24 inch Naval Gun

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Wirbelwind

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Friedman mentions a 1934 study for a 66,000 ton "maximum battleship" originally to be armed with 24 inch guns. This was later downgraded to "merely" 20 inch guns.

Do we have any further information on these monster weapons, which I assume only were theoretical?
 
I think that was only a theoratical weapon. The actual warship design was calculated with the 20" cannon designed before WNT
 
IIRC from eg generic railway guns and the German monsters, those bigger brutes had a lot of problems with bore erosion. Such that each gun's shells' driving bands ranged in diameter, to be used in succession from smallest to larger...

How did they expect to get around that problem aboard ship ? Unless mega-ship's machine shop had facility to customise bands ??
 
Nik said:
IIRC from eg generic railway guns and the German monsters, those bigger brutes had a lot of problems with bore erosion. Such that each gun's shells' driving bands ranged in diameter, to be used in succession from smallest to larger...

How did they expect to get around that problem aboard ship ? Unless mega-ship's machine shop had facility to customise bands ??
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You do what the Germans did with the Paris gun or Bull did with his HARP gun, you custom manufacture each shell with the calculated wear rate taken into account, number them, and fire the shells in numerical sequence. You'd also have to have a special set of tooling available to the gun crew to measure the chamber after each shot and the next round was loaded to determine the variance in powder necessary to obtain a consistent chamber pressure on firing. That would require adding a small amount more powder with each round to make up for the increased chamber and barrel volume keeping pressure constant.
 
That was indeed a test gun for development purposes made from a 16" cannon.
www.tapatalk.com

All the World's Battlecruisers-24" inch experimental gun for the USN

I'm looking for more info on this. Just ran across it on the navweaps page for the 16"/45 Mark 6 while searching for other date. Apparently the gun
www.tapatalk.com www.tapatalk.com
difficult to measure it's "/" calibre but looks like /15 or /20 maybe?
WNUS_16-45_mk6_24inch_pic.jpg
 
The same happened to the French 45cm Modéle 1920 cannon which is now transported to unknown location if not destroyed...
Photos of parts of the Gun and Cradle as of 1980 at Gâvres:
450mm%201.jpg


450mm%202.jpg



I'm not sure they had survived....

These two weapons, one 57 mm calibre and the other 75 mm calibre, were anti-aircraft guns of the French Navy. Landed when the units on which they were fixed were disarmed, they were used by the GERBAM (Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches en Balistique, Armes et Munitions) at its Gâvres site (Morbihan) for ballistic tests. But in 2010, this site, which was included in a Natura 2000 area, was decommissioned in order to restore the site in accordance with European directives. The gun depot was intended for scrap metal. Several municipalities, including Plougonvelin, then acquired certain pieces in order to expose them to the public. These two marine guns are part of it.
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The area is empty nowadays:
1619334442276.png
 
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Dilandu said:
Tzoli said:
The same happened to the French 48cm Modéle 1920 cannon which is now transported to unknown location if not destroyed...
Photos of parts of the Gun and Cradle as of 1980 at Gâvres:
Click to expand...
!!! I never though any of those photos existed!
Click to expand...

Sadly these small photos I only have. It would be nice to find more or even larger esolution ones or the originals if they still exists after 40 years (and if the person shot the photos still lives... )
 
Damn, a 24 inch gun with super heavy ammo would have been a sight to behold.

It should be noted that the Paris Gun and similar weapons were "relatively" low in caliber, with the main range and barrel wear coming from the hilariously high velocity they fired shells at and associated high pressure.
 
Tzoli said:
That was indeed a test gun for development purposes made from a 16" cannon.
www.tapatalk.com

All the World's Battlecruisers-24" inch experimental gun for the USN

I'm looking for more info on this. Just ran across it on the navweaps page for the 16"/45 Mark 6 while searching for other date. Apparently the gun
www.tapatalk.com www.tapatalk.com
difficult to measure it's "/" calibre but looks like /15 or /20 maybe?
WNUS_16-45_mk6_24inch_pic.jpg
Click to expand...
navweaps said this

One gun formerly used on USS South Dakota (BB-57) was converted to a 24" (60.96 cm) test gun by removing the liner, cutting the overall barrel length down to 492 inches (12.5 m) and then boring out the inside diameter to 24 inches (60.96 cm). The finished gun was part of the Atlas missile development program and was used to fire 5,000 lbs. (2,268 kg) projectiles at a muzzle velocity of 1,300 fps (396 mps) or 100 lbs. (45.4 kg) projectiles at a muzzle velocity of 3,600 fps (1,097 mps).
 
One potential method of dealing with the bore erosion would be for the gun to be smoothbore and to incorporate fins (potentially folding, which would allow for the shell to maintain the same overall shape as traditional full-calibre shells) to induce spin. You'd still have some degree of bore erosion, but this would reduce it.
 

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