At this distance, advancing to the beat of drums seemed rather pointless. As long as they aimed and fired, the problem should be solved.
The soldiers somewhat chaotically took the rifled muskets from their backs, pulling fixed paper cartridges from the pouches at their waists and loading them.
The earliest rifled muskets were loaded like smoothbore muskets: powder first, then the bullet. But forcing a bullet into a rifled barrel was extremely difficult, and soldiers often had to hammer the rounds in.
This was the method Alexei had used when he first tested a rifled musket with black powder. His verdict was that it was worse than a smoothbore. This loading method made the weapon's rate of fire far too slow—less than one shot per minute. Worse still, loading could not be done uniformly, severely affecting the efficiency of volley fire.
Rifled muskets had been this useless when they were first developed, but a new invention changed everything.
The Minié ball.
Naturally, Theus would not step into all those pitfalls one by one. He directly issued Minié balls with the rifled muskets. This was a two-part bullet: the front projectile resembled a traditional bullet, while its middle and rear were hollow and could hold gunpowder. A cork plug sat at the back of the bullet.
The cork base expanded to seal the chamber, reducing gunpowder residue and avoiding the need for frequent barrel cleaning. The bullet was also slightly smaller than the bore, allowing it to be loaded easily without hammering. Old-style rifled muskets required ninety to one hundred twenty seconds per shot, while Minié balls reduced that to just twenty to thirty seconds.
The soldiers pushed the bullets into the barrels, pulled out the attached ramrods from beneath the muzzles, rammed the rounds to the bottom, then withdrew the