Range of Naval Gunfire

Iowa-class battleship - Wikipedia

See note 5 at the bottom.

Longest strike by a naval gun was the USS Iowa on a Jap destroyer at
Truk Atoll in 1945. 35,700yds
Reading "note 5 at the bottom" brought back a memory of reading about that incident. Note 5 writes Iowa straddled the IJN destroyer. Straddled does not mean hit. If I recall correctly after being straddled the IJN destroyer hustled out of there unharmed. The important thing was that it did not get close enough to a carrier to launch the deadliest naval weapon of the time, a torpedo.
 
Iowa-class battleship - Wikipedia

See note 5 at the bottom.

Longest strike by a naval gun was the USS Iowa on a Jap destroyer at
Truk Atoll in 1945. 35,700yds

Maybe there is an asterisk needed for that attribution, for a naval gun on a target afloat. There is a WWI claim for the longest-range, firing the largest gun, with the heaviest shell, on a target ashore.

On September 28th 1918, HMS General Wolfe opened fire on the railway bridge at Snaeskerke Belgium from 36,000 yards. That day she fired 52, 18 inch shells weighing 3,320 pounds at the target.

The 18 inch gun and shells at the Imperial War Museum.

18-inch-gun.jpg


HMS General Wolfe (1915 - Wikipedia)
 
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My long-time shooting buddy (since has retired & moved away) was a Vietnam artilleryman.

He said the 8” guns he manned had a max range of 16 miles, at which it could drop a round into a 55-gallon drum.

Truly the king of the battlefield.
 
You can take the 55 gal drum statements with a grain of salt. Chuck didn't tote no 55 gal drums, at least in my observation. ;)
Long range land artillery is, generally speaking, an 'area weapon'. CLOSE counts! Many 'closes' count more. :D

The 175mm artillery used in Vietnam could exceed 20 miles, but you didn't want to call it in close to where you were sitting. ;)
 
The HMS Nelson was also there, but it didn't see action until June 10. It was the sister ship to the Rodney. That was an interesting class of battleship. And both were extensively used during WWII, so much so that both were basically worn slap out by the end of the war and scrapped pretty soon after the war.
The unusual main gun arrangement on Nelson and Rodney was due to the battleship tonnage restrictions after WWI. Originally designed to have 3 x 3 16" turrets A, B and Y, and to achieve >30 kts. Finally cut down to have a very long forecastle A, B and Q, and a very short "stern arrangement". Max speed downhill with a following hurricane, a hair under 24 kts. Dave_n
 
You're right Faulkner. The Yamato class battleships had 18.1" guns. They were originally designed with 51mm (20") guns but cooler heads prevailed.
 
The King George V class were the last class that came out in WWII. The Brits finished off one more battleship after the war was over, the HMS Vanguard. It was gunned with the BL 15" guns in a more conventional 4x2 arrangement instead of the 2x4x4 arrangement of the KGV ships.

I had forgotten Vanguard. She has the distinction of being the worlds last completed battleship. Those 15” guns were originally fitted to WWI battlecruisers. Using them was a wartime expedient. The Vanguard also had a transom stern, unusual for a battleship. Too bad the Brits scrapped her in the 60’s, they could’ve used her in the Falklands.
 
Know a AF guy who was a Foward Air Controller in SVN.
He does not like the M107 175mm long barrel!
He says when it shoots at near max range, there’s no telling where it gonna hit!
Often no where close to the intended target.
One of its main advantages appears to be it could out range the 130mm used by NVN.

M107 self-propelled gun - Wikipedia
 
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That was a black day for the US Navy......

As I recall the accident was originally blamed on the crew, but with further investigation it was found to have been caused by powder which was unstable due to poor storage for years on a barge.

Not only did they blame the crew, but singled out one man in particular and his alleged emotional problems involving his personal preferences. They dragged his name through the mud but finally ended up apologizing to his family, who were devastated by the implications.:(:(:(

Actually, it was the USS Iowa itself that suffered the explosion unless you are talking about the USS Mississippi that had a turret explosion in 1924.
 
That's why I love this stuff...

"...Curtis Lemay changed the tactics (one being the 'tight box formation') at at the time the air war was changing with the advent of long range escort fighters. That way it only took 8 missions to destroy a target rather than 10."

Many know that the use of escort fighters relied on belly fuel tanks on P-51s to get adequate range to escort bombers into the interior of Germany. Many more may not know that the person responsible for developing the belly tank was Cass Hough (who I think was a USAAF Colonel at the time), the president of the Daisy Manufacturing Company.

...it is a bottomless well of interesting details. Like all of the manufacturers making parts for guns you'd never think of being in that business.
 
The 155mm howitzers I built for the us Army have a 30 mile 55 gallon drum accuracy. But decades later they been modified in the sand box.

Can you elaborate on that figure? A 50 gal. drum is about 23” wide. So you’re claiming the nose of the projectile could hit a target about 3/4” wide at 1 mile away consistently?

I don’t care if you made them or not, what you’re claiming has no basis in reality. If that were the case, GPS guided rounds like the M982 Excalibur would not exist or be remotely needed.
 
Regarding effectiveness of artillery, the importance of proximity fuze development for artillery projectiles during WWII is often forgotten. Patton credited it with winning the Battle of the Bulge. It was not only for anti-aircraft use but also for antipersonnel use on land. See: Artillery Proximity Fuses
 
Can you elaborate on that figure? A 50 gal. drum is about 23” wide. So you’re claiming the nose of the projectile could hit a target about 3/4” wide at 1 mile away consistently?

I don’t care if you made them or not, what you’re claiming has no basis in reality. If that were the case, GPS guided rounds like the
M982 Excalibur would not exist or be remotely needed.

We were told this when we assembled them. There’s all different progectiles. Some laser guided by a guy pointing a laser in the field. There were self propelled sabot shells fired too. This was the late 80’s there are different versions of the 155 mm howitzer on you tube now. Lots of modern upgrades.

Being a class A machine builder they were taking lathes out of mothballs since ww2 they been in storage and revamping them to make parts for the 155 mm. We were making machines to make parts for the m1A Abrams Chrysler tank too. When this job ended I went to work assembling the 155 mm sub units for Watervillet arsonel. I gave them my best workmanship..
 
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I never been near a battle ship but whatever the Navy was firing in RVN our CO would tell us that is a new Cadillac that just flew over our heads.
Maybe $4k at the time? Army had 8" & 175mm SPs. One was good for 22 mi and other 30mi. I forget which. They were basically naval guns on tracks.
 
Back when the Army had Coast Artillery installations, I think they were stated to have a range of over 20 miles. They were also basically Naval guns on disappearing mounts.
nUo4kln.jpg
 
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That's called the Coriolis Effect. Beyond around 1000 yards it has to be taken into account, and the extent of the effect also depends on the direction you are firing. Ballistic computers do all those compensating aiming calculations. Back during WWII such computers existed aboard the ship but they were mechanical, not electronic, with lots of gears, screws, and cams. It was quite an art, and it took considerable skill, to operate them.

When they recommissioned the Iowa class BBs, the US Navy debated replacing the mechanical fire control computers because they worked really well and were very reliable.

The main additions in the 1980s refits were the switch to the more modern Mark 160 Fire Control System along with DR-810 radar in each turret to measure muzzle velocity of the outgoing rounds, along with better powder formulation using cooler burning diphenylamine based powder, a titanium dioxide and wax based additive, and polyurethane coated powder bags to reduce gas erosion of the barrels, increasing the life of the barrel liners from 290 rounds to around 1500 rounds.

The USN also remixed the powder used in the 1980s. When first produced in WWII, the powder produced shot to shot variation of less than +/- 10 ft per second, which increased to 14 fps in Korea, 23 fps in Vietnam and 32 ft per second in the early 1980s. The remixed powder again produced consistency of +/- 10 fps. This combination of fire control, powder and reduced bore erosion produced exceptional accuracy.

For example, in 1987, fifteen shells were fired in tests at 34,000 yards (19.32 miles). 14 out of the 15 landed within 250 yards (230 m) of the center of the target and 8 were within 150 yards. Shell-to-shell dispersion was 123 yards. That's not bad when shooting rounds that leave 50' diameter craters with blast effects that are several times that distance.

----

During WWII, the accuracy of US battleships in North Carolina, South Dakota and Iowa classes was due to a combination of two elements.

The electromechanical analog fire control computer (Ford Instrument Company Mark 8 Range Keeper) in the plotting room, where the trajectories were calculated, and the Mk 38 Ship Gun Fire-Control System (GFCS) located high in the ship where radar and range finder data were used to produce the data needed for tachymetric target motion prediction to compute the corrections needed to get the second round or salvo on target. There were three of the Mk 38 GFCS in the Iowa class BBs.

Against a fixed target on land at normal shore bombardment ranges, two shots is all it usually took. Against a maneuvering ship target it was a lot more challenging, but no ship class in any navy ever did it more effectively than an Iowa class BB.

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say an Iowa class BB could hit a VW Beetle at a range of 42,345 yards (24.05 miles) for the AP Mk 8, and 41,622 yards (23.65 miles) for the HC Mk 13, but given that the HC Mk 13 round would leave a crater 50' wide and 20' deep, with enough blast to knock down trees 400 yards away, a near miss was good enough to take out a VW Beetle.

In terms of actual hit percentages on ship targets, at 10,000 yards (5.68 miles) the hit percentage for a ship presenting a broadside target was around 33% (varying slightly depending on the spotting method used (visual, aircraft or radar) and about 22% for a bow on target. At 20,000 yards (11.36 miles) the hit percentages fell to 10.5% and 4.1% respectively and at 30,000 yards (17.04 miles) they were 2.7% and 1.4%.

Remember though that this is firing from a moving and maneuvering ship at another moving and maneuvering ship, each with speeds around 30 kts, with a time of flight of 13 seconds at 10,000 yards, 30 seconds at 20,000 yards, 53 seconds at 30,000 yards and 86 seconds at 40,000 yards.
 
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We visited Pearl Harbor last month, and it was quite exciting to step onboard the Missouri. At one point I was sitting on a bench made from powder bag cans that carried dates from the 1930's.

Pretty impressive to see those big guns and take in all that history.
 
I knew a mechanical engineer......

Regarding effectiveness of artillery, the importance of proximity fuze development for artillery projectiles during WWII is often forgotten. Patton credited it with winning the Battle of the Bulge. It was not only for anti-aircraft use but also for antipersonnel use on land. See: Artillery Proximity Fuses

....who actually worked on the proximity fuse.
 

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