This may seem like an odd question, however in film and television there are examples of people armed with muskets firing their ramrod at the enemy when they did not have another musket ball (Sgt. Harper from the BBC series Sharpe does this in an episode)? I realize that this may very well just be a creation of the film industry, but i figured i would ask because it would certainly be cool if it was true.
There seems to be a complete misunderstanding into how muskets operate, based on your question. I'm unaware of movies that do this, but if they do, they also are uniformed.
In order to have a projectile fly out of a musket, pressure must be built behind the round. You build pressure by keeping gunpowder behind a round musketball, which is confined in a small space, and then is projected outward when the force of the explosion needs to find a release point. It finds the release point in the easiest way possible, by pushing the ball down the tube. A ram rod would not work because it does not block off the entire barrel, so the force of the explosion can simply go around it. Also, muskets do not have any rifling, meaning that the spin on a bullet that takes place in 19th century fire arms did not happen in 18th century firearms. So when the bullet ejects, instead of moving in a cyclical rotation, the balls can actually spin any which way when coming out of a musket. This means that a ram rod, even if there was pressure behind it, would not be able to travel in the appropriate motion. One other major hinderance is that a musket ball is tiny weighing about 1.09 ounces at most, where as ram rods can easily weigh several ounces or even half a pound. There's simply no way that this could work. Source . Source