MOST powerful BP weapon?

[bob308]

i read the book on the washington. and it said it was a course greade of black powder for the 16" guns.

 

[Jumpshot]

There is a seige gun in Edinbugh Castle named "Megs Mon"

Thats "Mons Meg".
[url] http://www.edinburgh-royalmile.com/castle/castle-monsmeg.html[/url]


Here are some pictures of an older carriage...
[url] http://www.edinphoto.org[/url].uk/0_B/0_buildings_-_edinburgh_castle_-_0_mons_meg.htm


And here is a view down the business end...
[url] http://www.flickr.com/photos/brixton/291070179[/url]/

 

[ParadiseRoad]

October Country makes some big bruisers, I think an 8 bore and maybe a bigger one.

Article I found on the October Country rifles. Click on the photo below:

 

[RedFeather]

Well, Rodman guns packed a pretty big punch, maybe more than that gun in Scotland.

The nastiest black powder gun I've come across was a single shot featured in a gun mag years ago. It was a cartdige gun made up for some Maharaja in 1.00 caliber (one inch). The bullet had a nose cavity filled with powder and detonated by a .32 rimfire case inserted backwards. The author fired it (using a reduced load) into some wet phone books which were blown to shreds. I can't imagine what it was intended for.

 

[Coot]

Well it is certainly not shoulder fired, but for the most powerful strictly black powder gun and a MUZZLELOADER at that, I will suggest the 450mm (17.7") 102 ton Armstrong gun mounted at Fort Rinnella in Malta. Basically the entire fort was built to serve the one gun which reportedly was trained, elevated & rammed by steam power.

 

[paulvallandigham]

It is my understand that the cannons on board all the big dreadnaughts, and our own battle ships, like the Missouri, were fired with bags of black powder as the propellant. The same for the few Krupp guns made by Germany and mounted on railroad cars to take to the front and bombard Paris during WWI. Big Bertha may be the largest BP weapon made, but there still are arguments between military historians about various gun. It does dissolve in to definitions of " the most powerful ", with some favoring terminal energy delivered to a target, and others talking about how far a projectile can be fired( range). How much powder is needed to send a given projectile a given distance. There are good reasons for both sides of the argument.

 

[hawkeye1755]

The German Paris Gun.
It was capable of hurling a 94-kg shell to a range of 130 km and a maximum altitude of 40 km - the greatest height reached by a human-made projectile until the first successful V-2 flight test in October 1942.
At the start of its 170-second trajectory, each shell from the Paris Gun reached a speed of 1,600 m/s (almost five times the speed of sound).
The gun itself, which weighed 256 tons and was mounted on rails, had a 28-m-long, 210-mm-caliber rifled barrel with a 6-m-long smoothbore extension.

:hatsoff:

 

[Runner]

The guns on the Missouri would hit a football field at 36 miles. Now that is a group!

 

[Blizzard of '93]

Paul - having been a gun crew member during the Viet conflict I know a little about naval guns so can give a breif rundown. first I was not on a Battlewagon (16" guns) but manned an 8" gun aboard a towed into-place barge. the muzzleblast from this thing would knock a man down 20' away and the flash-heat would blister paint underneath and onside. Cordite explosive was developed around 1900 and went into naval service on ships that were already in the various fleets, some of these ships stayed around until WW2 since they were the 'ultimate weapon' until aircraft and the carrier for them came along. Cordite had coatings on the 'grains' (actually cylinder shape) to control the burn rate, to maintain steady pressure level. Any warship made after WW1 had guns designed to use this 'cordite' which was put into fine cotton or silk bags for loading. A 16" shell generally had anywheres fron 200-400 POUNDS of cordite pushing it. But we are talking 'in-line' gun here which is outside the Forum categorys. I don't know about the huge 'seige guns' that Germany put afield in WW2 but will bet $$ that they used cordite as propellant. A tip of the Hat, Blizzard :hatsoff:

 

[paulvallandigham]

Blizzard: Thanks for the correction. I suspect the people who wrote about Black Powder for those cannons wouldn't know the difference between BP and cordite, or smokeless powder! Cordite was used in a quarry in my home town for blasting rock. It has a distinctive odor, and we local kids could tell what caused the high school to shake by opening an window and waiting about 2 minutes for the odor to make it to us. The teachers throught we were nuts, until the school called the quarry and confirmed what had shaken the entire High School that day. Then the techers thought we were some kind of wizzards! tShe just could not fathom how kids would know the smell of cordite, well enough to be able to identify the compound by its aroma drifting through a classroom window.

 

[Blizzard of '93]

Yes it does have a smell, not like sulfur tho. And it does leave fouling but nothing like BP. we used to save some 'stalks' of the stuff to light off on bamboo stems just for the 'fizz' of it. crazy nuts we were.

 

[RedFeather]

My grandfather was in German artillery in WWI and had an opportunity to see one of the Bertha railway guns. There's a bit more modest one at the Navy Yard in Washington, DC. I think it might be a 12". They also have a nifty 16" barrel mounted so that you can look through it. (Don't get yer head stuck!) A buddy's dad was in charge of the Navy's gun development station down at Dahlgren. He told us that, when the US heard the Japanese had 18" guns, they decided to go one better and made a prototype 22". It never got off the ground as they could not keep it from drooping. After the war the Navy wondered if our 16"er's would have stood up against the Japanese battle wagons with their special armor, so they took a piece and tried it out with AP. Cut it like a hot knife through butter.