Ball Powder
Also: Spherical Powder
A spherical or flattened-ball smokeless propellant that meters smoothly through a measure but often wants a hotter primer to ignite cleanly.
Ball powder is a form of smokeless powder made as tiny spheres or slightly flattened balls rather than cut rods. Its round, free-flowing grains pour through a powder measure with very little variation, which makes it fast and consistent to meter when loading in volume. The shape and dense packing also let a given case hold a good quantity of powder.
The tradeoff is that the dense, coated spherical grains can be harder to light, so ball powders are frequently paired with a magnum primer for clean, complete ignition, especially in cold conditions. Ball powders are made across a range of burn rates, so they suit many cartridges, and their metering advantage is a real benefit for high-volume loading. Many precision shooters still prefer extruded powder for some applications, making the choice a matter of matching the powder to the load.