What would be your idea for a modern increase to the Royal Navy? With one caveat it would have to be at least practical, with public support and not OTT like rebuilding Warspite or giving everyone a personal aircraft carrier (although I do admit those would probably be popular with the public). Mine would be 2 cruisers (some sort of modern Kirov equivilant), 4 destroyers, 3 frigates, 1 helicopter carrier (bascially HMS Ocean), 6 submarines, 9 mine warfare vessels and 4 auxiliary vessels. And possibly the introduction of some AShM equipped corvette sized vessels would be a nice addition.
'Morning Drach, I just have a technical question: I've recently joined Discord but I'm still very unfamiliar with it, how can I find you there? Thanks!
If Battleships were to be implemented into the modern-day, what do you think their armament would be and what role would they play in modern naval warfare?
What battle was the picture of the exploding scottish cannon from? I've a feeling I saw it at school some years ago.... us Scots did have a few of them explode on us though! And anyone who's visited Edinburgh knows all about our 1 o'clock gun, a great device to tell the locals from the tourists 😁
Funny anecdote about the reliability of early cannons: Tsar Russia at one point got so fed up with cannons that would just blow up when fired dictated that canon builders who wanted to sell cannons to the state had to personally sit on every cannon as it was fired for the first time before they'd agree to receive that particular cannon. Story says that this caused both the death of a prominent cannon maker by his creation and a marked improvement in the quality of cannons used by the Russians.
@@CharliMorganMusic ha, when I was still in the USMC, I worked on Huey’s and Cobra’s, Avionics, and our best/most awesome CO, told my shop I was the only one he wanted working on his bird from Avionics, I was still a Lance Corporal then, ahah.
"scare horses and, somewhat decisively, bypass armor" "discover new and interesting ways to disassemble their enemy" "surrounded....by smarter crews in swifter ships" "vaguely legitimate, but mostly piratical" 19:50 "Let's just say, shipboard guns, of the period, included, but were not limited to, the following: (he names 26....i'm not doing that...the exhausting thoroughness of the list is it's own humor) (i've said this before. this type of video, tracing the evolution of a particular technology, is my favorite. thanks and well done, Drach.)
Once again we are reminded that the sciences of metallurgy and chemistry are frequently advanced through the roof and at a significant fraction of Mach 1.
-What'd they call a Culverin? -Culverin's a Culverin, but they call it Le Culverin. -Le Culverin. What do they call a Hand cannon? -I dunno, I didn't go into a small arms shop.
Sorry to be so late... I was stationed in Germany with the US Army during the 1970’s. I took some vacation trips to England; especially to visit a hobby shop there in Dover and to see the famous Waterloo diorama. On one of the castle caissons there were some artillery pieces from the time of Queen Elizabeth I (1500’s?). To this day I can recall the inscription on the barrels: Keepe mye bore bryte and kleene And I’ll fyre yore ball to the Calais greene Approximate spelling there! Regards
A brief summary of weapons Ancient Man: Throw rock Man before discovering gunpowder: Throw sticks and shoot arrows at enemy Man after discovering gunpowder: Throw rock but FASTER
I found out recently about this channel. Thought it was absolutely marvelous and decided to binge it, after all "5 minutes guides" are not long right? Right? WHAT? About a hundred drydock videos each about an hour long? 30 minutes long "5 minutes guides" about incredibly specific (and damn interesting...) naval history subjects? Well, "recently" means "several weeks ago" and I am still binging!
Adding a few things: - Viewers will note Drach refers to the various cannonry as 'bronze' whereas you'll often hear cannonry referred to as 'brass'. They are in fact bronze, the term brass was just a common term for the alloy at the time. - A weapon mentioned early on in the video is the ribauld, and is mentioned alongside the ribauldquin. The ribauld was a light gun and the ribauldquin was a battery of ribaulds on a single carriage, often termed an 'organ gun'. - Finally, terminology. Our modern way of thinking is strongly at variance with pre-industrial thinking. Everything changes with time and place and these classifications are very slippery so be careful if you read sources, see these terms and immediately assume it refers to these particular weapons. Period writers were often not intimately familiar with classifications and just used any old name for a weapon, something they did for nearly everything from ships, to fortifications, armour, hand and missile weapons and so on. It can be intensely frustrating :)
Saw that breastplate around 1970 it was in the Tower of London. With typical English understatement the label said “breastplate damaged by cannon fire”
@@DreadX10The big - only - difference between pirate and privateer was that the English monarch and state were investors in privateering ships and crew and expected to make a nice profit from their activities. Much of the capital that funded 16th century English mercantilism, which eventually led to the Industrial Revolution, probably came from privateered Spanish gold transports. European armies were often raised in a similar way to privateers, mercenaries raised as entire companies and regiments by a kind of military entrepreneur who then sold their service. Often to the highest bidder, with some mercenary companies changing sides quite regularly. They were different times...
@@tlw4237The amount of gold stolen by the brits is largely overstated by anglo historians to cope for the spanish golden century, at most it amounted to 5% of the total gold coming from the new world. Just like the "Uboat threat" in WW2 barely made an scratch in cargo coming to and from the british isles.
haven't watched yet, but i hope the title "things that make you go boom" is a deliberate dig at how often they exploded during action. Thus making you, and not your enemy, go boom. spoiler warning!!!!! totally not dissapointed
Also, when you consider the size of these guns and the two-wheel mounts, you can imagine the chaos caused by a slipped friction block in high seas. In other words, a 'loose cannon'...
Fun fact: Emperor Maximilian ordered that the first three shots had to be done by the gunmaker. He also created guns himself. And insisted on testing them. And I think that the reason for the amount of different guns was that there is a mix of original siege-weapons (everything with cannon in its name) and field guns, as well as the habit of using outdated guns.
Yes, The testning of a new gun was to be performed by the producer. Furthermore, to avoid producere taking their chance with mere statistics, the common practice, as I've heard it, meant that the 3 test shots were performed with DOUBLE POWDER CHARGE! Just to be sure. No need for later malpractice suits😏
Early iron cannon: when zip-guns were big enough to stick your hand down the barrel...I mean, that one stone-firing tube was secured to the carriage with ROPES! Yeesh. Thanks for doing this, Drach!
Not _that_ high, just higher than any other conceivable profession... farming, for example. Mining is the only thing that comes to mind as having the _possibility._
I believe the painting at 2:40 is of James II of Scotland, whose cannon exploded at the siege of Roxburgh shattering his thigh and killing him pretty much instantly
WOW thank you for the great research and the museum class illustrations. To have all this available online!! What a wonderful time to be alive in this universe 45 years ago I was winnowing the Edmonton Centennial and University Libraries catalogs to sift out information.
Fascinating account of early naval guns. It's always interesting as early technology and its use evolves over time, and in this case also led changes in ship design, which continues to this day.
I agree that 17th century artillery pieces naming is very funny topic. I spent quite a long time making a comparison of different types of land artillery pieces according to english, spanish and german nomenclature - and I didn't find even two sources, which would list same ranges of bore diameter for any class of artillery. In addition, knowing that some piece is for example 12pdr, does not mean much if you do not know in which country it was made, as one pound in this period can mean anything between 0.35 and 0.6 kg. At the end I came to conclusion, that "about 5 inches" is the most accurate value I will ever have for mentioned 12pdr, and I stopped trying to make the table more accurate. Many thanks for showing how the situation was at naval realm, as a person from Czech Republic my access to naval stuff is quite limited.
But they're also more accurate than guns of the Kamchatka... (IIRC, Ottomans actually scored a hit on a British cruiser with a stone ball from a medieval cannon during the whole Dardanelles/Galliopoli campaign in WWI. It didn't do much damage, but... It hit.)
@@nebufabu the thought of Ottomans were still mantaining a set of ancient artillery batteries up until WWI, in service condition nonetheless, in kinda surprising ,but also interesting. And they manage to hit modern warship using that damn thing.... Do u have any source link for this?
How brutal it must've been, waves and all trying to get a accurate shot and timing, can you imagine the stressful nature of the job back then? Amazing.
Guns,Guns,Guns! Looking forward to this future mini series Drach, loved the Armour and Boiler Videos too, you know how to make an old Engineer happy with how stuff works and why it was made to work like that. Glory to Croydon!
I am completely excited for part 2 as it covers the age of sail I most love. I grew up reading about Nelson, read all of the Hornblower books again & again, & now am on my 2.5 read-through of the Patrick O'Brien series. I know this takes a massive lot of work to put together, but stuck at Home with no work for the foreseeable future, things to look forward to keep me going
I am happy this video has been made. I was vaguely aware of this information, but always have a hard time finding the info when I want to reference it.
Ok, so we need to first acknowledge that this video is a world class presentation. Nothing comes close to this, (that I’ve found), on the subject. Excellent material. Well done.
Just found this channel mate thankyou and keep it coming It's good to know there are ppl out there who are still interested in this history And thankyou for all the viewers and the comments too
In more (relatively speaking) modern times there was the explosion of the Peacemaker gun on the USS Princeton in 1844, killing among others the Secretary of the Navy.
@@jefferyindorf699 if he was present to witness the test firing it would certainly have ended his career. Those sorts of mistakes you don't get to make twice.
So **that's** why we call them cannon! Having encountered these terms before and been bewildered, I'm actually amazed that you explained them in a way that makes having so many names make sense.
I LOVE your stuff - one request, you put some kind of text with some of your pictures, for example at 23:09 you mention the Falconett but the picture doesnt change right away, then it goes to 23:14 when you talk about the minion, we have a picture, but are you talking about a falconett with the picture delayed? Or is this a picture of a minion? I often have difficulty knowing if what you are talking about is what is displayed in the video, as sometimes pictures arbitrarily change without you sainyg 'and here we have the...'thing' but the dialogue just goes on, a common event in many of your vids. That being said i do enjoy just listening as well, but occasionally i am tempted to look at the video to see the thing!
Thank you so much for the effort you put into this channel. It is quite something, your treading the line between huge levels of detail and wry humour is a marvel. Thank you. Jonathan
I recall reading in the very good book "Confident Hope of a Miracle" was that Iron guns were cheaper and were less rust prone compared to Bronze guns, but as you said Drak, they exploded when they went wrong. A Bronze gun when they failed would bulge and would obviiously be broken, rather than spreading itself across a gun deck and very high speed which Iron cannons did when they went wrong. But Iron cannons were generally better, and newer forging techniques made them way more reliable.
the big break through with iron guns was casting them solid and then boring them rather than casting them with the bore in them as this caused a differential in the rate in cooling down causing potential fractures, this gave more strength to the gun during casting and boring reduced windage thus greatly improving accuracy.
I thought Bronze was pretty resistant to corrosion such as oxidation. Certainly more resistant than iron. Though I guess these guns could be so thick that a little rust wouldn’t do much damage right away, but would absolutely contribute to wear on the thickness over time.
@@aebirkbeck2693 Aye and they took to forging/casting Iron guns upright, making sure that the purest metals would be in the base where the boom took place. Allowing it to take the shock of said boom.
@@samiamrg7 Ya probably right :) I do recommend reading the book Confident Hope of a Miracle, its about the Armada and all the stuff going on beforehand and after. Its not a Britwank book either that heaps praise on the British either, its a very balanced book and isn't a huge wall of TLDR text as its damn well paced and written :)
According to 16th century literature by professionnals, for most of the century bronze was favoured - lighter (very important, likely deciding factor), more resistant as @samiamrg7 says. Besides improvement in the iron guns, the bronze-gun price increase - and the overall increase in the number of guns per ship - was certainly a factor that contributed to their end.
Complete landlubber here, the nearest salt water to me is over 1000 km.'s away. Have you, or would you, consider doing a video about fire control system(s)? As a shooter of conventional firearms I find it amazing that a weapon of any kind could fire even close to accurately on an unpredictably moving platform.
Worth watching twice. I'm pretty good with steel and breach loading but there is a whole lot here I didn't pick up on before. I had even off-hand thought that iron would just be better than bronze in all ways (lighter stronger cheaper more available) when iron at this time was only cheaper. It was harder to work, harder to make an adequate bore for, and harder to make safe.
Now I've been watching this video for like 6 times... I doesn't grow boring (it gets more and more interesting) and I still can smirk about the style. Simply charming.
Loved this, even though I already knew most of this. Kind of knew it - not to the point of being able to answer whether a demi-saker was more often cast in iron or bronze...
Great video as usual, Drach!!! What better thing to do in these dire times than review the even more dire times of the past. Tripping through the names and explanations of the Naval pieces was particularly entertaining. I can't wait for the follow up vids (since we all seem to have plenty of spare time right now). Cheers and stay safe and healthy!!!
I love your channel I learn something new all the time. I also love the way you deliver this knowledge," actively distribute themselves and their crews across the battlefield ". Ie they explode🙃🤪
Excellent video, and thanks for the nuance on the Armada! Some more additional points: 1) Spanish galleons were actually limited to about 10 in the armada and were quite flush-decked (~2m forecastle (and one deck only, not the 2 or 3 of carracks), ~2m aft castle, plus ~2m for poop deck - a set-up that would endure until approx the late 17ths century. The "invention" of flush decked ships (in comparison to carracks) seems to have been a European invention, featuring first Spanish attempts in the 1550s (Bazan's galleons and galleasses), Baker's galleons and Spanish ordenanza-built galleons as well as those built in 1582 and 1589. And, of course, the Dutch ships. The Portuguese galleons gained in 1580 after the unification were "galleonised" by the Spanish admiral at the time, e.g. their superstructures reduced. Cross-country learning was probably crucial for those developments 2) In the video, @drachinifel, you mention the Reggazzona, the San Martin and Trinidad in a breath, but all were actually very different ships. San Martin was a Portuguese warship, very resistent, and galleonised the Spanish way in 1580. The Regazona was a giant merchant ship built in Venice. The Trinidad Valencera was a huge grain merchant, whose properties were unsuited for heavy artillery (the hull was designed to withstand the outward pressure of grain, but not inward-pressure of a gun-recoil). The actual warships in the Armada were between 20 (Portuguese galleons, galleasses, Castillian galleons built in 1582, Florencia and one French galleon) and 46 (includes some armed merchantmen as warships), depending on the author. The ships closest to galleons were the Portuguese, Florencia, French and Castilian galleons (which all fared excellently). 3) The question of gun loading and carriage performance remains highly debated, but some points seem likely: loading after pulling a fixed gun inward (e.g. no recoil use for inward hauling) was the preferred method of professionals, both Spanish and English. Indeed, some Spanish ship designers attempted to design recoil-using , for two-wheel carriages (Bazan in 1550s, "the other invention being that two guns be used at the bow and paired such that when one gun fires, it hauls the other out, while itself going in" - implying that there were those two positions for gun use in battle, one for loading, one for firing. Palacio in 1587, who proposes ropes that are shorter on one side of the gun carriage, "so that when it goes back [with recoil], it is held back such as to rotate pointing parallel to the ship (e.g. forward)" and then can be loaded). The two-vs four wheel performance remains to be proven, and over the years several arguments have been made. The heaviest guns were placed as bow- (attack ability) and stern (defend-ability) chasers, and if possible one gun in the centre, and other guns in/around the fore-castle so as to point forward; line-abreast was the standard formation, and according to Rodger 1996, the goal of naval designers in the 16ths cent was to emulate the galley, i.e. the ability to place heavy guns pointing forward. The measure for sailing ships performance was their ability to defeat galleys (which could point 5 guns in the same direction, with relatively high precision - taking into account that broadsides on sailing ships would feature 8 to 16 guns on two-gun deck ships... which not all faced in exactly the same direction), and the 1596 English victory in Lisbon against galleys was as much, if not more celebrated, than the 1588 outcome. 4) The "massive" use of hull-smashing ordinance, with the goal of sinking a ship was certainly not an English invention, nor a standard tactic (as often credited to Drake). It would have been quite illogical for a privateer to invent a tactic based on sinking a ship, as your goal as a privateer is generally to board and capture the cargo. If I remember correctly, no ship was actually sunk by the English in 1588 due to gunfire. That boarding tactics remained prevalent is also shown by the Revenge's own demise: its crew resisted heroically to Spanish assaults, which was possible due to its fore and aftcastles, where the crew had taken refuge to repel assaults.
This video reminds me of my favourite hand tool (just going by the name). It is a hand file that is flat on one side, round on the other, coarse near the handle, and fine near the tip, with the proper name for such a tool being the coarse/fine round/flat double bastard file!
32:10 I was not prepared for the medieval cannon on coaster wheels. Just imagining that firing and rolling back against the stops with the sound of an office chair.
2:55 imagine you travel on land and maybe sea... hundreds of miles maybe taking days or weeks to arrive to your destination... finally there both armies take days to assemble and finally they line up on the battlefield and then your king dies when the cannon he stood next to explodes catastrophically. That's gotta do a number on troop morale
Please could you do a video on the naval theatre of the Spanish civil war. I know the Spanish navy took sides in the civil war but don't actually know that much about what happened during in the war.
Well done. Less confusion in a very confusing subject. Can you explain to us sometime what the significant changes were is metallurgy and casting processes that enabled to move away from bronze to iron. My very incomplete understanding of the subject leads me to believe that might be somewhat easier to follow than the semi-demi-bastard-royal arrow shooting loudenboomer.