Entertainment Janhvi Kapoor reveals Sridevi's death brought her a weird sense of relief: 'I deserve this horrible thing. ![]() Entertainment Chris Rock slams Will Smith for Oscar slap: 'But I’m not a victim, baby.At 21.8 meters (71 ft) long, one of the worlds biggest intercontinental ballistic missiles, the US Air Force LGM-118A Peacekeeper, was three times the length of a station wagon (estate car)But it worked pretty much the same way as a handgun bullet the size of your pinkie. Letter to PM Modi reveals Opposition unity challenges: Cong, DMK, Left missing Bullets and missiles come in all shapes and sizes.Rahul Gandhi in London: ‘BJP wants India to be silent …Congress has interesting ideas on Opposition unity’.The final instruction was to waterproof the cartridge: ‘When completed, the base of the cartridge must be dipped up to the shoulder of the bullet in a pot of grease, consisting of six parts tallow to one of bee’s wax.” The interesting section concerns the manufacture of cartridges, which were to be fabricated by the soldiers themselves, making up a tubular package of the Minie bullet and “two and a half drams of fine powder”. Published for the Military Library, Whitehall, by Parker, Furnivall and Parker, almost all of its 63 pages are deathly boring for the majority, who are disinterested in the intricacies of leaf sights, windage and volley firing by rank. But the 1855 edition, scanned from a copy at the University of Oxford, is online. The 1856 edition, which caused all the trouble in Barrackpore and Meerut, is available only in hard copy in the US and all but inaccessible to us. Now, back to the textbook, Instruction of Musketry. YouTube has some videos of modern replicas of the weapon being loaded and fired, and you can clearly see why the marksman has to bite off the end of the cartridge. Since he had the rifle in one hand and the cartridge in the other, the only way to open it was with the teeth. The rifleman had to tear it open, pour the powder down the barrel and ram the bullet home after it. ![]() The P53 cartridge was also a package, but a Minie cartridge, innovated in France by Claude-Étienne Minié. ![]() There is no need to bite a modern cartridge, which is a projectile atop a charge of gunpowder and a percussion cap, all packaged together. The P53 was a kind of halfway house, half a generation ahead of a musket but not a modern breech-loading rifle, where you lever a cartridge into the breech, shoot the bolt home and blaze away mercilessly. Designed at the Royal Small Arms Factory in the London borough of Enfield, the rifle-musket was sold to the East India Company by Parker, Field & Sons of High Holborn. The law of conservation of angular momentum, which has been known to armourers from the time of longbows, kept it true to a range of a mile and a quarter. The Enfield which replaced it was a muzzle-loader, too, but it had a rifled barrel which imparted spin to the bullet. The old veteran was a smoothbore muzzle-loader, and the ball tended to tumble in flight. About the time of the Crimean War, the British army phased out the doughty old Brown Bess musket in favour of the Enfield Pattern 1853, or P53 for short.
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