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A smoothbore weapon is one that has a gun barrel without rifling. Smoothbores range from handheld firearms to powerful and large artillery mortars. Some examples of smoothbore weapons are muskets, blunderbusses, and flintlock pistols. The opposite of smoothbore is rifling.
Rifling the bore surface with spiral grooves or polygonal valleys imparts a stabilizing Gyroscope spin to a projectile that prevents tumbling in flight. Not only does this more than counter Magnus-induced drift, but it allows a longer, more streamlined round with greater sectional density to be fired from the same caliber barrel, improving the accuracy, effective range and hitting power.
In the eighteenth century, the standard infantry arm was the smoothbore musket; although rifled muskets were introduced in the early 18th century and had more power and range, they did not become the norm until the middle of the 19th century, when the Minié ball increased their rate of fire to match that of smoothbores.
Artillery weapons were smoothbore until the mid-19th century, and smoothbores continued in limited use until the late 19th century. Early rifled artillery pieces were patented by Joseph Whitworth and William Armstrong in the United Kingdom in 1855. In the United States, rifled small arms and artillery were gradually adopted during the American Civil War. However, heavy coast defense Rodman gun persisted in the US until 1900 due to the tendency of the Civil War's heavy to burst and lack of funding for replacement weapons.
The Steyr IWS 2000 anti-tank rifle is smoothbore. This can help accelerate projectiles and increase ballistic effectiveness. The projectile is a 15.2 mm fin-stabilized discarding-sabot type with armor-piercing capability which the IWS 2000 was specifically designed to fire. It contains a dart-shaped penetrator of either tungsten carbide or depleted uranium, capable of piercing 40 mm of rolled homogeneous armor at a range of 1,000 m, and causing secondary fragmentation.
The armour-piercing gun evolution has also shown up in small arms, particularly the now abandoned U.S. Advanced Combat Rifle (ACR) program. The ACR "rifles" used smoothbore barrels to fire single or multiple flechettes (tiny darts), rather than bullets, per pull of the trigger, to provide long range, flat trajectory, and armor-piercing abilities. Just like kinetic-energy tank rounds, flechettes are too long and thin to be stabilized by rifling and perform best from a smoothbore barrel. The ACR program was abandoned due to reliability problems and poor terminal ballistics.
Mortar barrels are typically muzzle-loading smoothbores. Since mortars fire bombs that are dropped down the barrel and must not be a tight fit, a smooth barrel is essential. The bombs are fin-stabilized.
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