I'm on very limited time (and will be out of town for a couple) but I wanted to branch this out from the discussion in the artillery discussion.
This is from Brent Nosworthy's "With Musket, Fire and Sword: Battle Tactics of Napoleon and his Enemies" (p204)
Quote:
Although there was no consensus about the exact 'coefficient of effectiveness' of musket fire, if we may use this term, just about everyone who attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of musket fire admitted the percentage of shots fired in anger that succeeded in hitting a target were extremely low. This, however, was the theoretical performance of musketry conducted under the most favorable of circumstances. Military men knew that the actual performance under battlefield conditions was much lower, and many tacticians attempted to calculate the percentages of causalities inflicted during previous battles. One contemporary historican noted that the Prussians at the Battle of Czaslau (-War of the Austrian Succession) had to expend 650,000 cartridges to inflict about 6,500 Austrian casualities- dead and wounded (i.e. a 1% casualty rate.) ....
At Vitoria, for example, the British infantry were able to inflict only one casualty for every 800 rounds fired.
Nosworthy then gives a range of estimates from different historians, some contemporary, others more modern:
Guibert: .2%
Gassendi: .03%
Piobert: .03%
Napier: .3%
Hughes 3% (as the high)
Of course, all of this is going to depend hugely on range, and a simple comparison of shots fired to losses is very bare bones.
anyway, time's up.