What was artillery's use in ETW's time?

[Didz]

It is actually very plausible. The principle is the same as skipping stones on water. While water will swallow any slow moving object, high speed is a different matter.

Yeah!...the reason I doubt its plausibility is on two counts.

1.) Having done the whole skipping stones over water thing as a child, and as a father teaching my own children, I know that two factors are vital if you are going to get impressive results. One the stone needs to be as flat as possible, two the water needs to be as flat as possible. It also helps no end to add lateral spin to the stone to reduce the kinetic force it exerts on the water surface. Now, cannon balls are round, and solid, and don't spin, and the sea is not usually flat. Therefore, logic would suggest that firing a large lump of metal low across the surface of the ocean might result in the ball passing directly through a few wavetops, which would create a splashing effect similar to a stone bouncing on a pond, but it wouldn't actually cause the cannonball to bounce. In fact the constant impact with intervening wave crests is more likely to cause it to lose momentum faster and thus shorten its range.

2) The theory that any ships captain in a battle would deliberately risk a fully loaded broadside by firing it into the sea rather than at the enemy seems unlikely. The most common command I've actually heard associated with naval warfare of this period is 'Fire on the uproll'. This actually suggests that broadsides were deliberately timed to coincide with the point at which the ship had rolled away from the enemy and thus the elevation of the guns on its broadside was as high as possible. High elevation would actually increase the distance a shot travelled before it came into contact with the ocean, and thus reduce the loss of range caused by passing through the tops of waves and so increase its overall range. This actually makes a lot more logical sense. However, I can understand how an ordinary seamen on deck, or in the rigging looking at the series of splashes created by roundshot passing though the tops of wavecrests might think it was a clever use of the 'stone and pond' trick they played as a boy.

The fact that the same story has embedded itself into the mythology of the US Navy merely reinforces my belief that this is a case of old tars spinning a good yarn for us land-lubbers.

Doesn't make much sense though, the superiority would have manifested as better rate of fire and accuracy....trying to bounce cannonballs off of water is a somewhat risky precision move that wouldn't so much help make up for poor gunnery as make it horrendously worse.

Also the logic is fataly flawed...as if you are bouncing shot across the water surface how does it then manage to strike the target below the water line