*This gun was far and away the biggest gun when it was made. The exact barrel weight is 103.64 tons, and the carriage it sits on is another 46.82. It is definitely the biggest ever muzzle-loader. There were other big guns, beach-loaders such as those on the Yamamoto battleship, or the German Schwerer Gustav railway gun, but these don't count because they have either been destroyed or sent to the bottom of the sea. Other later railway guns, some of which survive at least in part, were built that sat on massive railway carriages, and these weighed more.
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In Fort Rinella. Kalkara, Malta, there is one of the world's two surviving Armtrong Whitworth 100-ton guns. The barrel weighed 100 tons, and fired a one-ton shell to the horizon, where it could penetrate the armour of any ship. At five miles it had a hit rate of 98%. The crew was never exposed to enemy fire when it was in operation, as it swivelled this way and that for loading on hydraulics. Today, its fire rate of one round every six minutes makes it obsolete, but in its day, this was terrifyingly fast for so vast a weapon.
The gun is not complete. Its loading mechanism was broken up for scrap, and the smaller bits that could be removed from the gun have gone, but the enormous bulk of its main sections are still there. It has been fired once in recent years by re-enactors, but just to create smoke, flame, and publicity.
As I myself pointed out while I was there, before making the same lazy mistake on camera, the shell did not carry one ton of explosives inside it. The shell in its entirety including the explosives weighed one ton. It was a one-ton bomb, however, and the hardness of the shell contributed to the force of the concussion.
The shell was propelled from the barrel by 450lbs of gunpowder. Local huntsmen would wait nearby during test-fires and recover unburned bits of powder scattered in front of the gun.
See also: www.fortrinella.com/history.html
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
Picture credits:
"Rockbuster-front" by Julo - Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil...
"Duilio 1880 002". Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil...
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Biggest gun in the world*
/ user "Lindybeige"
11 июн 2015
