In this episode we're talking about shells for battleship's main battery. To support the battleship's efforts to drydock, go to: 63691.blackbau... For the most recent updates to the project, go to: www.battleship...
The word "secure" across the branches. The Army meaning is to post sentries and keep good watch. The Navy mean is to turn out the lights, secure the doors and hatches and make sure it's all ship shape. The Marine meaning is to assault the building, prepare for counterattack, and defend to the last man. The Air Force meaning is a 20year lease with option to buy.
Love the gentle dig at the Air Force! On a similar note the military has a strong connection with stars… the Army sleep under them, the Navy navigates with them; and the Air Force rate hotels by them…😁 To ALL military members past and present; thank you for your service. Ex-RN CPOMEA
I was USAF 1981 - 1987. My favorite AF terms were dining hall, dormitory, bathroom, and other normal everyday terminology. When I was in language school in Monterey, CA, Air Force "dorm" had carpets on the floor and curtains for the windows. Other service "barracks" had linoleum floors and Venetian blinds on the windows. The Marines used to annoy me when they would wake me up during their PT runs, singing as they ran by my windows at 0700. LOL.
I’m not sure if you’d count it as a “branch specific name”, but I’ve always been amused by the Navies of the world (usually ones descended from the Royal Navy) who have “stone frigates”, such as HMCS Discovery in my former home city or HMCS Stone Frigate at the Royal Military College of Canada in Ontario. The fact that a permanent shore establishment nonetheless remains a “ship” due to historical legal loopholes and never letting progress get in the way of tradition is fun, I think.
I’ve always been fond of OOC. When I was active Navy on subs, it meant “Out Of Commission”. We even put it on the “bug juice” dispenser on the mess deck. Anything not working go an OOC tag. Including some sailors who were not motivated to work hard.
The M564 fuze was an artillery fuze. It was used on 105mm, 155mm, 175mm, and 8 inch rounds Interestingl to see the fuze well was the same size on those rounds as well as Navy 16 inch rounds
Takeaways from this video. (1) Ryan is always a superb presenter and does his homework. Makes us all a little smarter. (B) HC/HE … come on it’s the Navy. One smart guy per gun has and sets the fuses. The rest of guys are “the blue one or the green one?” (3) I really thought Ryan was pulling out Monty Python with the “let me skip a bit” - just add a ‘Brother’ to the end all will be well. (d) “Homemade” and Navy scares me, particularly when talking about things that go boom. Have you every seen a NAVOSH video? Keep the videos coming - I am always learning something - see a submariner can be taught.
Thank you for creating and sharing this video. All of your efforts are greatly appreciated. Working on preserving the real thing while educating the masses is so cool. This video is interesting fact after interesting fact.
I got into a “discussion “several years ago with a retired marine colonel and navy using “caliber” to mean barrel length. He didn’t believe me, I was surprised he didn’t know. It WAS New Year’s Eve. I had vol on Iowa for several months and watched Ryan so I was very confident I was right but really surprised he didn’t know this.
There's a really old joke about what it means to "secure a building" in each branch of the military: Navy: turn off the lights and lock the doors. Army: put concertina wire around it and don't let anyone in without authorization. Marines: charge in and kill or capture anyone they find. Air Force: take out a 5-year lease with an option to buy.
My favorite military terminology is what service members call junk food. The Navy and Marine Corps calls it gedunk and the Army calls it pogey bait. The Air Force probably just calls it lunch.
Personally I just think "high capacity" is a tradition thing dating back to the early era of shell guns when explosives generally were not high. You can't call the HE round "HE" when the filler is a low explosive, but you've still got to distinguish from your AP shell with a small bursting charge, so it gets dubbed high capacity instead. From there, well, if it ain't broke.
Modern 5 inch shells are called general purpose or hedp high explosive dual purpose. The have a programable fuse for point detonate, proximity/ air burst and delayed action detonate for light armor piercing. I witnessed a couple of sink exercises where old target ships soaked up dozens of rounds and were still afloat. The ex Guam in particular took at least 75 5 inch shells after we ran out of harpoon anti ship missiles. Finally sank her with 5 2000 pound pave way bombs. The shells would have killed a lot of the crew had she been maned but not much else beside a hefty repair bill.
I suspect what's going on here is a standardization on nomenclature. First a armor piercing round is just that. A high capacity round was called that because it carried more explosive than then armor piercing. The high explosive designation is essentially redundant as all the shells used compounds in the "high" explosive category. That is to say they burned at a super sonic rate. I suspect calling them high explosive was to standardize the nomenclature with the Army and NATO.
Yeah, I think this is more what it is. AP shells had a bursting charge. HC shells had a larger bursting charge. Hence High Capacity compared to the original AP shell.
DARPA came up with some really interesting rounds for the Iowas. There were the nuke rounds, of course, along with extended range rounds with 50-100 mile range & anti-infantry cluster munition rounds that could clear out an entire BTG in one shot. You can for A LOT of shit into a 16” battleship round. Now multiply that by 9 & figure 2 rounds per gun per minute…
I think they used the time fuses to explode after burying themselves deep into the ground before exploding. This delay is useful in collapsing tunnels dug by the enemy.
That's one way to use them, yes. But the thing with that mortar fuse is that it has two methods of ignition 1) The 200s time delay chain that's initiated by the firing acceleration. 2) The impact initiated instant ignition chain that bypass the time delay if the shell hits something relatively solid, like a thicker tree, a rock, a field piece, stone or heavy timber structure or the frame/drive train of a soft skin vehicle or the armor of an AFV.
I think "PDF" as used in the G3/G4 manual shown by Ryan is not "point detonating fuse" but instead "proximity detonating fuse." In the same way the proximity or VT fuse greatly enhanced the effectiveness of the 5"/38's in the AA and the anti-kamikaze role, the same enhancement was experienced by US Army and USMC field artillery units when they started using rounds with a VT or proximity fuse. These fuses enabled the artillery rounds to explode in the air above the target, greatly enhancing the coverage and therefore lethality of the fragmentation effect of the artillery shell. @8:58 The Army would likely call the 16" guns on Iowa class battleships "howitzers" based on the fact that they are cannon that can fire at both a high angle and a low angle. In comparison, the Army might call the original 14"/45 guns on USS Pennsylvania "guns" based on the fact that, as originally installed, they were limited to about 15 degrees of elevation. After Pennsylvania's 1929 refit, the guns could elevate to about 30 degrees, which in US Army naming convention would put them into "howitzer" territory. Whether or not the main guns on tanks such as the M1 series are "guns" or "cannon" is somewhat debatable, as the official Army noun nomenclature describes them as (for example) "Tank, Combat, Full Tracked, 105mm Gun, M1, General Abrams" but the firing table has "Firing Tables for Cannon, 105mm Gun, M68A1 on Tank, Combat, Full Tracked etc etc"
To prevent confusion: he is talking about the pre A1 variant Abrams, which had a British L7 105mm rifled gun. When the A1 mod came around, it was replaced with the German Rheinmetall RH-120 L44 120mm smoothbore gun.
@@Ganiscol It is true that the M68 tank cannon on the M60 series tanks and early editions of the M1 series tanks were based on the British L7 design, but it is not an exact copy---for example, the L7's breech is horizontal while the M68 breech is vertical. There are other subtle differences as well. And the M256 120mm tank cannon on the later editions of the M1 series tanks are based on the Rheinmetall gun, but once again, it is not an exact copy. As all three countries are NATO allies, ammunition interoperability was a design goal, achieved pretty well with the 105mm guns but only partially achieved with 120mm guns--both the American and German editions of the 120mm gun can shoot aech other's ammo, but the current British 120mm is rifled so uses completely different two-piece (aka semi-fixed) ammunition.
The Army calls howitzers that because they are primarily indirect fire weapons. Sure, nearly any howitzer can be used for a direct fire mission if necessary, but the Army also had guns in service with artillery batteries, such as the M107 SPG with a 175mm gun, a direct fire weapon.
@@throngcleaver I don't think any "redleg" would agree with you that any of their cannon are "direct fire." This is NOT to say that in those "Oh s**t" moments when direct fire is necessary most artillerymen wouldn't attempt direct fire upon advancing armored vehicles or troops.
@SomeRandomHuman717 Regardless, there are videos on RU-vid showing the M777 doing direct fire missions, on targets in the mountains of Afghanistan. Every caliber of howitzer and field gun has had direct fire missions at some point in its operational life, just like the direct fire guns on Naval vessels have done indirect fire missions. Many 75mm and 105mm howitzers were used as anti-tank or anti-personnel, direct fire weapons throughout WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.
another interesting one Ryan, I noticed on the diagrams you were showing there are lots of pieces and parts to those shells, would really like to see a video (if one hasnt been done yet) about all those fiddley bits -- good job
Interesting with the terminology. The 5" 54's on my ship fired quite a bit of HE/CVT, high explosive/controlled variable time, and also HE/IR high explosive/infrared. I always figured that the high capacity terminology was just a product of the era (I served in the 80's on a Vietnam era destroyer)
Hey everyone, this is GMG2 Jason R. Pribyl. I was on both west coast battleships (New Jersy, Missouri). When I went to gun school at Great Lakes, IL in early '88, the rounds were called "High capacity-High explosive" for the reason that Adam stated. they were essentially the same round, just a fuse difference. And so when I made it to the real navy (on a ship, the Jersey) the rounds were called both names together as above. Of course they were called HE or HC depending on who you were talking to but rarely if ever was the names said to designate fuse type.
Just more evidence that when folks create a naming convention that doesn't have clear definition then don't be surprised when other folks get confused. This type of stuff is a pet peeve of mine. Confusing words that could have been avoided much sooner. Thanks, Ryan, for trying to figure it out. In the end it remains poor choices of words but that's not Ryan's fault.
It would be interesting to know if (when they were active) any of the Iowas put to sea with 16” AP rounds AFTER WWII, since there were no other battleships left to fight.
High explosive vs low explosive refers to the burn rate of the explosives. AP rounds have a small charge of high explosive. HC rounds have a large (high capacity) to store more of the high explosive charge.
From what I recall, it's actually a contrast to the "common" projectile, while was thick-walled (and, fitting down the same barrel, therefore had lower internal volume for explosives) and had some limited AP performance without being true AP shot.
Air Force, powder room, love it 😂😂😂😂 The largest rounds I handled were 5 inch when my GQ station was the 5 inch magazine on my first ship. 70 plus pounds of blue dummies, HE, AP, and Willie Pete. I don't recall any of them being called HC. But I could just be old and forgetful.
I don't recall using the term "high capacity" while in an Army artillery in the 60's. We had hard targets like tanks and bunkers using impact fuses and soft targets like air bursts using proximity fuses. We had HE, smoke, and flares but not HC rounds.
My favorite military term is FUBAR, because that's the result of what happens when one of those rounds hits its target. Another nice video. Thank you Ryan and Battleship New Jersey crew.
In the Army a Cannon has two distinct names, anything over .50 caliber that can be loaded with explosive ammunition is called a cannon. A gun like on the M1 tank or a 155mm field gun is a cannon that fires at a low trajectory. Most cannons these days are properly called howitzer as they are guns that are capable of high and low angle fire.
The last cannon in wide usage by the Army was the 155mm “Long Tom” of WWII fame. The modern artillery pieces are howitzers. Call it a gun at your own risk, because a true Artilleryman will quickly, and decisively, correct your error in a most unpleasant way!
All of the larger calibers are cannons. The group, Cannon, consists of rotary cannons, auto-cannons, Naval guns, field guns, and howitzers. The differentiation between a gun and a howitzer, is direct fire vs. indirect fire. The 175mm cannon was a field gun, because it was a direct fire weapon. The 105mm, 155mm, and 203mm cannons, were/are howitzers, because their primary design is indirect fire, with a minor capability of being used for direct fire missions. Naval guns are direct fire, as are all rotary and auto cannons.
I prefer to think they sent a landing party ashore and tactically acquired them for their own use. But it really could have been as simple as a radio message that went something like, "Hey, when we are saving your butts with out big guns we are having some issues with rounds not detonating on impact. We would hate for Charlie to be digging them up and burying them in your latrines, how about send us some of those fuses from the mortar shells, those things always go off."
In British parlance, "capacity" rating of a munition is the proportion of the total weight which is taken up by the explosive charge. For example, the Tallboy bomb was described as "Bomb, medium capacity, 12,000lb". "medium" in that context means about half the weight of the bomb was the Torpex explosive, compared to a "High Capacity" 4000lb bomb where about 75% of the weight was Torpex. A bit of googling shows that the bursting charge in a Mk13 HC shell is about 154lbs of Dunnite. This sounds small for a 1900lb shell, compared to the above numbers for bombs, but it's worth remembering a shell needs to sustain much more violence before it explodes and therefore needs more brass and steel structure. For comparison the bursting charge of the AP round is just 41lbs.
"High Explosive" is a technical term describing substances in which the combustion front travels through the material faster than the speed of sound (as opposed to "low explosives", in which the combustion front is subsonic). This supersonic combustion front results in a shock wave with a virtually instant rise in pressure, qualifying as a "detonation" in and of itself. In contrast, "low explosives" don't detonate - rather, they are used to pressurize a container, to the point of structural failure of that container, and it is this sudden catastrophic failure of the container that constitutes the actual detonation of a low-explosive shell. As a consequence, whereas a low-explosive absolutely needs a thick sturdy shell to create an explosion in the first place, high explosives need a shell casing only to maintain shape during firing, and maybe as raw material for shrapnel. So a high explosive allows for a higher capacity in terms of explosive material. Technically, a "high explosive shell" would be any shell that uses high explosives, regardless of whether or not it is designed for high capacity / low fragmentation. However, the term seems to have acquired the secondary meaning of a shell designed for maximum explosive yield, at the cost of fragmentation, which is exactly what high explosives excel at. On the other hand, similarly, technically a "high capacity shell" would be any shell that uses an unusually high capacity in therms of explosives, regardless of explosive type. However, this almost inevitably requires high explosives. In other words, in practice the designations "high capacity" and "high explosive" seem to be older and newer terms, respectively, for the same thing: A shell designed to give the bigest blast possible for the caliber, with negligible effect in terms of fragmentation. The former term is technically the more fitting (and at its time of use the only correct one), but has subsequently been superseded by the latter after its secondary meaning in this sense had already established itself.
Although I have been retired for quite some time, I’m willing to wager I know something Air Force specific that the Navy does not. An All-Ranks Club: heaven forbid a Naval officer be forced to drink with the enlisted ranks! LOL Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I wonder, the mortar shell's time settings are for a relatively low velocity round while the Mk13 is much higher, what was the typical time of flight for 16 rounds in shore bombardment?
I always liked that both the Navy and the Marines use the terms Overhead for ceilings and Decks for floors and Hatches for doors and Bulkheads for walls and Heads for bathrooms...both services are of course part of the Navy Department...
I sort of disagree with you interpretation; I think you’re right about it being down to the fusing, but I think what the second source is getting at is that HE are designed to explode before/on impact, whereas HC are designed to explode after penetrating. This name then makes sense relative to AP, as AP are also designed to explode after penetration, but have a _lower_ capacity of explosive charge, than HC (or more correctly, HC have a higher capacity than AP, but both penetrate their target before detonation).
I think a clue to why high-capacity shells are called "high capacity" is in the general description of "1. Thin-walled projectiles" where it states "and a large cavity for the bursting charge". That "large cavity" would make it "high capacity", and begs the question of whether there was ever an explosive shell with a small bursting charge (low capacity) but more penetration that the Navy wanted to differentiate the shells from.
The Armor Piercing shell has a small burst charge. But since its called AP as opposed to Low Capacity, there is no need to call the other High Capacity. I doubt there was ever anything in between. The Navy just wanted to be different from the Army in that respect. 😅
I've heard "medium capacity" in reference to certain aerial bombs. I believe it has a lot to do with the ratio of bursting charge to bomb/shell case to turn into fragmenting steel. And yes, an armor piercing shell would be low capacity (small bursting charge).
@@Ganiscol Possibly, but there is another possible reason that involves the term "high-explosive". A high explosive is one that detonates instead of deflagrates, and some of the first high explosives were nitroglycerine (1846) and Dynamite (1866). The Navy has a history of explosive shells predating both of these. Thus "high-capacity" shells full of gunpowder as the explosive and meant to burst on the surface and cause damage to personnel and equipment versus low-capacity gunpowder shells meant to pierce the side of a ship before exploding and damaging the structure and seakeeping abilities of the ship. I am much more inclined to believe that the Navy simply did not change the designation to "high explosive" when the new explosives became available out of a typical stubborn resistance to change than to believe it wanted to call its shells something else out of any sense of interdepartmental rivalry.
The army had air burst. Rounds for their 155 and 105mm artillery rounds. Did they ever fix these airburst fuses on 16 inch guns for the mile class battleship?
All of the shells contained a high explosive charge. The HC just had more capacity for said explosive, but it still retained substantial armor penetration ability (Not enough for full thickness battleships but more than enough for most other vessel and vehicle armor, at 8 inches tempered steel or 10 feet of 5000psi concrete construction). A purely explosive round has much thinner walls and no substantial armor penetration relative to its size, its effect is purely from the explosion.
Yes, a high explosive by any other name is still high explosives, unless you're the gov't; who can say 2 identical items are legally distinct by simply naming them differently.
A question I've had for a while now. Had anyone tried to fit a VT fuse to to an HC shell? That way you can get all your blast and shrapnel ~10-20ft or so off the ground and not expend a bunch of your energy into making a crater.
You can be sure it was tried but it likely had less than desirable results. The smaller artillery like he 105 and 155mm used by the Army had a relatively small explosive charge in comparison to a Mk 13 shell, 5 to 15 pounds vs 133 pounds. While 5 or 15 pounds of high explosive can ruin your day exploding in the ground nearby, they can't move nearly the tonnage of the 133 pounds of high explosive in a 16". If that landed within 100 feet you were going to be injured if not killed outright. At least in an open area. By my rough calculations, the 16" shell is going to lift about 1,000 cubic yards of earth on impact, a good portion of it being propelled outward at velocities up to 6,000 fps. Making the 1,900 pounds of shell fragments in an air burst seem positively tame. But you can bet it would be impressive to see.
By hitting the target you ensure bunkers ect are destroyed, if you just wanted damage on soft targets you'd want a very different bursting charge (indeed at this scale likely a cluster munition) but also timed fusing will set range just fine, and most of the time a battleships main guns will be a far riskier and or more expensive way to deliver that than dropping a bomb ect. The asset large guns have is the kinetic energy they embody, and the ability to ignore ww2 air defenses (the latter is even probably no longer true in modern world).
Army, kitchen = mess , yea it sure is for some of the ones I've been in . Army , Limousin = any type of transportation. In my basic training our first ride in a Limousin was a cattle truck. A 20min ride to the rifle range. Army, bullet stop = a 11-b infantry. The list goes on and on
Another possible reason is that calling it "high explosive" is unnecessary because filling a shell with low explosives would be a very silly thing to do. For those who don't know, the difference is that high explosives are capable of detonation (supersonic combustion), but low explosives (i.e. gunpowder) only undergo deflagration (subsonic combustion).
Is the fuze timing in seconds or milliseconds? Everything I've worked with in targeting was milliseconds. A 100 second timed fuze just sounds off, but 100ms sounds more reasonable.
Does anyone know where the Navy term the Head comes from? Well, in case there are a few who don't know it dates back to the age of square sailing ships. Since these ships best point of sail was down wind...the toilets were placed at the 'Head' of the ship as that was down wind.... :-)
Is there a warehouse full of shells and gun powder that only a battleship could fire..?? Is there still government warehoused guns or other battleship parts??
It has nothing to do with the fuze, it is called high capacity because the shell had thinner wall that allowed an higher capacity of explosive than normal high explosive shells, the bursting charge of the 16 inch mk 13 HC is 8% of shell weight compared to 5-6% of normal high explosive shells.
I suspect they were Marine fuses: I think they use the same mortar fuses as the Army. The Marines let the Army pay the R&D costs, then just buy them from the contractor.
@@doughudgens9275 Marines ain't got no money. However, the buck actually stops and contractor is paid by u.s. taxpayers. Navy ain't got none of its own money in reality, either. Ha
One branch-specific word I like is "envelope". It means something completely different for a fighter pilot than for a paper-pusher, especially when you get outside it. Another one: Bingo. Not something a pilot wants to say.
I am SICK TO DEATH of you making light of the USAF! "Powder room" really? I did my duty suffering thru my 8-5, 5 days per week (Sometimes 6!) Sometimes, I even had to forgo the bars on Friday nights to recover aircraft on training flights. A little respect please.
