What are the different types of fuses used in Artillery Projectiles?
There are primarily four different types of fuzes that were used during the Civil War: the time fuze, the percussion fuze, the combination fuze, and the concussion fuze. The time fuze was the most widely used fuze system. Time fuzes were designed to explode a projectile after a predetermined number of seconds. Two basic systems of time fuzes were used. The first system was simply a powder composition, wrapped tightly in paper and pre-cut at the factory to determine the time before explosion. It was driven into a metal or wood fuze plug mounted in the fuze hole of the projectile. The second system employed a soft metal housing containing a powder train. The artillerist would cut through the train at the appropriate time mark before loading the projectile into the cannon. Both time fuze systems relied on the flame from the exploding propellant charge in the cannon tube to ignite the powder composition. After the composition had burned down through the set number of seconds, the fuze flam
