Naval gun

“ Again, the largest naval gun in the year 1800 was one firing but a 42-pound shot, while in the United States navy we have now the 13-inch rifle of 60 tons, with a projectile of 1100 pounds, and Great Britain has afloat 1800-pounder breech-loaders which weigh 111 tons. Before monster ordnance such as this, the strength of man, unaided, is but crude and futile. He must call to his help—as he has done—steam as the source of power for the electric, hydraulic, or pneumatic engines, which load, elevate, and train the gun. ”

“ Nevertheless, the first improvement in guns and projectiles that followed the advent of the armor-clad, gave the gun the lead, and the gun has kept the lead ever since.
Today, the long-range, high-power naval gun, charged with smokeless powder, and throwing a projectile made of tempered steel inconceivably tough and hard, and charged with high explosive, is the most powerful dynamic instrument ever produced by man. A 12-inch naval gun throws a projectile weighing half a ton, at a velocity nearly three times the speed of sound. ”

“ In the years which have elapsed since Lord Fisher came to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord, two altogether revolutionary changes have been made in naval war.
1. Until 1904 the 12-inch guns of our battleships were weapons that no one would have thought of using beyond the range of 4,000 yards. The identical guns have been used in this war at 11,000, 12,000, and 13,000 yards. The advance in range owes nothing to improvements in the gun. It has been brought about by improvements in sights, in range-finders, and in the organization called fire control. ”

“ A 12-inch gun placed in a fort may be just as good as a like gun placed in a ship, but it has no power to exert its power usefully unless some enemy comes where the gun can hit it. And when one searches the annals of history for the records of whatever fighting forts have done, he finds that they have been able to do very little. But a 12-inch gun placed in a man-of-war can be taken where it is needed, and recent history shows that naval 12-inch guns, modern though they are, have already done effective work in war. ”

“ Until the early days of the sixteenth century sea-fights had been land-fights in character; ships came as quickly as possible to close quarters, grappled or charged one another, cut rigging, and essayed to board. The sailor was subservient to the soldier. The gun, represented in the main by serpentines, periers, murderers, and other quick-firing pieces, was primarily a defensive armament, for the defence, firstly, of the entire ship, or, in the event of the waist being captured, of the fortified end citadels or castles. ”

“ A KRUPP GUN ON A NAVAL CARRIAGE.
The work to be done by an unarmored cruiser must be done from a distance when risking an engagement with an armored enemy. The superiority of armament must compensate for deficiency in defensive power which precludes close quarters. To make these ships effective they must be armed with guns capable of doing an extraordinary amount of work, and yet the size of the vessels will not admit of their carrying guns of immense weight. In order to get this amount of work out of a comparatively light gun, we must secure great initial velocity for the projectile. ”

“ All mouldings, said Muller, should be as plain and simple as possible; the trunnions should be on the axis of the piece; the windage of all types of guns should be smaller, and there should be more moderation in the charges used.
In time all these improvements came. The smooth-bore gun, strengthened and simplified, preserved its establishment in the navy far into the nineteenth century, as will later appear. ”

“ So long as solid shot were used, indeed, these timber-built ships were admirably suited for the line of battle; as size and strength increased and as our methods of construction improved the ship gained an increasing advantage over the gun, defence increasingly mastered attack, to such a degree that by the end of the long wars with France the ship-of-the-line had become almost unsinkable by gun-fire. But so soon as shell guns were established—even with spherical247 shells fired from smooth-bore ordnance—wooden ships loomed easy targets for destruction. ”

“ Not only is the 12-inch gun a weapon incomparably great, compared with the musket, but when placed in a naval ship, it possesses a portability which, while not an attribute of the gun itself, is an attribute of the combination of gun and ship, and a distinct attribute of naval power. ”

“ Opportunities have been afforded to note the progress made in armor and artillery, and though the smooth-bore shell is still operative against unarmored vessels, the advantages of the rifled gun under all the circumstances of navy experiences have been admitted, and in the transition through which our naval artillery is now passing we are not embarrassed by the presentation of views antagonistic to the principles on which it has been determined our new artillery is to be constructed. ”

“ BREECH-LOADING RIFLE-TUBE READY FOR RECEIVING JACKET.
The built-up steel gun is the one now adopted in Europe by the leading powers, and it is the gun with which the United States navy will be armed; but, before its final adoption, efforts were made to convert old smooth-bore cast-iron guns into rifles, and to construct new guns partially of steel and partly of wrought-iron. As some of these methods of conversion offered an economical means of acquiring rifled cannons, our naval authorities were led into the error of countenancing the effort to a moderate degree. ”

“ Moreover, the historian goes on to relate that the ship's guns were carefully sighted, and her ammunition frequently overhauled. Often a cask would be thrown overboard, and a gun's crew suddenly called to sink it as it bobbed about on the waves astern. Practice with the great guns was of daily occurrence. "Every day for about an hour and a half in the forenoon, when not prevented by chase or the state of the weather, the men were exercised at training the guns ”

“ The struggle between guns and armour begun with the Gloire and Warrior had continued. In the presence of the new powers of mechanical science, artillerists and shipbuilders had sought to plumb the possibilities of offensive and defensive elements in warship design. Guns influenced armour, armour reacted on guns; both revolutionized contemporary naval architecture. It was in the effort to aggrandize the power of guns that Noble discovered that, with the existing powders and with the short muzzle-loading gun, a natural limit of power was soon reached. ”

“ Secondly, the navy was itself “unwillingly dragged into the cul-de-sac of269 experimental construction induced by the clamour of public opinion.” The type, the size of the gun which was to be embodied in our latest warships, was decided mainly by forces outside the navy, and changed from year to year. Naval architecture changed with it. The adoption of the succession of increasingly powerful rifled guns set experts at their wit’s ends devising warships suitable for carrying them; entailed continuous alterations both in the armaments of new ships and in the design of the new ships themselves ”

“ Those of 44, 40, and 28 guns relatively or absolutely diminished in number; whilst the number of the 38-gun, 36-gun, and 32-gun frigates increased. The officers who had personal experience of many campaigns were able to impress on the naval architects of the day the necessity of recognising the sharp distinction that really exists between what we should now call the 'battleship' and what we should now call the 'cruiser.' In the earlier time there were ships which were intermediate between the ship of the line and the frigate. These were the two-deckers of 56, 54, 50, 44, and even 40 guns. ”

“ Artillery would have to be in a more advanced stage to justify its use at sea, for no vessels could afford to carry guns which could only be used so infrequently. Nevertheless, the moral effects of gunfire were so evident, especially when weapons were made more powerful and able to inflict serious material damage, that the adoption of the new arm for naval war could not be long delayed, and the time soon arrived when both national and private vessels of any size carried one gun or more. ”

“ The machines which owe their rise to the invention of gun powder have now totally supplanted the others; so that there is scarce any but the sword remaining, of all the weapons used by the ancients. Our naval battles are therefore almost always decided by fire-arms, of which there are several kinds, known by the general name of artillery. ”

“ It must not be assumed from this that naval guns are bad guns or poor guns, however, but simply that they are made for a special purpose for which they are highly efficient, from which it follows almost as a natural consequence that they are somewhat less efficient when used for some other purpose. ”

“ It first must be understood that all modern guns on ships-of-war are breech-loading and rifled, and that the smooth bore exists only as a relic, or to be brought out in an emergency for coast defense, when modern guns are not available. From the thirteen-inch down to the four-inch, the guns are designated by their caliber, the diameter of their bore, and the shot they throw, while from that to the one-pounder they take their name from the weight of the shot. Everything below the one-pounder is in the machine-gun class. ”

“ The French, with characteristic ability and independence, have in the mean time made many notable departures from their first types of broadside ships. Believing in the association of heavy guns with light ones—mixed armaments, as they are called—the central armored casemate of wholly protected guns has been rejected in order to give a maximum thickness of plating at the water-line. The largest guns are mounted en barbette—that is, in towers which protect the gun mechanism, and permit the pieces to be fired, not through port-holes, but over the rim of armored parapets. ”

“ On the modern battleships the function of the great guns is the penetration of the enemy's armor, either at the waterline belt or on the turrets and gun positions, while that of the rapid-firers is the destruction of the unarmored parts or the disabling of the guns not armor protected. The six, three, and one-pounders direct their rain of shots at the turret portholes, gun shields, or unprotected parts of the ship, having also an eye to torpedo-boats, while from the fighting tops, the Gatlings rain a thousand shots a minute on any of the crew in exposed positions. ”

“ If the radius of the gun were only required to be small, as in a moving vessel, the ball might be placed at the muzzle, and in such case little sound or vibration, and no smoke whatever should come into the vessel, and no damage could be done to the gun save by shot striking exactly in the muzzle. This is so perfectly practical an arrangement, that nothing but the fact of a ship’s sides being too weak to sustain the recoil of guns so attached ought to keep it out of use. Our sailors are too precious a commodity to have them wasted in working muzzle-loading guns at open ports. ”

“ This gun, which has been experimented with in the English Navy, is intended as a defence against torpedo-boats. It has four barrels placed in line, having a calibre of one inch, to fire a half-pound steel projectile. The projectiles are placed in guides behind the rear of the barrels, and by the movement of a lever are sent into the chamber, fired, and the empty shell extracted. Gearing worked by hand-wheels gives elevation and direction. The fire is rapid from this gun, and the results have been excellent for penetration. Weight of the gun complete, about 1000 pounds. ”

“ Men were in the whitewashed magazines, with felt slippers on their feet, handing out 6-inch shell and cartridge-cases. Others, rushing out from the darker ammunition passages, seized them, shoved them into little canvas bags bound with rope, and dashed back again to feed their own especial ammunition hoist. Hooking the bags to a rope which ran up the tube, passed over a pulley-wheel at the top and led down again, they hauled the shell and cartridges up to the 6-inch gun above them. ”

“ The guns at this period, and indeed since Elizabethan times, were mounted on carriages formed of two wooden sides or cheeks strongly connected together by timber cross-pieces or "transoms", and placed on four solid wooden wheels or "trucks". They were secured to the ship's side by thick ropes or "breechings" passing round the breech of the gun, and long enough to allow of a certain recoil on being fired. The gun was run out again by blocks and tackles, which could also be used to haul it inboard without its being fired, in order to secure it for sea and close the port. ”

“ Round the masts are placed some of the shot and shell for the large guns below, painted white, and the knobs (i.e. studs to fit the rifling) and points gilded. Were here shown a Gatling gun for service on shore or for clearing the decks of boarders, &c. On going below we saw a couple of rocket-tubes burnished like a looking-glass. . . . In the steerage we saw a 7- or 9-pounder boat gun polished beautifully (as was all the metalwork in the ship) which had an arrangement for reducing the recoil by a cylinder full of oil. The main-deck battery consisted of 12-ton guns, lacquered to look like jet. ”