even a poor hawken style rifle will out shot a good military style rifled musket. fwiw, bobn
Brace yourself, Bob, I'm piling on you too!
I might agree a little more had you said something like, " Generally, a GOOD patched roundball rifle will group better than a rifled musket out to a hundred yards or so"
I've seen some pretty excellent accuracy from the rifled muskets with minie balls and I own one which, loaded with a patched .570 round ball, groups better than it will with minies. Gary's going to disagree with me here about round balls from rifled muskets. I know they weren't designed to shoot round balls but the rifling twist is slow, and I believe that if one were to take 10 rifled muskets and 10 Hawkin style rifles, work up round ball loads for each, you would find there was no practical accuracy difference between them.
Minie balls are sensitive, or at least that's my experience. They are hard to properly cast and require a narrow window of powder charge weight to function as designed. But... when you get it right, as Hawg says, shots are possible at longer ranges with them than with round balls and at those ranges, they become More accurate.
If I had a chance at a Zouave in the hand as opposed to a Lyman great plains rifle in the bush, I'd take that Zouave!