I too would pick a Bess as the more versatile and better gun , but not the commercially made Bess's available today .
The Long Land pattern musket is part of my family history , Family members at Culloden would have used Bess's against other family members armed with swords , my distant family member at Waterloo was on a horse so he used a sword and pistols . The Bess was standard for New Zealand's early settlers , both for self defense , food gathering and trade .
I believe the way to make shot for Military musket is to flatten a ball with the back of an axe or somesuch , then chop the lead into small cubes and load it over wadding with more wadding on top . I have read of swan shot being used in muskets , I am not quite sure how it was made , Captain Cook seemed inordinately fond of shooting troublesome natives with swan shot during his round the World voyages of exploration .I suspect he thought he was being humane .
A British Battalion of 500 men could be expected to fire 1500 shots in 1 minute .
The Prussians did some tests and found that a battalion of men firing at a target 100 feet long and 6 feet high scored 60 % hits at 75 yards , 40% at 150 yards and 25% at 225 yards .
Colonel George Hanger wrote in 1814 . A soldiers musket , if not exceedingly ill bored ( as many are ) will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards , it may even at a hundred , but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards , provided his antagonist aims at him ; and as to firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket , you might as well fire at the moon .
In the Napoleonic wars at Talavera it was reckoned that in half an hour 1300 French were either killed or wounded but it had taken 30,000 musket balls to achieve that . 3,765,000 rounds were fired by Wellington's army at Vitoria and caused 8000 French casualties , 1 hit/459 shots . The Captured
Charleville ammunition , being a smaller caliber , was used by the British when their own ammunition was running low .
There seems to be some confusion on India pattern guns made for the East India Company and used by the British troops in the Napoleonic wars and later, and modern Indian BB,s which are replica Brown Bess's made in India today to a fairly low standard .