End date 2030, 100 years...

[IronDuke99]

Early muzzle loading rifles needed some kind of patch to grip the rifling, this made them slow to load. Also early riflemen would often hand measure and load the powder (to aid accuracy) rather than use premade up cartridges (cartridge paper is a term we still use) hence they could never fully replace smooth bore muskets, until the invention of the expanding -minie- bullet in the 1850's.

In an emergency you could load a early muzzle loading rifle without the patch, but with nothing to grip the rifling you had no more accuracy than with a smooth bore Musket.

Smooth bore muskets, fired in a volly by massed soldiers, were accurate enough out to about 100 yards, but pretty well useless at much over 200 yards.

Rifled Muskets like the Minie and the Enfield pushed the effective range, again for volly fire, out to maximum of up to 400 yards and one of the things that meant was that infantry could now engage artillery at beyond canister range (anti personnel round, of lead balls packed in a tin, that turned a smooth bore field piece into a giant shotgun).