More research

The Too Fat Lardies are doing the wargames community a great services by publishing modern editions of the 1824 and 1862 Kriegspiel rules.  I have charted data from the 1862 edition infantry fire table to consider the professional expectations of the time concerning breachloader performance.

First, performance as a function of range

The vertical axis is the mean of six results corresponding to a 1d6 roll.  Points in the context are a figure of merit that inputs into a second computation concerning target density.  More or less, multiply by 4 to see how many enemies an infantry company can kill in a two minute turn.  On the range axis, the original chart is in hundreds of Prussian paces of  0.75m

An easy target is a body of troops advancing in the open; a hard target are men in cover or obscured.   The key point here is the knee of the curve between 250 and 300m -- an inch more or less on our table.

The second chart shows the expectations that harder targets get even harder at long range

This is the ratio of the values charted above.  The point to note here is that out to 250m or so, they expect fire against a hard target to be 2/3rds as effective as fire against a target in the open; but long range fire is disproportionately less effective against hard than against easy targets.

Now, while the first chart is going to be very different for a chassepot vs a dreyse, I have to ask myself how the second chart will change.