I always like to imagine that is the endgame for large scale space wars. No more vessels with fancy turrets and special manoeuvring of individuals, just massive walls of guns trying to wipe out the enemy guns like some kind of 18th century infantry square. But the infantry are particle cannon armed battleships.
I wish we got to see the insides of the turrets on the Battlestar Galactica and see the crew. They’re like the one group of people we never got to know about.
In a Tech Book was written that there are fully automated Revolver Cannons with 2 feading lines for each turret, one for Frag and one for a Programmable HEAP
@@FranksFilmEcke pretty sure they talked about gun captains and firing at least the main batteries manually. I haven't dived deep into the specs in a while though, feel free to correct me.
It doesn’t always make sense, but you do like to see those big guns swinging into battery. Few things in sci-fi so clearly communicate to an audience that significant things are about to happen, it’s the deep space equivalent of racking the slide on a shotgun.
Every shonen anime fan's favorite part of Space Battleship Yamato -- when Space Yamato swings her guns about, she's going to bring the rain. (When the firing cone of her Wave Motion Gun lights up, she's about to bring *MAJOR* pain.) 😂
@@plzletmebefrank oh yeah, that and thumbing back the hammer on a pistol that’s already cycled several rounds, but it’s short hand; everyone in the audience knows exactly what feeling it’s supposed to convey.
One thing that wasn't mentioned was that a sufficiently large turret rotating will also induce rotation on the attendant vessel, if it is in space. Recoil is not the only effect a gun can have on a spaceship that doesn't need to be considered (as much) on the ground.
Easily fixable by a counter-rotating ring within the construction. Either have it purely counterweight, or additional armor or a hold for more ammo. We kinda solved the counterrotation force issues about the time we invented modern single-prop helicopters. Just gotta upsize it. By a LOT.
@@aleksatanaskovic9172 also used in space power tools it would be neat to see such systems employed as backups to the normal attitude and maneuver systems in an emergency the same way a gun is also a bad but functional rocket, a turret could be a crappy but functional emergency gyro
On a big ship like a WW2 battleship the stuff surrounding all the rotating mechanism and ammo hoists is called a barbette. Most modern warships don't have this setup any more as their guns barely penetrate the deck in most cases with them having an ammo hoist, power and water feeds and that's about it going into the hull. Barbettes were much much larger and would have had multiple crew in them as well as hoists, flash proof barriers etc etc.
@@nobleghost1177 Aye could be :) Back in the late 1800's to early 1900's there was actually a huge difference between a turret and a barbette. A turret in those times looked like those on the US Monitor, a big upside down biscuit tin that covered the guns and crew in armour. Whereas a Barbette was an armoured mounting that didn't have a roof and the gun and crew were largely exposed to the weather and were only protected from things like shrapnel etc coming in at flat angles. The advantage they had was weight, they were a LOT lighter than the old turret types and thats why they fell out of favour as they started putting 'armoured hoods' IE an armoured roof over the guns and crew and these evolved into the more modern turret types you see on WW1 battleships. As an example of a turret and barbette, have a look on wiki at the Royal Sovereign class of battleship and you'll see they all had open barbettes apart from one the HMS Hood, which had the old style turrets. :) You'll also see that the Hood is a full deck lower than the others of the class due to the weight of the turrets, and this made her a poor sea boat and prone to getting roughed up by weather. whereas the ships with barbettes were better sea boats. But looking at the ISD II's main guns they're really in turrets but barbette sounds better :) So yeah we'd call them turret mounted guns but the Imps called the barbettes :)
With bigger ships such as battleships, the turret proper was too big to be mechanically sealed to its barbette. So it just sat in its barbette like a giant plug. Thus, when mortally wounded dreadnoughts like the Yamato turned turtle, their main gun turrets fell out of their mounts and were strewn across the sea floor.
@@seanbigay1042 While many ships did do it that way, it wasn't because they couldn't secure it to the barbette. There were in fact ships that had turret fasteners installed on the main batteries.
Is there any futuristic/space sci-fi where every bullets are smart/missile like bullets? Imagine "railgun" turrets that spam missiles... Why missile bullet you say? To add more speed and have maneuverability. Remember even a hand sized rock can hit like a nuke if it is thrown fast enough.
We called them "Brush blocks" in aviation. They're how you get power into a prop for de-icing/anti-icing. Great system until the day they wear out or get dirty. Then you learn to hate them.
A lot of ww2 era turrets do. The sort of stuff that allows free rotation, doesn't generally work well at large sizes and under the vibration of gun recoil and shell hits. Most fully rotating gun turrets from ww2 instead just have a 720° limit or something similar More than enough to track a target in combat, the turret can just be unwound after
@@lovipoekimo176 it's a universe thing, though some weapons in B5 are better at killing fighters, missiles, and most energy weapons than others. The one of undisputed champions of PD weapons is the human reverse-engineered Interceptor. Basic rule of thumb for if an Interceptor can intercept your shots: is the incoming shot a) First One BS, b) light-speed beams, or c) neither? If A or B, then it won't work against them (though the E-Web could help a bit), if C then it's a yes.
Honestly I always assumed that **if** humanity was dead set on its interstellar warships taking direct inspiration from the massive steel battleships of the 20th century (which I totally would be, because they’re fuckin awesome), i figure they’d be a lot like the seafaring originals except mirrored on the x-axis. That meaning they’d have a “deck” on top and bottom, no keel, and another set of turrets on the “bottom” too. That way they’d have closer to 360 degree field of fire. Maybe those turrets would be a bit like the ones on “Space Battleship Yamato” where they can aim almost straight up.
the problem with such an arrangement is also its advantage, the only targets that you can fire all of your weapons on are those that are directly broadside to you. While this may be desirable in some settings, in others it may be more desirable to concentrate the guns on one side of the ship, with the underside housing things like hangers for vehicles or drones, missile bays, or machinery spaces and magazines. Alternatively, the underside could just be more armored, with a relative minimum of weaponry, to protect the internals of the vessel. In the old steel battleships, the main belt armor extended well below the waterline because the bottom of the vessel was where machinery spaces, magazines and boilers were, equipment the loss of which would either destroy the ship or put it out of action.
@@andrewmayo9400 This only works because the script says so. A space going warship has no bottom, and can't dictate the enemy's approach vector. So a good shape for a gunship is conical (studded with turrets), so most guns can fire forward, with 50% for off axis. I also favor avoiding multi-role ships. CVs with drones and Marine shuttles escorted by Battleships and a gaggle of Anti-Missile/Drone Frigates/Cruisers
@@stephen1r2 That depends if it is only a space ship, or if it is capable of landing on planets as well. Many ships in fiction, including but not limited to Harlock's "Arcadia" and all of the Gundam motherships except the one in 00, are also capable of landing planetside, so they must be oriented such that they are structurally sound in both gravitational and 0 g environments. If my enemy is aproaching from the negative Z direction (below, as traditionally oriented), then the ship can be rotated about its long axis to bring the guns on target, just as if an opponent is approaching from the east a ship can maneuver to bring the guns on target faster by turning either toward or away depending on the current orientation of the guns. A roll maneuver, in terms of delta V and thus fuel, is one of the cheapest maneuvers that a spacecraft can execute, since it can rotate about its velocity vector without changing it. Likewise a ship that can land on the surface of objects needs to have the neccesary equipment to support planetary landing, not just gears, but also shock absorbers, ascent thrusters etc.. This equipment can dictate design in the same way that the need for large heavy boilers and exhaust funnels limited the space available amidships for guns on naval vessels, leading to the classic 2 fore and either 1 or 2 aft turret configuration. The Bismarck for example had 2 forward and 2 aft double 15 inch gun turrets for an 8 gun broadside, whereas the iowa had 3 triple 16 inch guns turrets, 2 foward and 1 aft for a 9 gun broadside (there were suggestions at the time of her design of a 2 fore 2 aft design, but there were concerns about the stability of the ship from so many 16 inch guns so high above the center of mass, rolling from firing the guns broadside could damage the ship or impact accuracy.
@@andrewmayo9400 just make a ship that is a long hexagonal tube with all the fragile bits in the center, with guns and armor on every surface, if you need to get all guns on target you can just spin the ship on its axis and have it shoot volleys whenever a side is on target, hell you can even go halo's covenant and keep the bridge inside the belly of the ship and just use the multitudes of cameras and sensors to stay appraised on everything
@@andrewmayo9400 if i want assault landers i'd go how Star Wars' Clone Wars went and have a design like the Acclamators be the premier planetary assault lander and focus my space fighting ships' designs to actually fighting in space i can compensate by building the military infrastructure around that, having orbital anchorages and dry docks interconnected with a space-station that's tethered to a planet through a space elevator
Mean while Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Cries in copyrighted corner btw, when you straight up turn your space battleship into a mech and "hold" the main gun, there's no need for a turret XD
Imagine being the guy who has to reapply grease to every joint on every spaceship in a storage depo. They will probably be depressurize for long term storage, meaning inside stuff like doors must be protected as well.
Neat that you showed the Gatlantis dome turrets from SBY! That particular design is pretty neat. A relatively weak turret that has a full hemisphere of coverage and can fire in any direction with minimal movement, plus the rate of fire is very high.
I think it is more of a gattling gun principle, may be those eariler ships had heat management problems on gun barrels. Unless they also can divert the beam through all the barrels at the same time for wide screen defense or multitarget lock?
Taiidan Heavy Cruiser in Homeworld 1 for the coolest big gun layout in scifi. Decent coverage in most angles but all capable of baring forward - most scifi designs have horrible huge blind spots - not just behind but (generally) below. Donnager class in Expanse gets it similarly nice.
I can’t believe I had to scroll down this far to see a Homeworld mention lol. I love Cataclysm’s designs personally, although some are…odd. Like the Somtaaw Destroyer having heavy turrets that seem to free-float on rails???
@@martinjrgensen8234 Not just the last book, the last three had a jump of approximately 30 years, and a whole lot of things happened very differently and/or for very different reasons.
@@CMTechnica 30 years is hardly a massive jump, and the core cast remains Holden, Naomi, Amos and Alex. The entire saga is about the four of them, and the massive changes that they lived through and influenced, from the start of book 1 where they are not especially close crew-members of the Canterbury, to the very end of book 9.
The latest iteration of the Arcadia is IMHO absolutely insane. All her broadside turrets sit on rings that let them rotate round the hull for 360° coverage in the X and Y planes. How crazy cool is that? (But the inside of that hull must look like an infernal machine from Mordor ...) 😂
I like the detail that in The Expanse the PDCs have an RCS thruster on the back to compensate for recoil. And also imagine if the Normandy SR2 from Mass Effect 2 and 3 could also turn it's twin Thanix Cannon to also fire on Targets not directly in front of them. (Or imagine them actually using it more often then just the one time against the Collector-Ship at the end of Mass Effect 2.)
I think that's actually the gun providing its own compensation. The ammo is caseless IIRC, so it wouldn't be that hard to have recoilless/RAVEN guns that just balance their own recoil.
Guns on warships (and how you use them) can be a very fun concept in any story. Even in my writings, I have a case where a civilian billionaire, rejected from military service, took the turrets from USS Iowa and Missouri and slapped them onto an older 22nd-century spaceship that he called The Rampage. There were a variety of reasons why this was done (Earth has been mostly abandoned), and the warship's entire frame was rebuilt, including utilizing engines to help counter recoil generation. The ship can essentially fly sideways and fire its guns onto a target. However, it's important to note that this is an ad-hoc design as shells are very slow, and space is absolutely huge. The ship is essentially a raider that does saturation bombardment at stationary targets. There can be other ways that gun turrets can be used in stories. This can include Gatling-like turrets where the barrels cycle to help out in heat reduction. Rings can be used to house large gun turrets, where the rings spin to cycle each turret when firing at single targets. It's important to note that space doesn't care what your ship does. You can lightly spin the ship to fire every turret you need to hit a target. Space isn't a 2D field (which writers can fall into when depicting battles). Up, down, left, right, nobody cares.
I have a similar-ish thing in an alt-history sci-fi setting I was working on a while back where easy space travel and FTL became possible in the late '40s/early '50s due to a "new element" discovered as a byproduct of nuclear testing that works as a reality-breaking superfuel. The Soviets in this setting, finding themselves outpaced early on by Western space warships and weapon systems, took the guns off of the recently decommissioned dreadnought battleship October Revolution (originally the Imperial Russian ship Gangut) and slapped them onto what was, at the time, the largest military spaceframe ever built. Ended up being named in honor of the old dreadnought. It was effectively an ill-conceived stopgap measure and outdated before it was even completed due to the development of space missile systems, but by the time of the main story (late 2010s) it had ended up being basically the only functioning capitol ship that the Soviet remnant had left (all the others got blown up or scrapped during/after a conflict with NATO in the '80s). The setting as a whole is a bit weird technologically, which is the entire point. Technological development has been stagnant since the early '80s due to various factors, and the Soviets don't really have any peer/near-peer foes in the systems they operate in, so the rustbucket October Revolution with its 1910s naval guns and unreliable late '50s nuclear reactors is still pretty useful for them (when it's not in spacedock for repairs) despite basically being held together with duct tape and woefully inadequate for dealing with other capitol ships. "Nyet, dreadnought is fine."
On warships, the armored housing around a turret is called the "barbette". Inside it, there is the turret foundation, which the "turret part" of the turret sits on with rollers in between. The rest of the compartments all have their own names. Also, the turret basket is mainly there as a floor for the crew. Without a turret basket, you would essentially stand on top of ammo boxes and physically turn yourself as the turret traversed. With the basket, the crew is automatically connected to the turret so they turn with it. Not all modern tanks have turret baskets. Mainly the russian tanks instead have a rotating plate on the hull floor, and only their seats are actually connected to the turret. The turret in a tank just sits on the turret ring, and the basket does very little to keep it in place. Look up "leopard 2 turret fell off" and you will see a quite funny photo of just that.
The major parts of a turret are: Spinny bit on top = Gunhouse Part of the turret that hangs down in the hull = turret stalk (the turret stalk is multiple "baskets" deep - each "basket" is called a "pan" on a ship) Part of the ship that the gunhouse rests on = barbette Also, in all nations' navies, a two-gun turret is called a "twin turret," but in the United States Navy (and ONLY the USN), a three-gun turret is either called a "three-gun turret" if each gun can elevate individually or a "triple turret" if all three guns move together. Also, under almost all circumstances, turrets will not fall out of a ship because they install retaining brackets or "clips" to hold the turret on the roller track.
Point of minor correction: only the uppermost level of the turret stalk, directly under the gunhouse and equivalent to a tank's turret basket, is called a "pan". The other levels are called "flats". The distinction between the two is that the pan is open-topped into the gunhouse, whereas the flats are closed cylinders.
In The Expanse they rotated the ship to allow the PDCs to hit targets better. I'm sure a turret would benefit from this as well. I'm actually surprised more ships don't rotate or spin during combat.
Travers Speed isn't usually a problem for the REALLY big, Massey (Heavy) guns since they're designed to kill other Capitol Ships, NOT the small, fast moving Fighters and Missiles...those are dealt with by the smaller, MUCH lighter and faster moving Point Defense Turrets... The WW2 Battleships didn't use their 16 inch gun Turrets to kill airplanes, they used them to kill other Battleships (or buildings in the Bombardment role)...the small 5 inch guns would be used for small, fast targets...
Bigger guns, bigger minute of arc. For a 50 caliber gun, a few inches can change the end target quite a lot. Isaac Newton is a the meanest dude in space.
The Japanese actually had anti-aircraft rounds for the big guns on their battleships, including the Yamato. They just tended to be horribly ineffective at taking out attacking bombers with them. I think that I remember some of the rounds even turning the big 18-inch guns into giant shotguns!
Tell that to the Yamato that struck both the USS Johnston (And sinking her) and the USS Samuel B Roberts (crippling her) with her 18inch guns while both ships were maneuvering hard. I didn't mention White Plains or Gambier Bay because Casablanca class escort carriers are not fast.
In space warfare turreted guns tend to be the secondary armaments that support the truly absorb spinal mounted F.U. dispenser. Also a rather common misconception is that a ships armaments aren't guns in the same way we think of WW2 Battleships. But merely a way to transfer the Ship's Power Output into damage, be it kinetic, termal or otherwise. So adding more Gun Turrets to a ship than you can fire at once, is a perfectly valid tactic to solve blind spots.
Indeed. The game Eve Online is nice example of this. Each turret comes with two actual fitted turrets. One mounted on each side of the ship. And they work in tandem to cover each others blind spots. Very nice to see up close when you are shooting
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 Nah. If your ship is manoeuvrable enough, or the target is slow enough then it gives you amazing weapon stability for firing BIG rounds at an enemy.
@@vi6ddarkking no its not, distance is the massive enemy of a fixed forward facing weapon. there is a reason they even went away on tanks, and the only reason aircraft retain them is turrets are real bad for aerodynamics. It is incredibly difficult to engineer an RCS system that is both powerful enough to maneuver an entire ship at a reasonable amount while also being precise enough for fine aiming. It is also far more energy inefficient than turreted weapon, as you would have to expend considerable amounts of fuel and energy just to aim the one big gun. And you better hope the enemy isn't shooting at you and landing hits because hits from even light projectiles will still impart momentum on your ship and throw its aim off. And this is on top of the fact that the one big gun can only fire in one direction at a time at a single target. which means if you get attacked form multiple directions, your one big gun is pretty helpless, and building a ship around one big gun makes it pretty helpless against swarm attacks from smaller cheaper ships. where as ships armed with multiple turreted gun batteries can much more easily deal with swarm attacks from multiple directions, especially if equipped with cluster munitions designed to deal with such threats. And this is on top of the fact that one big gun is also a single point of failure where one malfunction now makes your ship helpless. A single massive gun ship is only ever going to be any good at fighting other big gun capital ships at close range, where as a turreted capital ship can much more easily fight off both other big capital ships as well as kill smaller warships and depending on ammunition load, even deal with fighters very well, as well as being much more tolerant of weapon malfunctions since one malfunction is unlikely to deprive you of your main battery. and dont start with that but turrets are heavy and complex nonsense, turrets are an over 100 year old technology that is pretty well mastered now, and compared to the other technology a spaceship would have a turret would be positively caveman technology by comparison. And building one massive oversized gun is going to be far more expensive than investing in numerous smaller caliber guns.
As hard sci-fi nerd turrets are very important, i think they will be more numerous on sci-fi ships than those on water naval for multiple reasons they can be for anti missile defenses to CQB and more also because having more volume of fire gives advantages but doesnt mean missiles and lasers will be apart of the game
With So Many Sci-Fi Worlds That Have Some Form Of Inertial Dampening/Compensating I've Always Wondered If Such Tech Could Be Used To Explain Away Recoil Or Lack Of It.
This is a very tank-centric understanding of naval guns. It’s a bit off. It also focuses more on individual ships which rarely fight individually. They always form groups, divisions, and task forces.
One of the things I like about Eve Online is the massive caliber of Minmatar ships guns. To quote Captain John Rourke (of the good ship Clear Skies), "Stationary ships don't react well to Fourteen Hundreds."
4:55 That heavily depends on the setting (if we talk SciFi). If you try to be rather realistic with your setting, I would guess it's rather likely to happen. If you basically put fleet combat into space, whatever.
The thing about turrets in SF combat is there's a certain satisfaction in actually seeing that whole process where the turret pivots, the barrels align, there's a moment of quiet, and then *boom*. It's one of the things I found I preferred during the Kelvin v. Narada battle at the beginning of Star Trek '09, seeing the phasers as physical turrets poking out of the Kelvin's hull just made them feel more real.
Generally on a ship, the whole assembly is the turret. The armored bit with barrels sticking out is the gun house. The armored part around the lower turret is the barbette. Additional magazine space for both shells and powder may be outside the barbette proper, but still behind armor. There will be pass-throughs for moving shells or powder into the turret proper; in US lexicon they're usually called scuttles.
As for a recoil felt throughout the ship, that's the assumption that the ships have zero inertia. In fact, they have extreme amounts of inertia and even though big guns do have recoil, one would hope the static inertia of the vehicle would not be massively affected by big gun recoil. Steve
I like how the smaller ships in Halo and Star Wars work with their batteries being like artillery. I know line of sight isn’t ideal for something so big but fuck it I want to see forward barrages. Also before some nerd mentions it, Star Wars turbolasers/blasters use volatile plasma gas catalysts that go through turbocharged electrical laser generators that are of course distributed based on size; they’re not pure electrical/chemical lasers that travel completely at the speed of light always and only break circuits or short out cameras or lightly scorch things as far as the energy lasts. They *can* aim 360 quickly, they don’t need and the projectiles do travel faster and farther than any missile or other ship when it tries move straight out of visual range. As if the cannons couldn’t just blast through whatever you’re hiding behind. And on the ground you’re a sitting duck for the atomic death bolts so don’t even bother running. If the plasma or explosion of the fire don’t get you the radiation will. A missile is also a one time use thing that you have to load onto a special pod or something which these ships would have on them anyway. And at close range why bother wasting a missile, the cannon is cheaper and faster. We’re developing railgun for this exact problem. 2:08 I cannot wait to play this
One interesting aspect of David Drake's RCN saga is that 8-inch is the biggest-caliber gun any warship can carry, even a dreadnought. This is because unlike a seaborne warship that can use the sea itself to absorb the recoil from its guns, in space the only thing that can take the recoil is the ship itself, and the recoil from an 8-inch gun is right at the upper limit of what any hull can take without being turned inside out.
0:30 I believe it's called a Battery Column. Battery (a grouping of guns) because each barrel is considered a separately maintained gun despite being physically bound to the same direction. Column because you're right, a massive rotating undercarriage that extends 3 decks deep into the ship can't rightly be called a basket, and that word fits the design choice best. Edit: They are apparently called barbettes, which also makes sense for a cluster of hostile protrusions. It also just depends on how you want to name your own fictional universe's terminology.
Anyone else watching the footage of the mobile suits sniping off those battle ships in much of the used footage and lamenting on the lack of close in point defense?
Speaking of which, one of the things that makes Star Trek unique is that their ships don't use turret, unless you count the torpedo launchers. They have an array of energy emitters instead, which can disperse or concentrate the weapons energy. This design eliminates the need for stabilizing the weapon. I have yet to see other franchises do this on screen but there might be books that have ship weapons similar to this.
The barbette is the fixed armored structure in the hull in which the turret mounts. It isn't part of the rotating turret mechanism. I don't think there is a word to for the structures of the turret below the gun house. Turret is the entire moving structure. Gun house is the part visible outside the ship. You can have hoist, powder rooms, shell platforms, etc. depending on the design. But those are all separate parts. None are the term for the part of the turret below the gun house that moves with it.
@@maxstr on us warships the only part of the ship that is not armored is the bow and the stern everything between turret 2 and turret 3 is what is considered the armored citadel
Alright, that's it. In my scifi setting, PDCs are all 76mm and made in Italy, because at this point I'm convinced the Italians will always keep the things upgraded for relevance.
I like how star trek phaser arrays just side steps all these problems. Exactly like a future solution should. Also, would like to see more discussion on recoil. It seems overstated. It's not as if the ship is firing even 1% of it's mass, so it should have very little effect.
One thing star trek lore has made very clear is, the phaser strip is superior to the phaser turret and cannon when it comes to fields of fire. But on the other hand, defiant's quad cannons go BRRRRRRRRRRR.
Forward firing only works because it's smaller and more agile than most opponents it's basically a Star Trek equicalent of a heavy fighter or light/medium bomber converted to ground attack in WW2 when they stuck numerous .50cal or 20mm guns in the nose for strafing. When your big you need more arcs of fire.
Now I'm imagining the Defiant with all four of it's phasers set up like a Starfury Thunderbolts gun. Just four spinning barrels on the nose screaming "I don't know you, this is my system!" to anyone unlucky enough to experience it.
@@Plaprad Man, Sisko would have made one hell of a starfury pilot. Too bad he was "self-deleted" by section 31... i mean left for the celestial temple.
@@Ushio01 You know, if the defiant had to be a WW2 plane, i've always imagined it as a P-61 as maneuverable as the P-51. That'll be possible only with inertial dampeners and structural integrity fields.
I think Eve-O always had a good way of showing the turrets being set on opposite sides to allow for traversal and tracking targets around the ship. Some ships from the Amarr and Minmatar line that are 100% combat focused, shows this off nicely.
@@sumukhvmrsat6347 Indeed. Thought he might say something though about turrets that are internet and hidden like the Mon Cala ships have. It’s like the opposite of the title lol
