In Reply to Emelio's comment

My reasoning with hose Pistols was thus there seemed to be quite a variety of ways cavalry used fire arms in the period but they seem to boil down two three broad bands.


1 Those who did not use them & relied on the sword
British cavalry being the classic example of this, with Marlborough order that his horse to be issued with only three rounds of ball to reinforce this. 

2 Those who used them on the charge or prior to a counter charge
French cavalry did this unleashing a volley at the trot before accelerating to a gallop & going in with the sword, though French tactics with horse where in flux & they at versus other times used both the other tactics. Bavarians where also supposed to have on occasion at least fired just before launching into a counter charge.

3 Those for who the Pistol was used as primary weapon
This is the classic Retier style of using them & it was still used by  the Austrians amongst others where horse would be involved in a fire fight as mounted shot possibly without charging or advancing to contact

I also concluded that pistols if loaded in a mellee they might have been used opportunistically but could find no evedence any one trained to do that so I am happy to presume its inclusion in the normal mechanics for fisticufs.

So I am left with perennial question how do I model that? 

I reasoned that if 1& 2 only existed then I would be best to model pistol use as either a mellee weapon or as the use of fire arms is modelled for foot as a penalty for being unloaded. The problem with this was that cavalry with sword only as its primary weapon was seen with the exception of the French as being the "best" of the three broad tactics but I could work round that. However with case 3 existing  with the horse standing off and exchanging volleys with the enemy I could not & I felt I needed to give pistols a range even if a rather short one. it also will allow me to model  Horse which fail to make contact due to being "put off by pike or bayonet" firing a ragged volley form the point the charge stalls.

However thank you for the feed back it helps & makes me think back trough my reasoning

Firelock & Matchlock

Types of musket & other Small arms
During the period we are considering we have several sorts of small arm in use.

Muskets which could be either Firelocks (flintlocks) or Matchlocks (lighter versions of the weapons used in the Thirty years war &  English Civil War ) at first flintlocks where the preserve of specialist troops mostly used to guard the artillery train where all those slow matches would be quite a hazard but as time went on they spread to the generality of infantry & dragoons & eventuality totally displaced firelocks.

Carbines which like muskets could be either Firelocks or Matchlocks but which where used by cavalry and where short enough to be fired mounted & most importantly loaded mounted. They had a lesser range than a Musket but longer than a horse pistol. They are notable as use of Cavalry in the shot role was quite common in this period. Much more so than it latter became.

Horse pistols Large heavy pistols carried in pairs & used by some nations cavalry on the charge as well as in the classic & increasingly obsolete cavalry rotational fire drills.

Ranges
Because Pistols are at least viable ranged weapons at this period I have to give them enough range to be useful. However if we consider those listed in Sharp form muskets and carbines  you will see there is a problem they are too sort to include a pistol with any sort of range. After some though on this I found I was going to have to change the ground scale and casting about for something suitable & not too huge came to the conclusion that a 1:1 ground scale for 15mm would work rather as it does for TW&T & M&B other Lardie rules sets. Which I am familiar with & I may well visit on the Discersions Page. The Scale is 1" = 4yards

The  up shot of this is assuming that a Musket has an effective range of 80 yards that the table form Sharpe looks like  (note all shot are assumed to be line troops) all other ranges are based on that of the musket.

              0-5   6-10   11-20    21-30
Musket  5&6       6         6           7
Carbine   6          6         7            -
Pistol       6          7         -

Note a seven on a d6 sounds impossible but its got by rolling a 6 followed by a 4+

I am not planing on changing movement distances though I am aware that extending the range of fire arms will alter the dynamics of the game I just want to play test it to discover quite how.

Thoughs on unit sizes by prompted by Abikapi2

I am rather sorry I took so long to get back to this but the blame for that can rather go to the madness which was the Christmass festivities.

I have to be honest not settled on a fixed number of troops for a group of infantry & had not the time to finish my initial ramblings on the subject, I have now & would value your opinion, I picked 10 as I wanted fire fights to be a bit less decisive than with Napoleonic sharp as all my reading suggests they where & 10 is more resilient when it comes to shock than 8, I also considered 12 as this would allow a group to deploy 3 wide & 4 deep for  Rotational fire &  4 wide three deep for Group fire. The 10 strong group on the Battalion level gives you an 80 figure strong Battalion with four Big men if you remove the grenadiers & assume they have been Brigaded together else where.

At the Battalion level two groups are intended to represent a company & would include 1-2 pike men per group & at company level pike would be separated into their own groups.

However all this may change on play testing & the Elector of Marrienburgs first company of foot nears completion so we will see then.

Thank you Stefano

This is coincidently the post I thought the internet had eaten hence the test post a bit expanded 

Test Post

posted because I posted something yesterday which seems to have vanished


Edit- Rather embarrassingly I had posted it as a page for some unknown & unfathomable reason & have now fixed the problem.