Posted on 05/24/2012 7:30:35 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
10 Largest Caliber Weapons Ever
Most weapons, from .45 automatics to 155-mm howitzers, are described in terms of caliber—the diameter of their projectile. These are the biggest of the big. Some are impractical showpieces built to satisfy the outsize egos of dictators such as Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Others are pure demonstrations of extreme gunsmithing. All of them pack a punch.
Largest Muzzle-Loading Cannon
The Tsar Cannon was cast in bronze in 1586 and weighs 40 tons. Its 35-inch bore and could fire about 1800 pounds of stone grapeshot, earning it the nickname the Russian Shotgun. It was never fired in anger and seems to have been intended mainly for display. Regent Boris Godunov, who ruled Russia in the late 1580s and 90s, described it as a way of overawing the local population and terrifying visiting ambassadors.
Napoleon wanted to take the Tsar Cannon back to France when he captured Moscow in 1812, but left without it. The big gun is now a popular tourist attraction outside the Kremlin arsenal.
Largest Gun Used in Action
In 1936, Adolph Hitler asked artillery-maker Gustav Krupp whether he could build an artillery piece to defeat the new French Maginot Line. Krupp's suggestion: a giant cannon with an 80-cm (31-inch) caliber. Hitler ordered two.
Named Gustav and Dora, after Krupp and his wife, each 1350-ton cannon required its own train to move it and took three days to assemble. They could fire concrete-piercing shells weighing seven tons—as much as a bus—over 25 miles. The huge cannons arrived too late for the war against France, but Gustav devastated Sevastopol in the then-USSR during the siege, firing up to 14 rounds a day. Both guns were broken up at the end of WWII.
Largest Gun on a Battleship
Japanese monster battleships Yamato and Musashi were fitted with nine 18.1-inch guns apiece, making them the most powerful artillery afloat. But though these guns had an effective range of some 26 miles, they were of little use in real combat. By the time they launched at the start of World War II, aircraft carriers had begun to eclipse battleships.
The Yamato once did get close enough to engage U.S. warships at the battle of Leyte Gulf, but submarine and aircraft attacks forced its retreat. Bombs and torpedoes sunk both ships.
I thought the idea of shooting something into space was from Jules Verne's story of a trip to the moon.
Q&A: Dr John Hunter -- The man who wants to shoot the Moon
Verne's story put cigar-smoking humans on the Moon, shooting them out of a cannon in, hmm, I think, Florida (!). That really, really wouldn't have worked. The other needed line of research, that of making satellites sturdy enough to survive the boost to orbit, was more difficult than the ballistics technology. Bull worked on this project five years, was overtaken by the missile men, and never achieved orbit with one of his projectiles. Thirty or so years later, his altitude record was broken by a gas gun project of Lawrence Livermore.
From Earth To Moon Jules Verne:
http://manybooks.net/titles/vernejuletext93moon10.html
> In his 1903 publication on space travel, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky refuted Verne’s idea of using a cannon for space travel. He concluded that a gun would have to be impossibly long. The gun in the story would subject the payload to about 22,000 g of acceleration (see formula). However, he was nevertheless inspired by the story and developed the theory of spaceflight. Gerald Bull and the Project HARP proved after 1961 that a cannon can shoot a 180 kg (400 lb) projectile to an altitude of 180 kilometres (110 mi) and reach 32 percent of the needed escape velocity.[citation needed] Additionally, during the Plumbbob nuclear test series, a 900 kg (2,000 lb) capping plate made of steel was blasted away and never found. It has been speculated that the plate entered outer space because its speed was estimated to be between two and six times the escape velocity, but engineers believe it melted in the atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon#Technical_feasibility_of_a_space_cannon
Was the gas gun project the one where they used propane injection in the barrel and a teardrop shaped projectile to achieve velocities of a few thousand ft/sec, from, IIRC old M-60 (tank) barrels welded together?
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