Giant Roller Bearing

Never Before Seen: 16" Gun Turret ROLLERS MOVING
Battleship USS IOWA Museum

What we have here is a 2,000 ton chunk on steel sitting on top of the some of the biggest Timken Tapered Roller Bearings in the world. 

It's one thing to see the ship floating in the water, sailing the seas, firing its guns, and then you start looking at drawings and animations and I'm thinking that's pretty cool. Then you go inside with these guys and you get an entirely different picture. It's kind of nuts.

These museum folks have a bunch more videos of the inner workings of the ship. However, the link listed just below the video is 404. Weird. Anyway, I just watched three of them. You need to be careful, you fall in, you might never find your way out.

Big Gun

Russian servicemen of the 20th Red Banner Guards Combined Arms Army of Zapad (West) group of forces fire a 2S7 Malka self-propelled howitzer towards Ukrainian positions amid Russia's military operation in Ukraine, at an unknown location, Russia.

I think it was the colors that caught my eye here. They look slightly off, like you might see in a science fiction fantasy. Or it might be that the bright light from the muzzle flash distorted the color palette.

Just for grins, here's another little bit of science fiction:

End Stage Capitalism

That's Not A Tank

2S9 Nona self propelled mortar

Aljazeera included this picture with their daily update of the situation in the Ukraine, but they labeled it a tank. It kind-of sort-of looks like a tank with a big gun barrel and tracks, but it all looks too light duty to be a real tank. I posted a question on reddit and tarkin1980 was kind enough to answer.

The 2S9 is a Russian machine from 1980. They built a thousand of them.

Black Dragon M1 Howitzer & China

The Black Dragon M1 Howitzer: The WWII Superheavy Artillery That's Still Relevant in Taiwan
Megaprojects

The video starts with an ad that lasts up to the 1:10 mark, just in case you don't want to listen to Simon talking about hair loss.

This gun saw some serious use in WW2. It was used again in the Korean War and then the US put it away. The Republic of China (also known as Formosa or Taiwan) still has a few of them on some of the small islands just off the coast of mainland China. Taiwan has 166 minor islands besides the main island of Formosa. You can see that some of them are very close to the Chinese mainland.

Taiwan & Outlying Islands, notably Kinmen and Matsu

The Chinese Communists and the Nationalists have been fighting each other more or less continuously since 1927. Sometimes the war heats up and they start shooting at each other, and sometimes it cools down and they just glare at each other but they have never come to terms. The Commies have been making noise about how 'they should all be one China' lately. It might be that they are trying to distract their populace from bad economic news, but that kind of thing has started wars before, notably the Falklands war between Argentina and the UK.

Update July 2026 added Kinmen Island to map caption.

Regard

USS Constitution Gun Deck

I'm reading the Ionian mission by Patrick O'Brien and on page 177 Killick (the captain's steward) and the ship's carpenter come into Jack's cabin because they're clearing for action (i.e. packing up all of Jack's stuff and carrying it down three or four flights of stairs and storing it in the hold, and then knocking down Jack's apartment walls to make room for the gun crews to serve the pair of six thousand pound cannons that share his apartment with him).

'Just let me down this cup, Mr. Watson,' said Jack, drinking the last of his ill tasting coffee, 'and the place is yours. You will take particular care of the Doctor's - the Doctor's object will you not?' he added, pointing at Stephen's dressing-case, now doing duty as a music stand.

'Never you fret, sir,' said the carpenter, pointing at the joiner in much the same manner. 'Pond here has made a special case for it, lined with junk.'

'It is not an article that should ever have gone to sea,' said the aged joiner in a discontented voice. 'Still less into action.'

Stephen, being who he is, is probably totally unaware of the amount of trouble the captain and crew go through on his behalf. That they do all this without complaint and without even mentioning it tells you how highly regarded he is. 

P.S. 'Clearing for action' is like an everyday affair aboard Jack's ship. Repeating the same procedure over and over again is no doubt tedious, but practice makes perfect, and if you ever need to do it in a crunch, which is generally the only time it really needs to be done, it's best to have the procedure down pat. Crunch time is not the time to be figuring out where to store the commander's favorite bowl.

Beauchamp Tower Part 2

1899 Apparatus for steadying guns on shipboard. US Patent 640051A

Beauchamp Tower, besides his research into lubrication, also came up with a gyroscope stabilized gun platform for Naval vessels. His machine incorporated a heavy flywheel, shown in cross section in the lower part of the above drawing, and four hydraulic pistons. Tilting the ship, and hence the base of this platform caused the gyro to open a valve that allowed hydraulic fluid to flow into a piston and so level the gun platform. Other than these patents, I didn't find any other mention of it.

A self leveling gun platform sounds like a really good idea. Back in the late 19th Century, gun people had gotten very good at building big guns and along with building the guns they had also developed the math needed to calculate the trajectory of the fired shot. However, those predictions depend on the gun having a solid fixed base. A ship is just the opposite of a fixed base. Even on a calm day, with a ship at anchor, there is going to be some movement, and any little movement is going to destroy the accuracy of the gun. So you can see how having a platform that sits level regardless of what kind of monkey motions the ship is making could make hitting your target a possibility instead of a lucky strike.

WW2 battleships had ginormous electro-mechanical computers for aiming their guns. I've looked into those before, but what I didn't realize is that these systems incorporated gyroscopes. I mean, why would you need a gyroscope? A battleship is so big and heavy, it's not going to move, it's like a floating rock. Except it's not. Everything that floats is subject to the motion of the water. Never mind all those scenes of battleships cruising sedately across an ocean that looks flat as a mill pond.

Eventually I stumbled on this article by Gene Slover and I realized that all of guns on a battleship were mounted on self leveling platforms. The platforms didn't contain gyroscopes, but relied on electrical signals sent via wires from the master gun control computer. The signals caused motors to run or hydraulic valves to open to do the actual work necessary to keep the platform level. So on a ship that is engaged in a battle, all of the gun platforms are all tilting in unison to compensate for the motion of the ship.

Caption of the Day

U.S. Soldiers using the Enhanced Portable Inductive Artillery Fuze Setter on an XM1156

And that's after I cut it down to the bare essentials. A giant corporation developed a 'smart' fuze for conventional artillery shells that greatly improves their accuracy. It is not as accurate as purpose designed 'smart' shells, but it doesn't cost as much either. The big advantage is that it can be used with existing 'dumb' artillery shells, and we have a gazillion of those stored away in secret warehouses. Probably next door to the Sinaloa cartel's cocaine warehouses.

Other posts about smart weapons here.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Long Range Artillery

M777 Lightweight Howitzer

Six inch, light weight howitzer can hurl a bullet 22 miles. Well, not exactly. Notice the extreme elevation of the barrel. What it does is hurl the bullet five miles into the air where it deploys its wings and then glides toward its target, where upon it takes a nose dive. "Lightweight" means it is light enough to be carried by a helicopter. Some parts of it had to be made from titanium in order to make it that light. The "wings" are kind of stubby.

Excalibur Guided Artillery Shell

This "gliding" is more like a guy in a wing suit than a sailplane. Even though it looks like it should fall like a rock, it still manages to travel at least 4 miles horizontally for every mile it falls. Since those little bitty wings are not going to do much to keep it from falling, it must have considerable horizontal velocity. With the extreme elevation of the gun, it is not going to get much horizontal velocity from being fired, which means that on the way up, the wings are going to have to alter it's trajectory from near vertical to horizontal.
     It has a guidance system that makes it very accurate, which means that if you know where your target is, you don't have to fire more than one shot to hit it. The Marines love this shell so much they ordered a thousand of the things at something like $85,000 each.

Thanks to Scott.

Update April 2015: Replaced the picture of the howitzer on account of the web site it came from lost it.

Bonus 155

Roberta grumbles about an ad, which prompts me to do a little digging, and I fall down the rabbit hole into Terminator-smart weapons land. The ad uses a clip of an attack on a military vehicle using some new kind of bomb. Evidently this new bomb is replacing the IED's (Improvised Explosive Device - the road side bombs being employed by the insurgents/jackasses/criminals in Iraq against US troops). I saw the ad before, but I didn't think much about it, but then I have my own hot buttons. But hearing from Roberta prompted me to find out just what this guy is talking about: all I heard was mumble. So. EFP: Explosively Formed Projectile, a nasty anti-armor munition. Poking around I found this video about a really fancy, really complicated anti-tank howitzer shell.


Your tax dollars at work. Each shell costs $40,000. I suppose if you are facing a tank, that might be considered a good deal. If you are a hardened bean counter, it's also pretty good economics. A new US Abrams tanks goes for about $4 million, a good used Russian tank can be had for a mere $100 grand.

But would it really be effective? I can see several possible problems:

• Can you hit a moving target? The Bonus 155 can scan a circular area 200 yards in diameter, (i.e. a target area of 32,000 square meters). The cannon that fires this shell has a range of 20 miles. Gunners have artillery down to a science, so I imagine they could probably put a shell within a hundred yards of their target if it wasn't moving. 20 miles is a long way, and even a bullet is going to take a couple of seconds (36 according to the video) to get there. If the tank is moving, you are going to have to predict it's new location or the shell is not going to be able to "see" it.
• Target identification. The Bonus will only fire it it identifies a target. What if it doesn't identify a target? Does it just fall to the ground and wait for the enemy to come pick it up and shoot it back at us?
• The Zulu war quartermaster problem: will they be able to deploy these shells in time to use them? I mean, they cost $40,000 a piece. I can just imagine the guy in charge of the armory being real persnickety about letting just any gunner pull a hundred shells from stock.
• The junkie stockroom clerk. Normally you need a BIG gun to shoot one of these shells, but each shell contains two mines that could be removed from the shell and triggered manually. I just see a stockroom clerk slipping these out the back door one at a time in order to get another fix.

As a bonus, I saw the camera they used to take a picture of the MOAB drop (right at the 3:33).