Musketry ranges & Musketry quality

I am at present considering changing these and changing the mechanism for determining effectiveness at a given range

Musketry ability
I said before that I liked the way Terrible Sharp Sword the ACW rules supplement  spit the characteristics of a unit down from the simpler elite good,  etc system of the Original Sharpe Practice.I have mentioned Drill in earlier ramblings so lets consider Musketry.

Musketry in this period and for much of the whole horse and musket era had little to do with personal marksmanship it was to do with a massed effect of formed troops firing in an orderly way. At the start of the period I am considering it was it would seem the aim to maintain a constant hail of fire on a target and this was done using a variety of rotational drills, but this reduced the shock effect of the fire and innovations before the period we are considering such as the Swedish Salvoes of the thirty years war gave people pause for thought.

However the concept of Volley fire was slow to develop and spread as the result of firing all your guns at once whilst certainly having an effect on the target left you with all your weapons unloaded. This was seen as a significant disadvantage when your effective rate of fire was one to two rounds per minute.especially if your Volley failed to put the opponent to flight and he charged you or by means of other firing drills maintained a more constant if lesser volume fire at you whilst you frantically reloaded.

I have already mentioned the effect of types of firing drill in an earlier article on this blog so I wont repeat myself here, and will limit myself to the quality musketry.

In Sharp Practice I would suggest the following ability levels

Pitiful- dice rolled for effect as per firing drill in use by troops, with one dice in two lost
Poor -dice rolled for effect as per firing drill in use by troops, with one dice in four lost
Adequate - dice rolled for effect as per firing drill in use by troops, with one dice in six lost 
Trained - dice rolled for effect as per firing drill in use by troops, with no modifiers
Good - dice rolled for effect as per firing drill in use by troops, with one dice in six added 
Excellent- dice rolled for effect as per firing drill in use by troops, with one dice in four added



I will come back to this later but I hope you see where I am going this is very much a work in progress