Martini-Henrys: Zeroed at 1400Y????

[raindog]

I read on Wikipedia that Martini-Henry rifles (standard British army issue in the late 1800s) were zeroed at 1400Y:

"The rifle was sighted to 1,400 yards (1300 m). At 1,200 yards (1100 m), 20 shots exhibited a mean deflection from the centre of the group of 27 inches (69.5 cm), the highest point on the trajectory was 8 feet (2.44 m) at 500 yards (450 m)."

Good Lord! I assume I'm missing something here.

These are not scoped rifles. Can people even see to shoot at 1400Y?

Why would they sight it at that range, when a shot at 500 yards would be 8 feet off point of aim? I realize that rifles were designed for longer shots in the pre-assault-rifle days, but still...1400 yards? With a zero that would make 500Y shots awful?

The ammo is the .577/450 Martini-Henry bullet (400g @1450 ft/s).

[csmsss]

I think it just means that the ladder sights were regulated to allow for aimed shots at that range.

[thallub]

Those rifles were not sighted at 1,400 yards. The sight is adjustable to 1,400meters (1,500) yards.

[Bartholomew Roberts]

Are you sure about that? I would be surprised to see a Martini-Henry with sights marked in meters since the English did not even study adoption of the metric system until 1947.

[Scorch]

The Martini Henry rifle had volley sights marked to 1,400 yds, intended to be used against massed troop formations, not against single person/point targets.

[dahermit]

One of my favorite moves, Zulu Dawn (not "Zulu"), there is a scene where, in the anticipation of a massed Zulu attack, two soldiers are sent out to put up range flags every 100 yards, allowing the soldiers to set their sights at the distances at which the Zulus would advance...better than having to estimate the range.

[mapsjanhere]

I remember in Fontane's description of the German/French war of 1870/71, the French Chassepot was consider superior due to it's ability to hit at 800m+, past the effective range of the German Dreyse. But that at the same time most French soldiers were doing poorly at short distance since their sights usually made their bullets to high. Even at the beginning of WWI, standard sights started at 400 m, meaning you shot over the guy at short range.

[darkgael]

That note about volley fire is right on. Wars were fought differently then. The M-H came out of the same tradition as the Brown Bess, another volley fire gun. Remember....those were the people who brought you the charge of the Light Brigade (kinda on the receiving end of volley fire there).
Martinis are marvelous guns to fire, even today. The cartridge case is huge; it will swallow 120 grains of Fg easily (though it was not loaded that heavily).
Pete

[Crosshair]

Yup, remember they didn't have machine-guns back in the day and cannons were slow to fire. Since infantry still stood in large formations they just shot at them so the bullets landed somewhere in the formation.

During the "Plevna Delay" in the Russo-Turkish War. The Russians were taking significant casualties at 1000+ yards from massed rifle fire. Of course when some attacks got within 200 yards, the Turks showed what the Winchester Model 66 could do to advancing infantry.

[44 AMP]

And short range in those days meant under 300 yards. What has been forgotten is the method of aiming taught in those days. Soldiers were taught to aim at the enemy's belt buckle.

This method allowed for fairly generous errors in range estimation, even with the rainbow trajectories of many of the rounds of the era.

The Martini sights would be in yards, not meters. And while there were standards for accuracy at extreme ranges, using the ladder sights, the rifles were commonly zeroed at their lowest sight setting.

Wikipedia is not infallible.

[the rifleer]

"I read on Wikipedia that..."

that was your first mistake. Teachers at my school will not accept work cited from wikipedia.

[Crosshair]

Teachers at my school will not accept work cited from wikipedia.
Neither would the teachers at my school. They would not accept any piece of information off of the internet either, regardless of what website it was. I had to waste my time to get a hard copy of the same statistics that I could get off of the governments own website in 5 minutes.

The hard information I could find was often either incomplete or out of date. They would accept every out of date piece of information from the 1970's era Encyclopedia set my parents have. Just to screw with the teacher I once quoted one of those old encyclopedias as saying the consensus was that the Titanic sank in one piece.

[[email protected]]

Here's a link to an interesting article on long range ballistics of 19th century military rifles/cartridges. And no, it's not wiki
http://www.researchpress.co.uk/longrange/sandyhook.htm

[kilimanjaro]

According to the history of the Zulu Wars, 'The Washing of the Spears', the British Tommy was trained to shoot the Martini to 400 yards at marksman level. They received a few shillings extra a month for qualifying and most were long-term soldiers. It was a common military practice in those days to treat the rifle as a very long-range weapon, either in volley or individual fire.

[BlueTrain]

The .45-70 Government was not quite the equivalent of a .577 but it had some of the same characteristics and expectations in performance. The heavy bullets retained a lot of energy at the practical limits of their ranges. The practical limits of their ranges, however, implies volley fire, as others mentioned, but it was still long range, even with relatively low velocity.

You may recall that this was also the period of long range target shooting, generally using single shot, large caliber rifles, though it was still a specialized sort of game, in that both the rifles and cartridges were produced just for those activities. There is still some interest in long range off-hand target shooting but it doesn't generate much coverage in magazines.

The Springfield and Martini (Rossi came later) rifles were heavily loaded and lighter loads were used in carbines.