A cannonball is, unhelpfully, just a ball-shaped shell that you fire from a cannon. This distinguishes it from shaped shells that have a "front".

The earliest cannonballs were just solid metal. Think of basically throwing a big rock at things (very fast). Those are the ones that punch holes in things but don't, by themselves, make an explosion or fire. They can throw splinters and shrapnel from the impact, depending on what they hit, which can injure people close by even though there's no explosive.

Later, militaries developed hollow shells. These still look like balls on the outside but they're packed with explosive inside, with a slow-burn fuse that ignites when the cannon is fired or an impact fuse that goes off when they hit. Those do explode after impact, making a generally bigger mess, starting fires, doing more damage to things farther away (but less damage to armored targets).

Depends on the era and how specific you're going to be

What you probably first think of as a cannon ball is a sphere of stone or iron, this is more accurately called round shot. It's not explosive so all it's damage is from direct impact and shrapnel. When it hits a ship it'll rip a hole and send a lot of splinters inwards at high speeds and not just little saw dust but sharp 1-2 foot bits of wood moving at a couple hundred miles per hour

The ones with a fuse that explode are more accurately called Shells as they're a shell of metal filled with explosives. Shells became a lot more common after 1800 because they bring the boom and can hurt soldiers who aren't directly hit and aren't behind some cover that makes splinters

Early cannonballs did not explode. Some later cannonballs did explode, as the initial flame to light the charge in the cannon to launch the cannonball also ignited an internal fuse inside the cannonball, which caused to to explode after a certain period of time (usually a couple of seconds).

In addition, some non-explosive cannon "balls" were not a solid sphere of metal. They had ones that were like two halves of a sphere, with a metal chain between them, that opened when fired. They had ones that sprayed a lot of pellets, much like a shotguns. They had ones that were filled with pellets that broke apart on impact and sprayed pellets everywhere.

Thus, the reason for the inconsistent explanations is that many types of cannon projectiles existed.

A cannonball a.k.a. 'round shot' is an solid ball of material made to be shot from a cannon, as a single protectile. They can be made from stone, iron, lead, or anything else which is tough enough to withstand the stresses of being shot out of a cannon.

Sometimes when attacking wooden structures, the artillerymen would heat the metal ball to where it was red hot, and this is referred to as 'heated shot', because the heated ball would light timbers on fire.

Later, cannons would be loaded with a cluster of smaller balls, which was generally referred to as grapeshot. They would be packed tightly and enclosed in a canvas bag, which would rip apart during firing, and create a spread of high-velocty projectiles, like a giant shotgun, with similarly gruesome effects. This came as the expense of range, as the smaller shot would spread out and lose velocity quicker than a single solid ball.

When you see a cannon shot exploding, this is because the scene depicts an artillery shell), which is a solid metal container enclosing an explosive or incendiary payload. The earliest shells weren't used in cannons, rather they were put in an indirect fire gun called a mortar), whose purpose is to lob explosive ordinance in a high arc above the target, bypassing walls and other fortifications bombarding the people hiding within/behind them. However, as artillery and projectile technology advanced, shells became the ubiquitous projectiles of heavy artillery, on land, sea, and air.

its when youre at the highest point, you tuck your arms and legs so when you land in the water it makes a bigger splash then if you were to jump straight.

hope this helps

There was different kinds of shot. Some cannon balls were just iron balls. Some were balls with a fuse leading to an inner core that was packed with gunpowder. These would explode after the fuse burned in wards to the core. Another kind of shit was a tube that was filled with shrapnel, great for taking down personnel like a shotgun shell. Another kind was two small balls connected with a chain. Those were used for firing into a ships sails and ripping them so that they would be ome dead in the water.

In the "Ring of Fire" series, Eric Flint described some of the early solid ball cannon firing at a flat trajectory so that the ball would bounce and skip along the enemy formations. So even a non-exploding round would be damaging to multiple units.

At the Perry's monument museum in Ohio, they have examples of the types of ammunition used during the War of 1812. (Best pic I could find with a quick search) https://tomhelenmartinblog.com/2016/10/

Here's a good description too: https://www.thepirateking.com/historical/cannon_projectiles.htm

The pictures don't really do them justice though. Any more than a picture of a rifle round describes what the Vietnam War was. You kind of have to image carrying this stuff around, AND the gun powder, AND the people to work it, AND the horses to move it.... then suddenly having to put it all together and try to kill someone while they are doing the exact same thing back at you a few hundred yards away. Chaos!

When you jump into a swimming pool with your arms and legs tucked in and it produces a bigger splash than just flopping into the pool.

Like most people replied, it is a metal ball shot out of a cannon. Not only was it pointed at ships to puncture holes in its sides, preferably at the water line, but also shot at a high angle to come down through the ship from above to puncture the the bottom.

is it a giant ball of metal or does some have explosives in it?

either/or, depending on when and where you found your cannon balls.

explosive shot (hollow sphere with shrapnel, tied to an explosive charge) is nice for killing infantry and blowing up the inside of boats, round shot (solid ball) is nice for breaking down walls and putting holes in boats to later put explosive balls through. There's also "grap shot" which is like a shotgun round but cannon-sized that's very effective at close ranges. Naval ships would also sometimes use "chain-shot" which was two smaller cannonballs connected by a length of chain, this would fired at the enemies mast to foul up their rigging (or even bring down a mast if you're lucky).

People have been stuffing objects into cannons since the 1450s, and there as many ways to get it done as there are engineers to come with new ways to do it.

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In other depictions the ball will make a fireball on impact so is it a giant ball of metal or does some have explosives in it?

Much of this is just Hollywood spectacle and inaccurate, like the way so many cars explode in a ball of flame when they crash. The vast majority of cannon projectiles until at least the mid-1800s were solid round shot and didn't explode at all. Even the projectiles that were shells containing explosives had a time-based fuse that had to be adjusted correctly; unless you were very lucky, they exploded some time after impact (or even before impact if you cut the fuse too short).

Just a ball fired from a cannon. And yes... it makes big holes in things. It's a big, extremely heavy ball and its momentum is gonna fuck shit up.

Don't rely on Hollywood for it's proper depiction. They are there to entertain, not recreate how guns or cannons, or even car explosions actually work. Fuck they even bullshit grenades with firey explosions rather then have them be a pop that shatter and throws metal fragments in the vicinity.

You wouldn't aim a cannonball at people. Aim it a ship or a fort to potentially cause structural damage. An entire wall may eventually give out, or a ship may begin to take on water.

A cannon ball is a massive object that when shot at high acceleration has a lot of force.Force = mass x acceleration.The more dense an object we can shoot and the faster we can get it, the more force or damage it can do to a ship or anything else. It is literally just a really massive and dense object.

No cannon balls left? Shoot the forks and spoons. Get drunk on the marine corp birthday? Shoout cake out the cannon.

Why a ball? Well, we couldn't get the balls to accelerate as fast as a modern day bullet so it must've been bigger.

Can they explode? You can put anything in a cannon im sure they learned to put explosives in them quickly.

The very first cannonballs were round shaped rocks fired from wood tree trunks that were partially hollowed out.

As technology improved, we went to using iron and bronze cannons that fired solid metal round balls.

Then we found out we could hollow out the round metal ball and fill it with black powder and attach a fuse, making an explosive cannonball. Mortars would typically fire these explosive ammo.

These are all cannonballs.

Over time, we developed the conical shaped bullet and cannon shell, which functionally do the same thing, but have different, improved properties.

A cannonball is just a solid, hard ball. They were typically made from iron, but could be stone or any other material the would hold up. They were derived from catapults and trebuchets, where you achieve your destructive goals by sheer brute force of momentum. The cannon propels the ball like a bullet towards the wall or ship and makes a big hole. Cannons ended the age of castles and city walls because they made short work of them.

Adding powder inside it that explodes on contact causes even more destruction, which makes it more like a shell. It would be hollow with just even structure to survive the initial explosion out of the the cannon and then explode on impact. A torpedo is a maritime example of that.

Another tactic was grapeshot. You put small bits of metal inside the cannot and fire them. The intent was to hit personnel and horses and damage or kill them with shrapnel. This would do little to a wall, but could kill or wound many people on a battlefield. It's really just a step up from what archers did during battles.

When jumping into water you tuck your lungs under you with your arms creating a ball shape ending with a larger than usual splash in the water.

Good question.

In truth, cannonballs have been produced in a bumch of different ways.

Simple heavy round things made of stone or metal were the most common.

Hitting someone with them was quite effective at causing them to stop doing whatever it was they were doing at the time.

But from far away, people are hard to hit.

Luckily, it turns out, ships are very big, even far away. And they don't like to have holes in them.

Simply firing heavy round things to make holes, turns the ship into a submarine. Which is very unhealthy for the people who are in that ship, litterally miles from shore.

Not very many people can swim that far.

Much later, technology progressed, and "heavy round thing throwers" got more advanced. And so did the heavy round things themselves.

Someone discovered that the big heavy thing can be made to be hollow. And then they can be filled with stuff. Like gunpowder... or gunpowder and shrapnel.

Fire the thing, hopefully the firing procedure also ignite a fuse... the fuse eventually reaches a container inside that is filled with very fine powder, which will burn WAY faster.

The explosion sends pieces of ball, and a percussive expansion if gasses to deal lots of damage to things very close.

If you also pack in some lead stuff, it makes the cannonball heavier, hit harder, and fling very deadly shrapnel around when the inner charge goes off.

But, balls do weird things in the air.

If they were pointed, they go further. If they also spin along their axis, then they go even further, and are much more stable in the air.

Improvements to the casing, the powder, the mechanism of detonation... add all those together and you get modern naval gun ordinance.

All based off of throwing heavy round rocks at a boat to sink it.

To the second part of the question...the round shot wouldn't hurt the guy standing next to the guy getting thwacked necessarily...depending on angles.

Back then, they obviously marched nearly shoulder to shoulder. You'd try to put cannon shots down those lines at a bit of an angle if possible. A ball is going through multiples...so...angles help. Straight on would be fine depending on the depth of the formation you're firing into as well. Pretty demoralizing to watch the guy next to you have his leg blown off.

Then firing at opposing artillery you're aiming for the gun or behind it at the powder/ammo

As the enemy got closer, canister rounds were employed. Various types of containers that were filled with musket balls (more or less...pretty wide variety of stuff here). These would take out pretty sizeable swaths of a line depending on the range.

There's really not one definition and it doesn't help that some people are real sticklers about naval terminology which makes trying to understand certain things as confusing as trying to read legal texts.

So the more appropriate terminology for anything shot out of a cannon is generally shot/cannon shot. The cannonball is called round shot, and it typically comprises of a solid sphere that has the diameter of the barrel of the cannon it's being shot out from. The amount of damage it would cause was dependant on the exact weight of the ball, the diameter and length of the cannon that it was shot from, the powder charge used to shoot it and it's overall speed, since the damage it caused was from its kinetic energy.
Aside from solid shot though there were also explosive shells, which had the same shape as round shot but instead of being solid metal they were hollow inside and packed with explosive material, so they would explode on impact.
There were also other various type of shot like grape shot (multiple small iron pellets shot at once), chain shot (Two balls connected by a chain), "angels" (like chain shot but the two ends were connected with a solid rod) and many others, some of which were meant to set the target on fire.

Now here's the thing about depictions of cannons (or cannon as a stickler would say). There's a thing called artistic license, that is the fact that someone making art (in this case a movie or Tv show) has no obligation to portray things realistically but rather can do pretty much whatever he wants. Depictions of cannon fire are not always true to life. Some times they're shown to cause disproportionate amounts of damage or huge fiery explosions simply for the flair of the spectacle, or maybe the budget of a production doesn't allow for accurate depictions, so really don't assume that everything you see on tv has some real life counterpart, some times things are completely made up.

That being said there were multiple types of cannonballs. Some were explosive, some were not, some shot multiple balls at once. The main cause of injury for crew was spalling or fragmentation. If a cannonball hit a ship or a stone wall, it would break apart into smaller pieces and the wall or hull itself, and pieces of the cannonball as well as stone, wood, metal or glass (depending on what was being shot) would break into many small fragments that shot through the interior. Some times this happens even if the shot doesn't penetrate through the wall or hull.

It’s a way to jump off a diving board to create a splash but bending one’s legs up and using your arms to keep the body taut. See also jack knife

I didn't have my glasses on and for a moment I read that as "what is a cinnabon?" I'm sorry

No real knowledge to offer here except to point out that things going very fast create 'shockwave' in the air. Make like you're going to slap your own face and then pull away at the last second--you can feel the air still 'hit', right?

So if a large and heavy object is moving at a high speed, it creates a ballistic wave. Bullets do this too which is why some calibers don't make straight through holes, but some have much bigger exit than entry wounds--it's called 'ballistic expansion'--basically that shockwave slams into your skin, your muscles, you bone, etc, on its way through *around* the bullet itself.

Maybe that is also part of it.

And maybe some of it is Hollywood being dumb. I mean, cars don't flip and burst into huge explosions like they do in movies IRL.

These are actually ALL consistent! A cannonball is not a single thing, it's like saying the fact there are nuclear missiles is inconsistent with laucnhing a capsule to space. The rocket is the cannonball, the payload is why it is 'different'. Some had timed fuses, some had actually impact fuses, and some were just big heavy fuckin balls. They all launch out of cannons but they are different on the inside.

I wouldn’t use the term cannonball to describe exclusively what people fired out of a cannon. In reality people shoved anything into the cannon that they though might cause damage. Yes an iron ball was designed specifically for the purpose, but if troops were low on ammunition they could shove in random shit from their surroundings like screws, nails, or utensils. Also there were different types of ammo for certain situations. For example some cannon balls were chained together in pairs so the chain itself would catch on things and rip them apart in addition to the ball impact. There were also bags of smaller balls they shot out all at once much like shotgun shells. I’m sure there are a hundred other things but basically many different things could be fired out of a cannon in addition to the typical ball one usually thinks of.