[jivemi]

[quote=Firestorm;836404]

Originally Posted by jivemi

Depends. Before the 1840's, there was a definite dichotomy between a "musket" and a rifle because they both had their strengths and weaknesses. Rifles were more accurate but slow loading; you can just drop a musketball down the barrel and fire it, where an early rifle-ball had to fit so tightly for the rifling to actually work that you had to take your time to hammer it down the barrel. R. Lee Ermy explains it well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ2JdkG2Yi4

The invention of the minie ball changed that, it removed almost all of a muzzle-loading rifle's disadvantages. By 1865 almost everyone had a "rifled musket" of some kind—and some of these were literally smooothbore muskets that had grooves cut in the barrels to turn them into rifles— so they just started calling anything muzzleloaded a "musket" to differentiate them from the next wave of technology: breech-loading and lever-action guns that were becoming more and more common.

Interestingly enough, I've seen sources from World War I refer to old guns that were still in limited military use (lever-action Winchesters, breach-loading Martini-Henrys) as "muskets". Might have once been a fairly generic term for obsolete service weapons, though I don't know for sure.

Thanks for the video and explication. So now I know that early rifles (Kentucky Long and British Baker of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles fame) fired ball instead of conical bullets. Learn something new here all the time. Cheers!