How to Build a Battleships Main Guns - Is a Bigger Battery Better?

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Thank you very much once again to mellin and now. Continuing with the rest of the program, the

main

armament of the battleship is, of course, the big gun, but there is a surprising amount of complexity behind the construction of the battleship's

guns

, at least in the dreadnot era, as well. Let's take a brief, but somewhat deeper, look at the past. At the beginning of Napal, artillery weapons were generally made of bronze. This was because iron weapons, although cheaper, had a horrible tendency to explode randomly but distressingly frequently. Additionally, iron, of course, was subject to rusting quite quickly in the humid saltwater environment of the sea where ships were built. tended to be inside and that meant that the various components that made up an iron gun could become even worse and even more dangerous as time went on, there was only a certain amount of cleaning and painting such weapons could do of course, the first iron weapons.

Hence the term Gun Barrel arises, since the first weapons of this type were built using the same techniques as wooden barrels, that is, a series of staves that formed a cylinder that was then joined with hoops, as you can see on the cross section of one of On the other hand, cannons recovered from the 16th century English warship Mary Rose, bronze, could be cast relatively easily and then cast as a large item that could then be cleaned and leveled before accepting them into service. Bronze was, of course, significantly more expensive, but a bronze weapon worn down from repeated firing would eventually work.

Harden it to the point that it might as well actually, the crack could just be melted and recast. The advent of

better

iron casting techniques during the 16th century would gradually allow more reliable iron weapons to be made, initially starting with small ones and gradually increasing in size as they were much cheaper overall. They gradually overtook the bronze cannon as the weapon of choice, especially as this also coincided with ships beginning to carry more and more

guns

per ship and the number of ships the state kept in service was also growing overall, although whether one led to the other or vice versa.

On the contrary, I'll leave it up to you to decide that bronze would continue to be used for very large weapons, where iron casting took a little longer to catch up and in Prestige ships for a couple of centuries, but by the end of the 18th century a weapon long bronze would be unusual. enough to be worthy of comment, for example the HMS Victory which came before the existing HMS Victory carried long bronze 42 pounder guns on her lower gun deck but of course the current HMS Victory only used 42 pounder long guns. iron during most of his service, including that one. lower gun deck where there was typically 32 pounds of iron and of course the much older Mary Rose we mentioned earlier carried a mix of iron and bronze guns, and the iron guns themselves were also a mix of construction techniques: iron and later steel were therefore the materials used to make a ship's armament in the 19th century, but the basic principle of casting a large metal object sometimes with an insert of sacrifice to form a barrel or bore blank and then drill it and forge the resulting single piece of metal into a Naval cannons re

main

ed fairly standard and until the late 19th century, at this stage, cannons had grown quite large in some cases, but also at this time rifled guns began to appear in mainstream naval artillery and therefore a change in construction methods may also be necessary. observed this change results in weapons moving from a monolithic one-piece construction technique to what is known as a constructed weapon, at least generally referred to as a term that then takes on a slightly more specific meaning, as we will see, but essentially means a weapon that has been constructed from several components rather than simply being a monolithic hunk of metal.

This change came about for several reasons, first and foremost, and to be honest, it was an issue that would limit the overall size of naval weapons. Next, what was the size of a piece of steel that could be cast with a reasonable degree of quality control. With the advent of rifles and big guns, a weapon would have to be cast as a solid mass and then completely eliminate the chances of warping the differential from the ground up. The cooldown and the like were too great for any sort of sacrificial empty space insertion to be used, as had been done in soft war weapons of earlier periods, and this meant that if you wanted a weapon that weighed, for example, 20 tons, you needed to be able to cast a single piece of steel that could weigh between 25 and 30 tons and then have lathes, hammers and presses to drill and forge this mass into a weapon, even assuming you could technically do this, the large amount of weapons that could be expected to be mounted on a typical warship of the 1870s or 1880s and the number of ships that needed these weapons meant that, realistically, it didn't matter whether you had one or two factories that could do this at a rate very slow because you needed to be able to make dozens of such weapons and that lowered the practical limit of what your weapon foundries could normally make a little below the industrial threshold of their economy, with exceptions for specific Prestige weapons that they could only install on a ship or in a separate location.

Of course, the type of metal needed to make durable rifling, which tended to be exceptionally hard steel, was completely unsuitable for making a weapon as a whole, at least on this scale, a hard and relatively brittle material that is good. to maintain its groove. would crack or break under the significant stress of a battleship's cannon fire and all propellant firing and this would occur with little or no warning, as actually happened several times in the mid to late 19th century, rather than be a bit like Battleship. armor, you would need a combination of harder steel internally if you like the business end of the gun, but backed by a softer, more ductile material that could absorb and resist the stresses imposed by firing the gun.

These and other problems could be solved by making a relatively thin barrel or liner, as it was often called, and then enclosing it in multiple cylinders, often terms such as hoops or jackets would be used, which could be made of other steel. Thicker or thicker hoops could be applied at the breach end as this is obviously where the pressure was the highest and this largely applied regardless of whether you were making a muzzle-loading or breach-loading rifled weapon, This in turn now meant that your ability to craft a really big weapon was still limited by a maximum viable ingot size which increased significantly overall. since any ingot only needed to become part of a weapon rather than becoming the whole thing, eh, for example, if you could only make a 40 ton ingot but had a weapon designed that was composed of five separate elements, the largest of that weighed 20 tons or perhaps the whole thing weighed 20 tons, then as long as removing the material from a 40 ton ingot left him enough to have 20 tons left over for the component, he could assemble a 100 ton weapon with 5 20 tons of components Despite not being able to cast a single piece of metal or even half the final weight of the weapon, this construction method would be used for most battleship weapons throughout the pre-dreadnut and dreadnut era, as well Let's go into a little more detail about the construction process from start to finish.

It would all begin with the smelting of the metal. Now it is usually composed of new pig iron that is smelted from iron ore in a blast furnace and then mixed. With other pre-existing steels, usually scrap metal that was melted in an open hearth furnace, from this somewhat bubbling and glowing liquid, the various impurities could be removed and, as time passed and weapons were developed, together with metallology, various additives could also be included. at this stage, which would change the overall composition of the steel in question, either by slightly altering its carbon content or by adding trace metals for things like

better

corrosion resistance, better tensile strength, or other characteristics you may want depending what part of the weapon it is in particular.

The batch of steel that was to be manufactured, the molten steel was then poured into giant molds and depending on the time and the manufacturer these could be cylindrical or faceted blocks, once this casting had cooled and drawn it was then heated again and until it was shined and transferred to a large press, at first steam hammers could be used or, although later, presses or hammers could be operated hydraulically and presses generally became preferred, whatever you were using, They would then compress and elongate the ingot greatly. In the same way that a blacksmith would forge a piece of steel into a sword, only on a macro scale, the ingot would be rotated after each press or blow to equal the resulting billet, which would now roughly resemble a basic gun barrel in At least as long as you were looking at it from the side as if you were looking at it from the front, the lack of a place to place the shell would be quite obvious, since with a smaller scale forge, it would sometimes be necessary to reheat the mass , but the sheer thermal mass of so much metal meant that it could generally retain working heat much longer than something normally done with a hammer and anvil.

Now, at this stage, having been compressed and displaced in all sorts of directions, the bill would be under significant internal stress and would therefore be analyzed to the extent that it was applicable for the intended use, any part of the weapon in which you were supposed to do a kneeling that consisted of reheating it to a certain but lower than molten or exceptionally bright temperature and then slowly cooling it. This cycle could be repeated several times at different temperatures and with different lengths again depending on the final qualities of the metal you were looking for. There would be an additional analysis process later but this was the first so this is where getting the explanation of how to do that next was the process of boring and that doesn't mean it wasn't interesting, it was literally boring with a lathe giant, this turned the cylindrical piece into a tube and if the tube was to be the casing of the gun then rifling would also be necessary, now cutting the rifling is a process that requires extreme precision and extreme delicacy for the period of weapons before grind and dreadnut, but it also requires immense strength as the metal being cut will be quite hard. with something this size you simply can't start cutting while the barrel is still glowing and relatively smooth because you will almost certainly end up with slight internal movements that would ruin all the processes necessary to make a battleship gun, this process is the most complicated , almost every other step, a defective item can be remade or replaced unless of course the Billet is exceeded in the first place, but the slightest misalignment or the slightest step in the rifling would mean that the entire process up toThis stage has been wasted. and the coating only has to be discarded with the entire process.

Starting over, the outside face of the Billet would also be milled regardless of whether it was a liner or some other part of the gun, as the hammer or press would have brought the overall size of the billet close to, but not exactly, the desired final outside diameter. , only mills and lathes offer the fine control of dimensions needed at this stage, assuming that a working coating has been produced. The gun can then begin assembly for a cocked gun, this would consist of another cylinder running the entire length of the gun, which was milled and tabbed to fit the liner, which would include any expansion at the end of the gun, and ​It would then be made to an inner diameter that was slightly smaller. than the outside diameter of the casing, so close that one could be forgiven for mistaking the two dimensions for being exactly the same, but even so this cylinder, called a tube, would be heated by taking advantage of the fact that metal expands when heated. thus making the inner diameter a little larger, it would then be lowered onto the liner and the two components could be cooled during the dreadnut nut period.

This was also done under pressure to ensure that the shrink steel cooled and settled evenly, so that the tube and liner were held together by immense pressure and immense friction which would prevent them from separating, this also had the advantage of exerting a constant inward force on the casing, although not above its elastic limit, so that when a projectile was fired and pressure built up inside the gun and attempted to force it out, it had to first overcome this compressive force before which could begin to put stress on the tensile strength of the tube and any subsequent components.

The principle of deliberately putting stress on a system opposite to the expected loads is one that is actually quite common in engineering in various fields, although when it fails, releasing stress can produce quite spectacular results. Now the terminology may vary slightly depending on country and time period, but in most English sources, a cover would be installed over the tube. that is installed on the coating, the jacket would generally also cover the entire length of the weapon, but would be composed of two or more segments unlike the cube, which was one segment and outside of this would come several rings that were also cylinders, but not of full length and these would gradually decrease in length as the diameter increased more and more, resulting in a much thicker breach end compared to the muzzle, depending on exactly how thick and exactly what profile each forms. one of these segments.

It was made so that you can see a series of very obvious steps in thickness, this is most easily seen on late Ironclad weapons and early non-era pre-reads or later weapons with somewhat more complex layers and an outer ring very molded, you may only see one. or two light steps along the entire length. Butt rings also sometimes called locking rings can also be added at various points again depending on the design of the gun in question as an extra layer of security against the various hoops and jackets etc. moving up and down on each other. when the gun was fired and everything was subjected to different levels of stress as the projectile moved down the barrel.

Now, if you were making such a gun, all of these outer layers beyond the liner would have to be assembled first and then the entire collection, from the outermost hoop to the tube, would have to be reheated as one and lowered onto the coating. This is what allowed the pistols to be reconditioned. The tube. The shirts. The hoops, etc. They had a useful life that could really be measured in time. thousands or tens of thousands of shots, since in addition to providing structural support to prevent everything from bending, its main function was simply to resist the pressure of the propellant ignition that was transferred through the liner without suffering plastic defamation, so for Those of you who can't know that elastic deformation is when the material is distorted but is able to return to its original state, just like a rubber band.

Plastic deformation is where something becomes distorted and then remains at that level of distortion or may return slightly but does not return to its original shape. So, for example, if you watch high-speed footage of people practicing historical European martial arts or medieval reenactments, you'll see swords maybe hitting each other and you'll see the blade bend, but by the time they've finished their movement, the blade has returned to its original state. straight, this is an elastic deformation, very occasionally you can see someone hit someone or another blade or something quite frequently with something like a small sword and when the moon ends, the blade is now visibly bent even when standing and This is Plastic Deformation.

The problems with plastic deformation when it comes to weapons is not only that the weapon is potentially not in the alignment you really wanted, but also plastic deformation involves some type of destructive process that has occurred at a microscopic level that could, for example, While some quite dramatic failures occur quite quickly, the liner would, on the other hand, be worn away by both the temperature of the burning propellant and the passage of the projectile along the rifling quite quickly, since it would degrade very slightly with each shot, so the coating could only have a life cycle of a few hundred shots, possibly even less;

However, by reversing the process used to assemble the gun, heating it again so it would expand again, he could loosen the fit between the liner and the rest of the gun enough to remove the expired liner and then insert a new one, which meant To continue using the gun, I just had to make multiple liners instead of entire guns, at least in theory the different proportions of alloy material in the liner compared to the rest of the gun would help with this. since the expansion of it and the tube and all the other elements surrounding it occurred at slightly different speeds, thus exacerbating the gap;

However, sometimes some peculiarity of use or simply the design of the gun would mean that the liner could not be removed, in which case the If you wanted to continue using the gun you would have to bore it completely, a much longer and more expensive process. which could damage the rest of the weapon enough to render it unusable if you weren't very careful, although as mentioned above you could just keep reusing the same weapons, navies would order more weapons than needed for the ships they built, e.g. The two Nelson-class

battleships

of the 1920s needed a total of 18 of their large 16-inch guns to arm both at the same time, but a total of 29 were made, this allowed for catastrophic battle damage or some type of failure. to irrevocably disable a couple of guns and at the same time keep an entire stock of

battleships

ashore, then if a ship arrived with every one of its main guns worn out, which was unlikely but theoretically possible, it must be taken into account that it would not All guns and not all turrets fire at the same time in typical use and thus one or more guns may wear out considerably faster than others, but still, even if every single gun on the ship was worn out, the ship it could be re-equipped relatively quickly with a completely new set of working guns taken from shore stock and returned.

The worn out guns that had just been removed could then be taken to the Gun Factory and undergo the process of having their liners replaced and would therefore now become the safe stock for when the next ship arrived. Usually only a few barrels or maybe even one would need to be replaced and that could mean that different barrels could end up serving. on different ships in very strange orders, for example if you look at the two 15 inch guns outside the Imperial War Museum, each of them has quite an interesting service history as they were mounted on various ships, removed from one to recondition them and then they were reinstalled in another.

When it comes to a much larger scale, a total of 184 main production 15-in-42 guns plus a couple of prototypes were made despite the total needs of the five eight-gun Queen Elizabeths, the five eight-gun Revenge CLA Hood with eight cannons cannons both of Renown Each of which had Six Cannons Most glorious and brave Each of which used four cannons and four monitors Each of which used two cannons meant that the highest level of demand for them reflected in that list of ships it totaled only 116 guns and yes I know, some additional 15 inch monitors were made later but by that time the glorious and brave had become aircraft carriers but there was an alternative to this from In the 1880s, there was also what was known as cable.

Now, the actual technique had been invented a little earlier, but it was in this period that the technique was applied to Battleship grade weapons. Seriously, this method began to be used because weapons were growing very quickly in size, but the technology to work with them. The very large castings involved, as we mentioned above, were limited, so alternatively, once the casing and tube have been assembled, what could be done is to take a very long spool of steel wire, usually using wire with a square profile rather than a round wire that we might be more familiar with and note that this doesn't necessarily mean that the wire has a perfectly square cross section, it's just that the wire has four corners, each of which has a 90° angle, so it could be square. be rectangular and this meant that the wire could be laid next to itself in a coil without leaving significant air gaps.

In any case, this cable would coil under colossal pressure. You know, we're talking about six figures of PSI along any part or the entire length of the gun again, depending on the technique, the country and the time period, and a varying number of layers would be used, usually with more layers towards the end of the gap, after which solid hoops would be applied as with a reinforcing gun and the entire process would be finished as described above. So essentially the wire winding would take the place of some or all of the jacket and some or all of the hoops, but not all, the tension applied to the wire and the actual physical size of the wire in the various layers could also be Unfortunately, most of the literature of the period has advantages and disadvantages, although not all later writings tend to highlight the advantages of one method and the disadvantages of the other. almost proportionally to the nationality of the writer in relation to the nationality of the nations that used one method or another mainly for a good part of their history, since wire-wound weapons found greater traction in the United Kingdom, Japan and even the First World War, Italy and Germany.

The US and several others tended to stick primarily to the construction method throughout and this bias makes the analysis of each other's benefits more a matter of national stance than anything else, often other nations of course , they imported weapons from abroad. which can make it very difficult to determine the trends in the navies of those nations because you know that their manufacturers claim that they might prefer one technique, but they could be importing weapons from another country that makes them using the other and this is not helped by the fact that some considerations on both sides of the argument changed materially as metallology and machinery advanced over time, so some claims made for or against a particular method are true in some decades but false in others.

The main advantages of a coil gun are that the quality control of the wire bonding material is much easier to ensure in the first place and to monitor while applying because the wire itself is relatively thin compared to a jacket or hoop. large and the technology to make good quality steel in relatively thin quantities is much greater. more developed than the considerably larger jackets or hoops which, as we have said before, were generally at the forefront of the technology of the time. This is actually very well exemplified by the Japanese attempts to create a monstrous weapon in the 1920s, the predecessor of the am.

This nearly failed mid-construction when entire Hoops had to be abandoned at the last minute when previously undetected flaws became evident in the form of cracks when called to therest of the gun assembly, while in that case it was possible. a stop Gap to replace these units with wire wound, the overall failure of that particular weapon in final testing had more to do with the size of the weapon versus Japan's industrial capabilities at the time than with the benefits or disadvantages of any weapon in particular. construction method because that particular gun was a hybrid of both, plus for the first 3 to four decades wire wound guns could be made lighter for the same strength or stronger for the same weight compared to wire wound guns thanks to the fact that the wire could be applied. under extreme but controlled tension and due to its somewhat more elastic nature thanks to the way it dealt with expansion forces, which meant that a smaller amount of tensioned wire could reliably contain the same amount of force as a piece of larger forged and cast steel, this advantage disappeared sometime in the 1910s, however, as more advanced alloys increased the tensile strength and reliability of steel rings and liners.

It was also generally held that catastrophic failures were safer with wire-wound weapons, as material failure in such weapons tended to lead to quite dramatic damage. uncoil the cable, but this again usually tended to leave a fallen cannon on the deck and the world's biggest, messiest Slinky, as somewhere between 100 and 200 miles of cable could be used on a typical terrifying era weapon 45 caliber in length, on the other hand, a stockpiled weapon that suffered a catastrophic material failure would tend to fragment in many directions at once like a giant grenade, not to say that the W weapons could not do this, but they tended to do so with less frequently, on the other hand, of course, the W weapons had less longitudinal force going from the breach to the muzzle because of course the cable that was coiled around it does not offer much help in this direction, hence the need of a solid Hoops Andor jacket off the cord, now this could result in a drop under prolonged shooting as the gun became hot or whipped when fired as vibrations and forces traveled through the gun and this could cause inaccuracy , although this depended in part on the gunmaker's ability to supply the correct amount of tension to each layer of wire and what other methods could have been used to mitigate these effects, such as slightly widening the muzzle.

Of course it should be noted that HMS Warspite has the longest joint shot to hit a moving target from a battleship and her guns will be wire wound and the 15in 42 was generally known to be a very accurate gun and the winding of wire requires a fairly large investment in specialized machinery both to manufacture the cable and to carry out the winding, while the same equipment of lathes, presses or hammers in earlier periods, etc., that manufactures the coating and tube could also be use to make the jacket and rings of a cocked pistol. They are slightly different sizes.

There is also the issue of replacing the liner, but in this case. The literature from both sides states very loudly and confidently that their method is superior and the other significantly inferior for removing and replacing a gun's liner, so I'll leave that one for you to make your own decision once the gun itself is mostly done. Already assembled, the rather important gap block must be added, foreseeing that its adjustment has been made during the manufacturing process in the terrible period. This took one of two forms: the most common was the interrupted screw breach in this, a vaguely domed breach seal.

Featured at the rear end of the gun's breech by rotating it on a hinge, a series of staggered partial screw threads inserted into the rest of the breach block would allow the whole thing to be rotated and engaged with the receiving threads on the barrel. section of the breach and this brief twist finalized an already reasonable seal and ensured by the large number of threads that the block was strong enough to maintain the seal against the pressure of the propellant ignition, this in turn allowed the projectiles to be They will shoot using only bagged charges. which are ideally completely consumed in the process, facilitating a slightly faster reloading system and less equipment in the turret compared to the alternative.

Said alternative was the sliding gap block system. Technically speaking, it was a simpler system in which a large piece of steel would be slid down through the gap to close it, although in principle it was simple, but it had a number of slight disadvantages: firstly, the block of The gap had to contain itself rather than fit with the body of the gun to prevent it from flying backwards when the gun was fired and this slightly increased the weight of the gun and to make it possible to close the gap without absolutely massive amounts of friction and , therefore a permanent jam, the seal could not be absolutely perfectly gas tight, so the use of bagged charges would result in a pressure leak around the gap. which could range from annoyingly inconvenient to completely deadly and would always compromise the accuracy of the weapon as a random amount of pressure would be lost this way, which of course decreased what could be sent to the range of the projectile and potentially also meant the application. pressure was uneven, the solution to this was for the last charge segment to be in a brass casing much like a giant bullet.

The soft brass would form the remaining element of the seal when it was ejected and expanded by the force of the propellant. ignited or indeed fixed in place by the scope block latch, while this slightly reduced the magazine's fire risk, as a portion of its charges were now contained in hard metal, it also increased the weight of the magazine. ammunition and meant that you had to have a process for extracting and hopefully ejecting the extremely hot brass casings each time you fired the weapon, there was also the issue of where the sliding breach block went on a battleship scale, a unit mounted vertically could affect your ability to raise or press your guns unless you have made the turret higher than strictly necessary or make the gun pit deeper, which would increase the weight and, in the first case, also increase the turret target area for enemy projectiles or you could mount them sideways, which would obviate those problems, but meant you needed more room on the side of your gun than an interrupted screw breach whose horizontal profile was usually within the range of the gun's width. the gun itself did not require, as a result sliding breach blocks tended to be used on smaller guns unless of course you were cultured, while in certain calibers most large naval guns would switch to interrupted screw breaches , the exception to this was when it came towards the end of the dread period and armored self-loading cannons in those sliding cases.

Breach blocks and brass box charges lend themselves much more easily to automation using 1940s technology and so, for example, the 8-inch guns on a New Orleans or Baltimore class heavy cruiser used breaches of screw discontinued, but the 8-inch self-loading guns in the MO class used slides. gaps, although the weapons shared many common features, so conclude a brief description of how the battleship weapons were made if you ever want to get into the finer details of the mechanics of steel hardening and heat treatment, You know? annealing, quenching and all that kind of nice stuff which of course is also relevant to battleship armor design, let me know in the comments below and maybe I'll speed up when it's discussed later in the channel anyway, thanks for listening, that's all. video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for reviewing a boat let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pin post for dry questions.