intended to minimize the relative impact of familiarity with the rifle - a cohort of eighty men have been put through the full Hythe course. None of the men have used a firearm before, and they have been randomly separated out into groups of five and each one trained using just the weapon they are assigned. They have been issued eighty shots for training, which has been completed by the date of the trial.
The aim of this is to compare the relative utility of the weapons by recently trained men - the kind of men who would be supposed to use the weapons in battle. This has led to complaints from Boileau, who holds that his weapon is superior once additional training has taken place, but the rules are not changed.

The results are interesting, especially as there is at the same time a trial taking place of a form of lubricated cartridge for a smoothbore gun (this forming the sixteenth and final group of five). This method is discovered to be able to achieve accurate hits at ranges of several hundred yards, though the time taken to fit the tight-fitting cartridge compares unfavourably with the reloading time of the Enfield rifles which are being used as the benchmark.
Of the muzzle loaders, the Lancaster scores highest on accuracy but lowest on reloading speed, with the Whitworth somewhere between the Lancaster and the Enfield. The reliable P1853 performs as expected, but the 1861 short Enfield slightly exceeds it in reloading speed while being comparable in accuracy at range.
Interestingly, the Springfield rifle-musket is judged to be of the same rough capability as the British Enfield rifles, but that the sights are insufficient to use this capability at long range.

Of the breech loaders, the results are mixed and the source of much debate. Many of the inventors present cite the best-of-five rate of fire combined with the best-of-five accuracy results, though this tends to obscure the actual results obtained - which are duly noted in neat columns to be published in RUSI. Each rifle is touted as being easy to fire, quick to fire, accurate over a comparable range to the Enfield and to be hard to foul; in large part these are borne out, though to different degrees.

After much data is considered, the verdict of the trials is to purchase 3,000 each of the Boileau, Terry and Westley-Richards - and, crucially, to give them to infantry regiments in place of Cavalry ones. Two regiments each will trial these new breechloaders, and the data will be added to the results of the cavalry comparisions (which have not yet come in).


(It seems perfectly appropriate for the result of the trials to be "more trials!")