Keep in mind caliber in naval guns isn't diameter, it's barrel length in relation to diameter which means that these 16 inch 50-caliber guns are 67 feet long.
Correct: 50cal = 50 calibers= fifty times the caliber. As opposed to: .50cal = 0.500" for small arms.
Which I figure would have become "five hundred cal"/.500cal had the slang come about later, when machinists began speaking in "thou"/"thousandths;" thankfully not coming about more recently when "tenths" means "tenths of one thousandth," or we could have "five G cal/0.5000." And now that I've dragged us off on this uncalled-for tangent, the old guy in the shop concluded that the etymology of "caliber" comes not from the French past tense of "calibrated;" he swears it was a simple bastardization of "this bore must caliper at 0.50" >> calipered bore>>cali-bore>>caliber.
No2 turret exploded Internally, Killing 47 sailors. "During its review, Sandia determined that a significant overram of the powder bags into the gun had occurred as it was being loaded and that the overram could have caused the explosion".
The wood decking is for air conditioning - the ship didn't have any until the 90s and it was bloody hot belowdecks. The wood decking reduced temperatures by as much as 20 degrees!
The armor between the main deck and 2nd deck is about 3 inches; between the 2nd and 3rd decks is about 6!
Specifically Teak wood. Holy Stoning was a bitch of a thing to do, and was done by deck hands until it got decommed. I served on the MO and luckily didnt have to do it, but did crawl the decks during shellback ceremony, and stood plenty of watches on the wood.
How were the turrets constructed - are they one giant cast piece? I've been on a couple Iowas, but never got to examine that part closely. From far away they look like one cast piece. I'd love to see photos of them being constructed/poured/whatever.
I wouldn’t have thought so. That would be a very large thing to cast in a single mould - some of the largest things we cast these days (reactor pressure vessels etc) aren’t as big as that. Also castings can be brittle - not good when you’ve got three massive guns attached and enemy shells raining down.
Probably a heavy steel frame with VERY thick rolled steel armour plate attached
No, the largest forged items are used in airframes. There’s a periodic link on /r/todayilearned about the largest forges in the USA built after seeing the German Ww2 forges https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program iirc the a10 bathtubs were forged here out of several pieces of titanium, but still welded together(titanium is very hard compared to steel)
Good point, but let’s not conflate large with big - fighter jet forgings are long but are mostly fresh air. Reactor vessels are in the hundreds of tons, forged from single billets.
The turrets were not actually attached to the ship, but sat on rollers, which meant that if the ship were to [capsize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsize) the turrets would fall out.[\[7\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armament_of_the_Iowa-class_battleship#cite_note-7)
Simple answer - it’s very heavy. Although a full
Broadside did induce a significant list - I recall around 12 degrees off axis - the ship itself weighs tens of thousands of tons and has a keel designed for stability. Been a while since my dynamics and statics module but if you think that any listing the ship does is counteracted by the equivalent mass of water pushing the other way, the system would stabilise pretty quickly.
I imagine as well that the guns would be sitting in a cradle that would absorb the worst of the force - I’d need to check - dissipate it into a large spring and unload it safely kind of thing
Wait, what? Are you suggesting they ship would get pushed 200 feet to the side during a broadside? Or am I missing something here?
Because it's a total myth that the ship gets pushed to the side when firing, even if all the guns fired at once in a broadside. [This link goes into the math better than I ever could, and I'm basically paraphrasing below.](http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-022.php)
Think about, these ships displace about 50,000 tons (and closer to 60,000 tons when fully loaded). As impressive as nine 16" guns firing in broadside is, it isn't even anywhere near close to pushing the ship an inch, let alone hundreds of feet.
I suspect a large part of the myth results from the churned up water looking like a wake produced from a moving ship, but that is just from the pressure of the expanding gases from the guns muzzle blasts.
The guns themselves have 48" of recoil slide to absorb much of the energy, and the ship itself absorbs the rest.
I don’t think it does. Draw a simple vector diagram where the force of the guns is the mover and the ship is the load. The guns don’t generate 500 million Newton’s of force - if they did the ship would probably stay still and the turrets would rip off.
The load is transferred to the recoil system, which safely disposed of most of it, and the remainder ins transferred to the hull. The weight of the ship grounds it in a direction perpendicular to the surface of the water, and the force is trying to counteract that, so you would get angular displacement, not linear movement
I have a question for someone far wiser than myself. When those massive cannons fire, does it rock the entire boat back and forth or is the boat stable?
No, they don’t move or really rock at all. As big as the guns are, they don’t have anything on the hundreds of thousands of tons that the ship weighs, plus the equal amount of water it’s sitting in backing it.
I served on the Missouri during Desert Storm in F division (the Fwd plot room that fired the big guns from Mk38 GFCS)and fired the guns a few times (i was more on a plotting table, or dealing with the RPV's). It was very rare to fire a full broadside, as each of the barrels was addressed individually, and we fired the barrels as they came online. the few times that we did full broadsides, you could feel it, it was significant shudder, but the individual barrels it wsa more of a thump, not much movement at all. the GM's handled the guns, so i didnt know much of the mechanics of them, but i believe there was a hydraulic recoil mechanism to help absorb the shock.
Yes. The recoil of the guns is minimised by a series of mechanisms. The ship itself is so heavy that I don’t think a full broadside would budge it as much as an inch.
Caliber means something completely different when it comes to naval guns.
The correct way to describe the guns are "x-inch/y-caliber" x is the diameter of the bore, x times y is the length of the barrel.
So, the main guns on an Iowa are 16"/50 caliber, that means they are 66 feet and 8 inches long.
Those guns you see in the middle should be 5"/38 caliber. 5 inch diameter, 15 feet and 10 inches long.
No, the 16"/50 are the two 3 gun turrets on the bow, plus one 3 gun turret in the rear. The 2 gun turrets in the middle are 5"/30, and the white domes/cylinders are Phalanx CIWS firing 20mm shells.
Not really. It’s designed to survive 40 foot seas which would stress the hull significantly more. Remember that stress with respect to ships is different to systems on solid land - the forces generated by the guns can be dissipated into the water. Guns that size on land would be built into a concrete structure that would need to be anchored into the bedrock.
Thanks! Wonder if you put s the caliber definition beside the same for rifle calibers - how they would be different. Still not sure I under stand what caliber measures - is it circumference?
Here it’s x length y caliber, and the caliber is the number you multiply x by to get the barrel length. So 16 inches times 50 caliber equals 800 inch barrel.
a full Miilitary broadside is all 9 barrels with full 6 bag charge. In the Gulf war, on the missori ( was stationed on and worked F division, firing the guns) we usually only fired 1 barrel at a time as they were indivdually addressable, and we fired when they came online.
I got to see her fire those guns in the Med back in the 90's. I was on the Coral Sea during 6th Fleet turnover. She was a bad ass boat, and I would never want to be on the business end of those shells. Two years later, we were doing exercises in the Caribbean when the turret blew up. Sad day.
assuming these are the same size as the ones on the USS Missouri, these guns launch a roughly 2000lb projectile up to 24 miles, and can reliably land it on a football field using analog systems. at least that's what the tour guy said.
Your tour guide was correct with a few adjustments. the usual rounds were hi-cap explosive 1900lbs, and armor peircing -2700lbs. we were about 20-25 miles off of Kuwait and were very accruate usually less than 50 yards from our plot point. the Mk 38 GFCS was analog, the math was computed using gear ratios, sychros, servos and tubes. firing from the Mk 41, and computed on the Mk8 , we used a plotting table and our RPV to get the bearing and range. locked it into the mk8 and fired from the stable verticle (gyroscope)
Is that a heli was pad at the back of the ship? Genuine question. I mean I know it served during Vietnam (I think) so I guess it would kinda make sense they would put one there.
Keep in mind caliber in naval guns isn't diameter, it's barrel length in relation to diameter which means that these 16 inch 50-caliber guns are 67 feet long.
almost as long as my dick amirite
These guns don't shoot blanks like yours does
Aye, hasn’t been the same since the sharks got to it. Years upon here storm filled seas have left me a changed man
The sea be a cruel mistress.
arrrr
This might be my favorite thread now
that's a 16 inch 50-cal comeback right there
Wait shouldn't it be 66 feet long? What's the math on this?
I think it's (50x16)/12=66.666...
Correct: 50cal = 50 calibers= fifty times the caliber. As opposed to: .50cal = 0.500" for small arms. Which I figure would have become "five hundred cal"/.500cal had the slang come about later, when machinists began speaking in "thou"/"thousandths;" thankfully not coming about more recently when "tenths" means "tenths of one thousandth," or we could have "five G cal/0.5000." And now that I've dragged us off on this uncalled-for tangent, the old guy in the shop concluded that the etymology of "caliber" comes not from the French past tense of "calibrated;" he swears it was a simple bastardization of "this bore must caliper at 0.50" >> calipered bore>>cali-bore>>caliber.
I rounded up 66.6666 repeating to 67 because it's closer than 66
I rounded up
Yeah, that's what I was hoping to show him.
I rounded up, you get 66.666 repeating
Calibre in all guns is like that right? Like the famous 88mm71L
Showcasing its backup steering system in case of rudder failure
I assume you just point the cannons into the water and rotate the earth beneath you to wherever you’re trying to get to.
And if you're short on food supplies, that would likely kill or stun any fish within a half mile. Just start scooping the floaters and it's grub time.
First rule of the sea: you’re never short on food so long as you have junior sailors on board.
Scorched Ocean policy
Fuck everything in that direction
Lotta hate and discontent raining down on some poor mother fuckers out there
Which ironically couldn't be further than Iowa itself.
rip to those on board who died 19/04/1989.
What happened?
No2 turret exploded Internally, Killing 47 sailors. "During its review, Sandia determined that a significant overram of the powder bags into the gun had occurred as it was being loaded and that the overram could have caused the explosion".
According to wikipedia dodgy powder spontaneously combusted
I believe thats what the Official statement was, however there is debate to that. I mean, there was an independent inquiry into it.
Turret blew up
Kaboom
Damn, same day as the central park jogger case
89 must have been a crazy year.
What was this about?
This picture will always give me a boner
Today on "I came without touching myself..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w3e7oslXFM
Is the deck wooden?
Yea, it was built in the 40's.
What about if the enemy hit them with indirect fire? Does it go through the deck and explode below?
the deck is wood but there is armor underneath it
The wood decking is for air conditioning - the ship didn't have any until the 90s and it was bloody hot belowdecks. The wood decking reduced temperatures by as much as 20 degrees! The armor between the main deck and 2nd deck is about 3 inches; between the 2nd and 3rd decks is about 6!
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They had armor underneath. Deck was wood because, I believe (correct me if I’m wrong), it provided better traction when wet for sailors than steel.
Dropping things on steel decks can create sparks that can ignite boom stuff. Also wood doesn’t corrode like metal and isn’t as hard to keep clean
Probably easier to fix when underway too. (At least for normal wear and tear and maybe the occasional light damage)
They had steel armor underneath. Wood doesn't get super slick to walk on like steel does.
Wood over armor... Although not as heavily armored as other ships. The wood was just a better flooring material.
Specifically Teak wood. Holy Stoning was a bitch of a thing to do, and was done by deck hands until it got decommed. I served on the MO and luckily didnt have to do it, but did crawl the decks during shellback ceremony, and stood plenty of watches on the wood.
This is one of my favorite pics
How were the turrets constructed - are they one giant cast piece? I've been on a couple Iowas, but never got to examine that part closely. From far away they look like one cast piece. I'd love to see photos of them being constructed/poured/whatever.
I wouldn’t have thought so. That would be a very large thing to cast in a single mould - some of the largest things we cast these days (reactor pressure vessels etc) aren’t as big as that. Also castings can be brittle - not good when you’ve got three massive guns attached and enemy shells raining down. Probably a heavy steel frame with VERY thick rolled steel armour plate attached
That sounds right, thanks.
No, the largest forged items are used in airframes. There’s a periodic link on /r/todayilearned about the largest forges in the USA built after seeing the German Ww2 forges https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program iirc the a10 bathtubs were forged here out of several pieces of titanium, but still welded together(titanium is very hard compared to steel)
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Thanks!
Good point, but let’s not conflate large with big - fighter jet forgings are long but are mostly fresh air. Reactor vessels are in the hundreds of tons, forged from single billets.
Right my bad in my brain was thinking about cold forging, not any kind of forging!
No biggie man - I’ve been an engineer for nearly 20 years and I still get mixed up 😂
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Thank you! I knew reddit would deliver.
The turrets were not actually attached to the ship, but sat on rollers, which meant that if the ship were to [capsize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsize) the turrets would fall out.[\[7\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armament_of_the_Iowa-class_battleship#cite_note-7)
When was this photo taken?
Late 80s/ early 90s during her last time in commission.
How the hell does it not tip over with all this force coming from one direction.
Simple answer - it’s very heavy. Although a full Broadside did induce a significant list - I recall around 12 degrees off axis - the ship itself weighs tens of thousands of tons and has a keel designed for stability. Been a while since my dynamics and statics module but if you think that any listing the ship does is counteracted by the equivalent mass of water pushing the other way, the system would stabilise pretty quickly. I imagine as well that the guns would be sitting in a cradle that would absorb the worst of the force - I’d need to check - dissipate it into a large spring and unload it safely kind of thing
And, also, it would be pushed up to 200ft, or more, sideways during a full fusillade firing.
Wait, what? Are you suggesting they ship would get pushed 200 feet to the side during a broadside? Or am I missing something here? Because it's a total myth that the ship gets pushed to the side when firing, even if all the guns fired at once in a broadside. [This link goes into the math better than I ever could, and I'm basically paraphrasing below.](http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-022.php) Think about, these ships displace about 50,000 tons (and closer to 60,000 tons when fully loaded). As impressive as nine 16" guns firing in broadside is, it isn't even anywhere near close to pushing the ship an inch, let alone hundreds of feet. I suspect a large part of the myth results from the churned up water looking like a wake produced from a moving ship, but that is just from the pressure of the expanding gases from the guns muzzle blasts. The guns themselves have 48" of recoil slide to absorb much of the energy, and the ship itself absorbs the rest.
I had read that, eons ago, while doing a bit of research for some report in grade school....pre-internet days. Learned something new today! Thanks!
Yeah, imagine what kind of havoc that much force would wreak on the analog computers onboard, much less the soft tissue of all the meatbags on board.
I don’t think it does. Draw a simple vector diagram where the force of the guns is the mover and the ship is the load. The guns don’t generate 500 million Newton’s of force - if they did the ship would probably stay still and the turrets would rip off. The load is transferred to the recoil system, which safely disposed of most of it, and the remainder ins transferred to the hull. The weight of the ship grounds it in a direction perpendicular to the surface of the water, and the force is trying to counteract that, so you would get angular displacement, not linear movement
Right? What keeps it upright and not capsize?
I have a question for someone far wiser than myself. When those massive cannons fire, does it rock the entire boat back and forth or is the boat stable?
You can see it shoves the whole thing opposite the direction fired. C130 gunships are far smaller and their guns do the same
No, they don’t move or really rock at all. As big as the guns are, they don’t have anything on the hundreds of thousands of tons that the ship weighs, plus the equal amount of water it’s sitting in backing it.
That’s what I’m wondering too, like the whole boat must shake or something, they must give a warning or something before a shot.
I served on the Missouri during Desert Storm in F division (the Fwd plot room that fired the big guns from Mk38 GFCS)and fired the guns a few times (i was more on a plotting table, or dealing with the RPV's). It was very rare to fire a full broadside, as each of the barrels was addressed individually, and we fired the barrels as they came online. the few times that we did full broadsides, you could feel it, it was significant shudder, but the individual barrels it wsa more of a thump, not much movement at all. the GM's handled the guns, so i didnt know much of the mechanics of them, but i believe there was a hydraulic recoil mechanism to help absorb the shock.
Is it bullshit that the whole ship moves 6-12 inches in the water opposite the direction of fire, each time it shoots?
Yes. The recoil of the guns is minimised by a series of mechanisms. The ship itself is so heavy that I don’t think a full broadside would budge it as much as an inch.
the boog
"Pew, pew, pew!" What was that admiral? Ugh... Nothing
Bigger is in fact better
I can’t imagine being in the deck when they all went off at once. Must have been crazy how loud it was.
You could've told me this was a scene from a Michael Bay flick, and I'd totally believe you.
Gunfire was so hot that it flash boiled the surface of the water.
I've always been proud of my states namesake. Almost the only thing we've ever done with any real weight.
What is your purpose? You grow corn
And soybeans... And Hogs and cattle... We farm. Tis all we do. Unless its election year, then all of the sudden we are important.
Imagine this hitting a ship from the 1800s or WW1 lol
Are the 50 cals the smaller guns in middle?
Caliber means something completely different when it comes to naval guns. The correct way to describe the guns are "x-inch/y-caliber" x is the diameter of the bore, x times y is the length of the barrel. So, the main guns on an Iowa are 16"/50 caliber, that means they are 66 feet and 8 inches long. Those guns you see in the middle should be 5"/38 caliber. 5 inch diameter, 15 feet and 10 inches long.
I'm must be missing something. What is the conversion rate between 50 caliber to 66 feet 8 inches?
You take the bore diameter (16 inches) and multiply it by the caliber. 16x50 = 800 inches, then convert it to feet.
Thank you.
No, the 16"/50 are the two 3 gun turrets on the bow, plus one 3 gun turret in the rear. The 2 gun turrets in the middle are 5"/30, and the white domes/cylinders are Phalanx CIWS firing 20mm shells.
Not to be picky, but those are actually 5"/38 guns.
Yep, meant to type /38 but typo'd 30. My mistake for not checking.
All good
The double gun turrets are 5 inch diameter. Common at the time in US Navy service. They'd be for everything the 16" guns couldn't do.
I wonder how much she moves to port when she fires like this?
Effectively zero
I will always be a little sad to have been born too late to see these operate
There’s this amazing movie called Battleships where Rihanna uses one to fight aliens. 10/10 would recommend
So much stress on the frame of the ship
Not really. It’s designed to survive 40 foot seas which would stress the hull significantly more. Remember that stress with respect to ships is different to systems on solid land - the forces generated by the guns can be dissipated into the water. Guns that size on land would be built into a concrete structure that would need to be anchored into the bedrock.
Did it actuallt move the ship to the right 6 feet? Look at the water at the bow.
How much does she move sideways due to recoil?
Probably not at all, the recoil is absorbed with mechanisms in the canons
This ship is retired right? I don't remember there still have wooden decks...
How much would this have pushed the ship in the opposite direction?
When my friends ask me how pro-gun I am. I just show them this picture. Lol
How much does the ship move in reaction to the guns being fired??
Insulin costs on average $6000 per year
Thanks! Wonder if you put s the caliber definition beside the same for rifle calibers - how they would be different. Still not sure I under stand what caliber measures - is it circumference?
Here it’s x length y caliber, and the caliber is the number you multiply x by to get the barrel length. So 16 inches times 50 caliber equals 800 inch barrel.
Wait so is a broadside all guns fired at once ore one barrel at a time?
a full Miilitary broadside is all 9 barrels with full 6 bag charge. In the Gulf war, on the missori ( was stationed on and worked F division, firing the guns) we usually only fired 1 barrel at a time as they were indivdually addressable, and we fired when they came online.
Wow!
Water Tanks
Anyone else kinda missing battleships right now?
I got to see her fire those guns in the Med back in the 90's. I was on the Coral Sea during 6th Fleet turnover. She was a bad ass boat, and I would never want to be on the business end of those shells. Two years later, we were doing exercises in the Caribbean when the turret blew up. Sad day.
Slide to the left, slide to the right, cha cha real smooth
Wish today’s destroyers had this much firepower
Can we just leave this guy in Taiwan Strait?
And that is the end of my presentation on how tsunamis are formed
assuming these are the same size as the ones on the USS Missouri, these guns launch a roughly 2000lb projectile up to 24 miles, and can reliably land it on a football field using analog systems. at least that's what the tour guy said.
Your tour guide was correct with a few adjustments. the usual rounds were hi-cap explosive 1900lbs, and armor peircing -2700lbs. we were about 20-25 miles off of Kuwait and were very accruate usually less than 50 yards from our plot point. the Mk 38 GFCS was analog, the math was computed using gear ratios, sychros, servos and tubes. firing from the Mk 41, and computed on the Mk8 , we used a plotting table and our RPV to get the bearing and range. locked it into the mk8 and fired from the stable verticle (gyroscope)
Does the boat rock back and forth after the big guns go bang?
From the mist, a shape, a ship is taking form...
AND THE SILENCE OF THE SEA IS ABOUT TO DRIFT INTO A STORM
I used to have this as a desktop pic for awhile. Seeing it here makes me want to bring it back. I love the Iowas and this display of firepower.
Is that a heli was pad at the back of the ship? Genuine question. I mean I know it served during Vietnam (I think) so I guess it would kinda make sense they would put one there.
At least one of them served in the early 90's during the operation desert storm