Lieste

You have side tackle mounted to the frames forward and aft of the port, in conjuction with handspikes (the pieces of wood seen in your photo), the crew would haul and shift one side of the carriage closer to the block on the frame, with the breastpiece of the carriage riding on the portsill. The range of traverse is limited (by the width of the port, the breadth of the muzzle and the thickness of the hull at the port). It should be at least a couple of points fore and aft for most properly sized ports, though the work of traversing is much harder than of pointing for range or merely running the gun out, so 'tracking' a moving target is impractical especially if your own vessel is manoeuvring. Firing as she bears is most practical for rapidly changing conditions, but fine pointing could be attempted if the fire was 'deliberate' as in a chase, and if the relative motion was slight, also seen in the chase. (Note 'guncrews' were specified for a pair of guns on larboard and starboard - both could be manned using the designated crew, or the crew could be doubled to ease fatigue over a long engagement if fighting only one side. Various ship-board tasks were assigned to specific members of each gun-crew (boarders, firefighters, pump-men, sail handlers etc), so at various evolutions the gun crews would be reduced as these work crews were formed and then be released if their task was completed. This, rather than the need for 'as many men' is the main reason that fighting both sides was impractical - much of the gun crew would spend at least part of each engagement actively tasked elsewhere once the manoeuvring close in began and damage began to accrue.

The Robbins formulae are a little simplistic**, don't account (except by a 'guessed' parameter) for windage and were reputed to overestimate both the effect of changing charges and increasing barrel length more than matched with observed values. Plus when I attempted to replicate worked examples I didn't get the same results, so something appears to have been confused in the setting/printing of the method. I didn't follow up on getting agreement as contemporary discussion indicated they had limited accuracy off the narrow band of parameters they were tuned to suit. The 'form' used in either Aide Memoire d'Artillerie Navale or Ingalls' text which reproduces the work of Abel and Nobel give a more generally usable form (though both assume a later period more powerful black powder, not necessarily appropriate for earlier guns, and neglect discussion of an appropriate correction for old/damaged powder or weaker mixtures). The French document provides a useful estimate for both shot velocity lost to windage, and also an adjustment to recoil from these windage losses. This adjustment is usefully computationally derived, so the variation in shot performance with defect in size and weight across the full range of the permitted shot gauge for any selected weapon is possible. **To be fair to him he was one of the first to be looking at ballistics from a solidly empirical manner, with experimental results described and explained by a series of Axioms. He didn't have any prior catalogue of experimental results and limited equipment and funding to explore this over a wide range of scales, something which government ordnance boards did have available during the middle part of the C19th, although by then black powder was a 'comparison' powder to the newer smokeless powders being introduced, as were smoothbore roundshot in comparison to rifled elongated shot and shell. Black powder and roundshot tend to get the briefer discussion in the later papers, but they are reported as baselines, and useful information can be found from them (Bashforth is another with useful data, using his Chronograph - mostly for rifled ammunition, but there is some round shot from smoothbores as a baseline for comparison).

While a 32lb carronade is only using 1/4 of the powder charge of the 'distant' charge of the 32lb gun, it is also considerably lighter. A consequence of this is that recoil velocity is higher than for the gun, and the recoil distance available/required is less. Recoil energy for the 17.25cwt carronade is a *bit* lower than the maximum for the gun, but is similar to that of the 'middling' charge of the 55cwt gun. All this combines to give a much 'sharper' check on the breeching, elevation screw and carriage than the large guns. Compared to the small calibre guns, which have much more metal per pound of shot/powder this 'same calibre' difference is even more marked. A 32lb carronade will have around 4 times the recoil energy of a 9lb gun, and will be absorbing it over a shorter distance. (While a carronade is 'pushing' material limits (and later got a brass bushing in the breech to avoid failure of the threads), and it wasn't generally permitted to double shot them for regular use to save the breechings, fittings on the hull framing, and the carriage, the guns had a lot more leeway for using double shot with it's higher recoil - similar recoil is seen with a double shot and half charges, and distant charge and single shot, and middling charge and double shot is only around a third more.

The maximum range would be found at ~35-42 degrees depending on initial velocity and shot density. However, even with the beds and quoin removed, the carriage won't permit more than ~16 degrees (and this is in practice limited, by portsills to ~9-11 degrees). Earlier guns and their carriages were limited more (the Vasa cannon was capable of being elevated to 3.5 degrees according to notes from the recent test programme), and with some the quoin and beds present later carriages have a lower useful (and controllable) range of elevation as well (probably more than 5 degrees, but I'd have to do some additional calculations to get a figure for this for an example gun to confirm it). But-en-blank/line of metal - i.e. the line of direct pointing will give different ranges according to the (fixed) shape of the gun, the powder charge and windage, and the number and weight of shot. A single shotted 32lb gun pointing at a nominal 2/3 degree might reach 425yds to the muzzle height, and 540 to the water, from a lower battery, with the middling charge, 370yds to muzzle hgt, 485 to the water, with the small charge, 285yds to muzzle hgt, 395yds to the water. Double shot is harder to estimate, but a reasonable guess for the small charge would set the faster shot reaching to 140 yds to muzzle hgt (95 yds for the slow shot) and 245 yds for the fast shot (185 yds slow) to the water. It would be normal to engage at close ranges with reduced charges or even using double shot, and only to drive shot with large charges for distant work Carronades, firing a large shot, with lower velocity, but at a 'steeper' line of metal have similar distances of direct pointing to that of the long gun with distant charge, but have similar velocity, trajectory and penetration performance to the 'top' shot of a reduced charge double shot. This 'high' trajectory tends to make untrained carronade gunners fire rather high over closer distances, and to fall shorter than a similarly pointed gun much sooner at longer distances, but the absolute range of guns and carronades is not as dissimilar as many writers declaim (16 degrees from a carronade of 32lb would reach to 2390 yds, while the distant charge of the 9.5ft gun would require 8 degrees to drive a shot to the same range.