nchawkeye,

I look at it differently (surprise!). If I were to use a RB, why would I use anything but a smoothbore? This is getting to be quite an itch for me.

However, you're right, in the days of DB the roundball was much more common, as were smoothbores. I suspect conicals were around, but not popular because of increased loading difficulty. In the early 19th century, several attempts were made to come up with an easy-loading conical, most famously the minie. The first widespread use that I know of that projectile was during the Civil War. During that War, army surgeons were horrified and overwhelmed by the severity of the wounds made by the conicals, compared to the wounds from RB. Read some accounts of this, rather than take my word.

Unfortunately, this battlefield proficiency did not translate well to the game fields. The conical proved to be an ineffective killer, and in some cases was known to bounce off the side of the Whitetail Deer, allowing Bambi to bound away unscathed.

OK, I was having a bit of fun there. The minie had a relatively short period as a battle projectile, being rapidly supplanted post-Civil War by solid base bullets, as easy loading from the muzzle was no longer required due to the wholesale transition to breech loading weapons. As far as I know, the RB was never again part of the US Army's small arms planning. It had been superceded by projectiles of demonstrably superior performance. Why is that lesson difficult to fathom?

OldBob