U.S. Military (USS John McCain) Set to Intercept North Korean Ship

fox news ^ | Friday, June 19, 2009

[meandog]

5-inch-54 normal range is about 13 nm. I understand the ERGM program is now on hold by the Navy due to multiple failures in loading systems. Here is the link click here . I understand there was a lot of effort being put into the 16-inch guns to estend their range in the 1980s. One idea was to use a sabot on a 14-inch projectile which would have hurled it some 80 nm.

[lentulusgracchus]

Interesting, thanx for the info.

They had 14" projectiles lying around from the end of WW II? I thought the last of the 14"-gun BB's were decommissioned in the 1950's.

Someone speculated once in the Naval Institute Proceedings that if you used an 8" projectile, you could get it out to 100 nm with a 16" rifle.

The problem being, with naval targets at least, as a Royal Navy officer commented between the wars about their experimentation with 18" guns in HMS Furious, the gun had a range of over 30 miles, assuming you could hit anything at that range. Fixed targets would be another matter, and the 18" projectiles used by the RN and the Imperial Japanese Navy tipped the scales at over 3500 pounds, which starts to get into the range of the famous "blockbusters" and "Daisy Cutters" of WW II and later.

[2harddrive]

The following joke was posted on Yahoo yesterday:
Q: Why is Obama going to let the North Korean missile hit Hawaii? A: Because then he can say that THEY destroyed his Birth Certificate! LOL.

Upon posting, comments were made that this was a racist effing joke, that the poster was a racist mother-effer, and that he should get the eff off Yahoo.

I saw no racial component to the joke at all, and it was WAY funnier than David Letterman’s about Sarah Palin’s daughter. What do YOU all think?