Ever heard of a cannononball .. ovoid?

[kronckew]

with the advent of rifled cannon and breech loaders in the latter half of the 19th century, the cannon shot would be essentially cylindrical with an ogival end to reduce air friction and a flattened end carrying the engaging bands on the circumference that would take the rifling (and also allow them to be stored on end so they would not roll around). the ogive at the end would give them an oval appearance. by 1889 i believe that spherical solid shot was essentially obsolete.

even solid round shot during the american civil war was usually mounted in a wooden sabot which would be strapped to the shot with two bands of tin plated iron. these were frequently made up with wadding, and a pre-measured and bagged charge of powder into a complete round of ammunition that could be shoved down the barrel in one go.

the charge would be set off by a primer which was a long tube containing the primer compound and a prick with a sharp end to penetrate the bag, the primer had a pull ring at the other end which would ignite the primer thru friction when pulled - with a long cord. in large artillery and naval guns, charge could be varied by adding extra bags of powder behind the shot.

one easily viewed example is the main 16" gun on the USS missouri used in steven segal's movie 'seige' where they show it being loaded with a rather ovoid shell, followed by six bags of powder. these were fired electrically, but had a chemical primer backup justincase.

a good reference on american civil war era projectiles is the civil war artillery site at this Linky which has photos of hundreds of different projectile types. a very good demonstration firing video is listed under 'cool stuff'. some of the photos in 'cool stuff' show typical confederate and union edged weapons.