Powder And Shot
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Basic Information

Powder and Shot refers to the principle of a firearm in which loading is carried out using loose propellant and seperate ammunition - normally black powder and ball. Almost all powder and shot weapons are muzzle loading, although some early breech loading designs fed like this as well.

Pretty much any firing mechanism from cannon lock to caplock could be used - they all developed in the powder and shot era and most of them became obsolete before it ended.

This was the original way of loading a gun and lasted until the development of the minie ball and the cartridge - although primitive "cartridges" in the form of packaged and pre-dispensed powder and shot were around for at least a couple of centuries before then.

For practical reasons it was impossible to operate most forms of repeating weapon this way, the cap and ball revolver being a rare exception.

Note that this principle - or something like it - remains in use in a wide range of modern ordnance class weapons, where the round us loaded into the breech, together with one or more bags of propellant, depending on how much power needs to be put behind the shot. This system avoids handling loose powder, but still allows the gunner to vary the charge and avoids the impractical size and mass of having the whole round as a single cartridge.

Sources

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