And of course, you leave out the French again. Plus, are you really claiming the Royal Artillery forgot to take alone shell, spherical case, and case shot? Shame on them, I suppose...
Well, yes, I'm leaving out the French because they turned up pretty late and weren't involved in most of the firing. As for shell/spherical case/case, how many hits per artillery fire are you expecting?
I've seen numbers in the past that explicitly break down "minie rounds fired" and "minie wounds caused" (excluding dead), but can't find them at the moment; sorry about that.
Moreover, the idea that one fires more accurately with a muzzleloader than a breechloader is risible -- belied by both military analysts and soldiers around at the time armies made the transition from one to the other. The feeling -- and testimony -- was that the rush to reload with the muzzleloader meant that men hurried their shots more.
The idea that one should take one's time with the slow-loading muzzle loader is essentially the philosophy of Hythe. It may not be wholly accurate, but it's not so much risible as plausible. (If there are statistics comparing the P1853 Enfield with the Snider conversions thereof, we could be sure as the only difference would be the ML versus BL).
Leave alone the idea that for your claim to have any validity an entire generation of soldiers, manufacturers, and ordnance were not only mistaken about the superiority of breechloaders but uselessly expended all that time and money to equip their armies with inferior weapons and never, alas, realized the errors of their ways.
Well, not really, no. The BL fires considerably faster and most of what matters is the ability to either (1) generate casualties in a short space of time or (2) cause morale damage, and the BL would be better at both even if it were half as accurate. However I think that a well trained soldier with a ML who was then handed a BL would be no less accurate with it (as he'd be in the habit of properly aiming).
I don't doubt you managed that feat of mathematics. At Rorke's Drift the garrison expended about 20,000 rounds. This article estimates 4-500 Zulu dead, but that has to be modified by the fact that only 351 bodies were discovered on the field, and that a good many of those were merely wounded. Well, merely, until the soldiers of the Queen murdered them. There were, I believe, no prisoners taken. 20,000 rounds for 500 casualties (not counting the extra hundred or two fired at point blank the following morning) gives about 40 shots per hit. More likely than not the soldiers at Inkerman themselves fired at least a hundred rounds for each of their scores.
http://samilitaryhistory.org/vol046fm.html
What about the walking wounded? I'll admit I was using a higher total casualties number than the one you've used (I estimated about 1:1 walking wounded:dead or severely wounded), but from memory I was using an article which cited a 5%-10% hit rate as typical for the British in the battles in Africa as my sanity check.
As for the Inkerman numbers, you're suggesting a 1:100 hit rate, so that out of the ~200,000 small arms rounds fired at Inkerman there were ~2,000 casualties generated. So the other 10,000 casualties were generated by ~2,000 artillery fires.
This would imply five casualties per shot for the artillery, and by comparison with e.g. the battle of Gettysburg the 1st New York Light Artillery (Battery L) expended 1290 rounds over the course of the Gettysburg battle which would imply that it caused 25% of the Confederate casualties at Gettysburg by itself.
Either that or it really was foolish of everyone to abandon smoothbore artillery!