I think the old timers were more worried about the gun going off, than how fast the ball went, or how quick ignition occurred. If it went off, they had a real chance of living a few moments more. You saw larger touch holes, and strong locks, not because they were needed to fire the gun, but because the lock might take a real beating if the shooter had to use the gun as a club. Touch hole liners were things found on very expensive guns, and not usually on the common rifles found on the frontier. Think about how difficult it is to make a tap to thread an inside thread. These were very expensive tools, and only the larger smiths could afford to own one. Without a tap to threat the liner, how would you hold it in? It would be much easier to pull the breech plug, cut off the end of the barrel, retread the breech for the plug and drill a new touch hole, and make a new stock for the barrel. I do think that if they saw the muzzle breaks now available, they would have wanted one, too. It just would not have been as impressive on the end of a muzzle loading gun. I always have thought that the BOSS system, where the break also serves as a floating barrel weight to adjust the harmonics of the barrel to a given load, rather than requiring the shooter to tailor his load to a given gun, is one of the better, if misunderstood, advancements in firearms technology in the late 20th century. I truly expect to see it show up in the military firearms, perhaps in sniper rifles, where the utmost accuracy is sought by shooters for obvious reasons. The muzzle blast issue is what has to be solved for that to happen.
