Name that WW2 Thing

[Charge]

That would be Enfield Mk2.

-C+

[Charge]

What is this?

-C+

[cobia38]

 U boat snorkel


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[skorpx1]

U boat snorkel


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Forget the exact name of that, but it's an artillery gun that was designed to fire on England, from the beaches of France.

Hell of a gun had it been completed.


Easy peasy one here.

[Charge]

Simonov PTRS-41

-C+

[Cthulhu]

[tmetal]

Forget the exact name of that, but it's an artillery gun that was designed to fire on England, from the beaches of France.

Hell of a gun had it been completed.

The name was the V3 project, often referred to as the "London" or "England" gun. the idea was very smart but I don't think they would have been able to get the timing sequence for firing all the secondary charges to work reliably without first developing a computer controller for the job.  Had the Germans started this project earlier in the war when they had the resources, infrastructure, time and the luxury of a luftwaffe that could still effectively oppose the allied bomber streams, who knows how the war would have turned out.

[GScholz]

They did successfully build two of those super guns in Germany very late in the war. Used them successfully (as in they worked) during the Ardennes offensive.

[Cthulhu]

The concept predates the Nazi's by many years. You don't need a computer to control the firing sequence. The passing sabot, or a conductive bore rider can close the individual firing circuits for each squib, while automatically correcting for velocity variations in the bore.

You gotta give them credit though for claiming a rate of fire of 5 rds per minute.

Yeah right. 

[GScholz]

You gotta give them credit though for claiming a rate of fire of 5 rds per minute.

Why would that be a problem?

[Cthulhu]

Each "squib", or solid rocket motor, has to be reloaded before the next shot.

[GScholz]

And with a dedicated crew at each station, what would be the problem? The V3 was only a 150 mm gun. That's a smaller calibre than many field guns.

[Cthulhu]

It's extremely optimistic to think that 25 separate crews could coordinate and complete a reload within 12 seconds AND sustain it for any length of time. You'd also have to find guys willing to open the breech on what would undoubtedly be a very hot barrel after firing @ 12 shots per minute, and insert a solid rocket motor squib. Even with a fume extractor and some mechanism to clear the bore of hot debris from the last shot (most likely using compressed air), it would be a risky proposition. And remember that the guys in WW2 didn't have anywhere near the kind of insensitive munitions that we have today. Accidents would practically be a given.

Granted it was essentially a prototype, but taking over 5 weeks to fire 183 rds at Luxembourg is nothing to brag about. That's more like one round every 4 1/2 hours.

[GScholz]

You're making a lot of assumptions from ignorance. When batteries of separate artillery pieces could sustain coordinated fire with greater rate of fire I think it would in fact be easier to achieve a coordinated effort with a V3 type gun. 12 seconds is a long time. Also, by WWII cordite was already a 50 year old technology and very safe. Gun propellant technology has hardly changed much since WWII.

[Cthulhu]

I never mentioned Cordite. The V3 used solid rocket propellant (probably double base),  which although more stable than Cordite, must still be handled with respect. I learned this firsthand while overseeing a rocket sled test at China Lake in the early 90's. The technicians there told me of an earlier accident where one of the old Zuni rocket motors ignited prematurely when they were installing it on the sled. The poor guy was cut in half by the exhaust plume.

We could debate the potential effectiveness of Germany's V weapons till the cows come home, but the one thing they all shared, other than usually landing "somewhere over there in the general vicinity of the target most of the time", is that they had zero impact on the outcome of the war. Anything more than that is just wild-eyed conjecture.