That was the best demonstration of canister Ive seen so far.
From my brief research on this topic:
Only 1/10 of all casualties at Gettysburg were from cannon fire, eventough it was the largest show of force of that type in the history of the continent.
During the Napoleonic era it was said that one shot of grape/canister was equivalent to an infantry battalion's volley. Even more accurate was the second claim eventough I found it myself to be a bit too optimistic.
Lessons learned from trying to replicate grape/canister in 1/6 scale cannons:
You must use BBs of considerable weight if you want them to retain the force of the main charge and have extended range.
Plastic BBs as I found out cant retain the inertia. .17 cal BBs work pretty well. To be safe wooden sabots should serve as a divider between the powder and the balls. In one case I found a small BB stuck in the 1/8in flash hole. Evetough for some reason no divider between powder and balls seems to have a more accurate spread down range.
Sabots can be easily made from wood dowels. The whole idea of canister is to delay the spread of the musket balls inside the can (feel free to correct me
). I still havent figured out how to replicate this one. I suppose if you wrapped the BBs into aluminum foil or put them into a small container you wouldnt have such an early spread of pellets in all directions.
A line of red balloons is a really fun way to play with this scaled down concept.