Quote Originally Posted by Bligh View Post
Very interesting. Where did you get this wealth of information Dave. I have been looking for years.
Rob.
A mix of the extant firing tables, along with the period tables of dimensions, drawings etc from a variety of (mostly) free books from Google, and a few purchased copies of those which looked useful, but were incomplete/unreadable.

Plus drag data from Bashforth, and later data from NACA/NASA and an excel sheet to interpolate and to provide a consistent basis of measurement, to allow for direct comparison between French and British ordnance, and to give an estimated performance for guns only weakly described.
One of the more important books is the Lafay "Aide Memoire d'Artillerie Navale", as it has a reasonably competent and usable estimate of V0 performance for ordnance, of a consistent basis including the ability to explore defects in shot size and variation in windage.

Black powder has a tendency to be variable, so a choice of stronger or weaker performance could be argued for any piece, but the general scale is consistent with the published data, and it can be queried and modified to provide questions to the answers.