Carronades fire power.

[Lieste]

Somebody shoulda asked the Admiralty which was more expensive between sights for well-placed single shots vs a mass of wasted cannonballs on the bottom of the ocean... have to put it in accounting terms for the turdsucking beancounters to understand.

Foresights on guns tended to wood on the ports, damaging both the sight and the port. As there was a degree of motion, dwell on firing and general inaccuracy due to windage and roundshot deviating at long ranges from induced rotation, the precision of a single shot was not considered *vital*. An amount of inaccuracy is also helpful when ranging and pointing cannot be relied upon - some of the misses fired in the wrong places will hit. Getting the middle of the group relatively tight helps with adjusting fires, and getting the crews consistent in pointing and the junior officers good at range estimation/calculation according to sextant angles of e.g. the maintop of that '74' can make quite a bit of difference in how much of the fire will land on the target.

Practice was often at an old cask or a raft and screen, with prizes for hits on it. and the French at least practiced for their point en blanc firing (with relatively poor practice at closer 'decisive' range being perhaps a training issue and a failure to aim below the target at half range). Their ability to cripple English fleets and wear away through over a century of fleet actions, before the English return fires were effective does suggest more practice at longer distances - and John Clerk (with footnotes from Lord Rodney) indicates that ranges as close as 400yds were seldom achieved, with battle descriptions suggesting fires from 1200-700yds deciding the engagement in most cases in the French favour - though with the French continuing with their strategic missions, rather than doubling down on the destruction of the English fleets.

[Bligh]

The parsimonious attitude of the Admiralty in restricting live practice firing is well documented, and several Captains who felt that practice lead to a better rate of fire had to purchase extra powder out of their own pockets to enable this extra training to take place.
Rob.