What sort of damage would round shot do to the body?

If a 6 lb solid shot hit you in the arm, you'll be walking around without an arm. If it hit you in the head, you'll be walking around without a head; if it hit you in the legs, well then, you won't be doing much walking at all. The damage to the human body increases as the weight of the shot increases. If a 24 pound ball hit you above the elbow, it will probably take your shoulder and most of the torso along with it.

On land the artillery crews aimed the guns for the shot to hit the ground in front of the enemy ranks so that the ball would bounce through their ranks no higher than shoulder height removing any part of the body with which it came into contact. In the ship to ship combat falling rigging and wooden splinters from the ship's sides presented more danger than the actual canon balls.

It would remove whatever it hit and do a lot of damage to surrounding tissue.

All of these shots would obliterate whatever it hit. E.g., hit an arm, the arm disappears. Remember, they were designed to go through heavy oak planking on ships. Going through a body is trivial by comparison. Chances for survival if hit by solid shot are exceedingly poor. While bigger shot makes for more destruction, dead is dead!

probably lots of damage

Canon fire would obliterate any body part it hit. The force of a cannonball is just so immense

Black powder artillery, unlike modern artillery, projected missiles with great *force* but at quite a low *speed*. During the Siege of Gibraltar in 1704, the British garrison employed two boys to keep watch for Spanish projectiles and shout a warning every time the saw one coming so that the men working to repair the defences could take cover before it struck; that's how slow they were. This made the damage they did quite different from modern projectiles. A roundshot that hit a brick wall wouldn't send bricks flying in all directions; it could almost do the cartoon thing of leaving a neat round hole behind it.

And a roundshot that hit a man would not necessarily knock him over. A British sergeant, John Palmer, in the Crimean War wrote that on one occasion the roundshot bouncing toward them (because it was standard practice when firing at a mass of formed infantry to aim to hit the front ranks, and hope that the next bounce would hit the reserves behind them) looked so like footballs that one man put out his foot to stop one - and it went bouncing right on, leaving him standing on one leg with the other foot shot clean away.

you are morbid and it is depraved it is the sort of experience that sent soldiers insane for hundreds of years seeing such events can you imagine the next man to you having his head taken straight off can you even behold the shock no you can't you are a kid playing with fire it is more gruesome than you can understand and many really tough guys have broken under strain never ender estimate it

no doubt