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A Confederate mid-war innovation was the "polygonal cavity" or "segmented" shell which used a polyhedral cavity core to create lines of weakness in the shell wall (similar to the later fragmentation grenade) that would yield more regular fragmentation patterns—typically twelve similarly sized fragments. While segmented designs were most ...
Heavy artillery during the Civil War consisted of siege artillery, garrison artillery, and coastal artillery. Siege and garrison artillery were larger versions of field artillery, mounted on heavyweight carriages which allowed them very limited mobility: the M1839 24-pounder smoothbore was the largest one which could still be moved by road.
The 20-pounder Parrott rifle, Model 1861 was a cast iron muzzle-loading rifled cannon that was adopted by the United States Army in 1861 and employed in field artillery units during the American Civil War.
Shortly before the war broke out, the U.S. Army adopted a plan to convert M1841 6-pounder field guns from smoothbore to rifled artillery. Rifling the existing 6-pounders would both improve the gun's accuracy and increase the weight of the shell (by elongating the round).
In the American Civil War, the siege train was always transported to the area of the siege by water. The siege trains of the Civil War consisted almost exclusively of guns and mortars. Guns fired projectiles on horizontal trajectory and could batter heavy construction with solid shot or shell at long or short range, destroy fort parapets, and ...
Wartime records show that out-of-date artillery pieces migrated from the east to the west in the U.S. Army. [37] On 30 June 1863, the Union Army of the Cumberland counted 220 artillery pieces of which 10 were 12-pounder howitzers, while the Army of the Ohio had 72 artillery pieces including no 12-pounder howitzers.
PRAIRIE GROVE (KFSM) – A Civil War artillery shell that was found earlier this month near the Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park has been destroyed, but museum officials said that wasn't the ...
In the period before the Civil War, a U.S. Army light artillery battery was organized with four M1841 6-pounder field guns and two M1841 12-pounder howitzers. [1] The field gun fired solid iron cannon balls in a flat trajectory to smash its targets [2] while the howitzer was designed to lob hollow shells into massed formations or fortifications. [3]