Talk:Baker Rifle

Caliber?

Does anybody know what the caliber of this rifle and its ammunition was? Searching on the internet is inconsistent, most commonly saying that it is either .625 firing a patched .615 ball, or .653 with a patched .625. I would assume it is the former so that it can shoot a standard unpatched .625 carbine ball from a paper cartridge when accuracy was not required (British rifle troops carried a cartridge box with standard paper cartridges, a powder horn with better quality rifle powder and loose sub-caliber balls in a pouch), but I do not know for sure. Some sources even say that it is the other way round, with a smaller ball being used for unpatched shot but this makes little sense to me as if it also lacked the patch it would be much smaller than necessary and hence incredibly inefficient. --commando552 (talk) 19:59, 21 December 2013 (EST)