TBrennan Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 War of the Rebellion era 15" Rodman gun overlooking the Potomac at Fort Foote, downstream from Washington. Fort Foote was built during the War of the Rebellion to guard Washington, fort is well preserved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
m00n Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 Wow... that is a huge cannon. Do you have any other pics of it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BackBurner Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 That's one hell of a bass driver . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TBrennan Posted February 24, 2004 Author Share Posted February 24, 2004 Here you go Moon. There are a pair of these guns there, they are the original ones mounted during the war too. They fired a 15" solid-shot or a round hollow shell with a bursting charge, the blast of the discharge would start the fuse of the shell burning, the gunner would cut the fuse to length for the appropriate range. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TBrennan Posted February 24, 2004 Author Share Posted February 24, 2004 Here's a photo of the pair of Rodmans. I made the photo smaller. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mike stehr Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 Man, I would love to hear one of those pups fire-off. They gotta totally rattle your cage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mighty Favog Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 Ever see the 16"-ers' on the Iowa Class Battleships? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
m00n Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 Yeah they are huge. I was actually on the USS Wisconsin BB64 my 4 years in the navy. It's an iowa class. When we would fire those big boys the entire ship would rock back. It was wild. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jhawk92 Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 Moon- Pretty cool you were stationed on one of the Iowa's. I had read somewhere that if they lit off all 9 of the 16" guns at the same time, broadside, the ship would actually move several feet in the opposite direction. Similar thing happens to the A-10, shoot the 30mm cannon for more than a few seconds and the recoil actually stalls the aircraft. There are a few things I wish I could have seen "in the day," Iowa class lighting off some 16"ers, seeing an SR-71 take-off, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tankhokie Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 woo-hoo war-stories! in the turret of my m1a1d, with hatches closed, when i gave the command to fire i could look down out of the commander's sights and watch the floor after the 120mm main gun fired and see a "sea" of blue flame that covered the turret floor for a brief second or two then disappear. stuff like that will ignite any main gun rounds that are exposed (that is why the loaders stopped keeping a round in their lap) ...can cause the loader to become a crispy critter...happened just a couple of years ago at a gunnery exercise in texas, stupid decision by that tank commander to kill his loader just to shave off a couple of seconds on the engagement Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TBrennan Posted February 24, 2004 Author Share Posted February 24, 2004 JHawk---Stalls the aircraft? From what speed? Is the aircraft under power? You're saying the recoil from a 30mm cannon is more powerful than the combination of the aircraft's engine AND it's inertia? Tell that to a 10 year old or a graduate of Kansas where they evidently are too busy stealing basketball coaches from Illinois to teach math and physics. But Illinois is doing fine without the coach, they got a pair of Nobels this year instead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tankhokie Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 ha ha ha t, i was just going to leave that one alone, maybe he was thinking of the experimental a10 warthog that mounted a 16" iowa class chain gun on it's belly...i think it had eight 16 inchers mounted in an array...??? had problems with weight and balance along with flight stability during firing Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HDBRbuilder Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 The A-10's main armament is not just a 30mm cannon, its a full-fledged 30mm VULCAN (electrically operated Gatling gun)with an airplane built around it. It is not so much the firing of the Vulcan, it is the type of warhead BEING fired...depleted uranium solid in a metal jacket. I have never seen a Warthog stall in flight from long firing, but I have definitely seen them jerk back while the the firing was happening. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and when the warhead is depleted uranium being fired at that many rounds per second, the recoil is quite SUBSTANTIAL! Those depleted uranium rounds cause lots of destruction. Whenever a Warthog engages an armored target with a burst from that 30mm vulcan, the results are like one took a giant 40-foot long chainsaw with diamond-tipped blades and sawed right through it! It turns armored targets into nice piles of minced-up scrap metal! The Warthog is not a high-speed aircraft. It is basically a 30mm vulcan with a heavily-armored cockpit strapped atop it, and an all- metal monoplane cropduster-type aircraft built around it all...then two heavily-armored turbo fan engines are strapped atop the fuselage. It is designed to operate at slow air-speeds and have extremely good slow speed maneuverability, like a purpose-built crop duster has. The reason everything on it is so heavily armored is BECAUSE of its slow operational-speed in combat situations. It can fly with one engine completely blown away almost as well as it can fly with both engines operational. It is purposefully designed for low-speed ground support and is fantastic in that role...but that role causes it to need all that armor because it makes it vulnerable to enemy gound-fire. If you have never seen an A-10 react to surface-to-air missile(SAM) attack, dropping its chaf and rolling and maneuvering like a crop duster, then you just can't appreciate its low-speed maneuverability! Also, just a half-second burst from that vulcan is all it takes to send an enemy armored vehicle to the scrap-pile! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TBrennan Posted February 24, 2004 Author Share Posted February 24, 2004 Builder----Jerk back!!!???!!! Are you serious? Jerk back?? C'mon, can you comprehend the forces it would take to make several tons of mass moving at 200 mph....jerk back in the opposite direction? Maybe you saw the thing shudder, jerk back, no way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
m00n Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 ---------------- On 2/24/2004 6:06:00 PM jhawk92 wrote: Moon- Pretty cool you were stationed on one of the Iowa's. I had read somewhere that if they lit off all 9 of the 16" guns at the same time, broadside, the ship would actually move several feet in the opposite direction. ---------------- Oh yes, very true. We did a full broadside once, you definitly needed to hold on. The worst part about it was all the dust that had built up in the ventelation ducts for the last 40 years or so would come blowing out. I have lots of pics, but no scanner. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HDBRbuilder Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 TOM...I spent TWO YEARS at JRTC as the S-2 in the OPFOR Battalion, I saw more than ONE Warthog firing there on the range and maneuvering against our "smokey" sam's. I speak from experience, not watching movies! I am also a former Air Battle Management Operations Center OIC...in a Chapparal battalion (3 years)...knowing the capabilities of our and possible enemy aircraft and their combat uses, and coordinating with AWACS, front-line units, USAF fighter units, Patriot Battalions, Hawk Battalions, and Naval air to determine which air defense assets were allocated to which enemy air targets at any given moment in the air-land battle...and determining the intelligence requirements to track enemy air as it entered our airspace and as it left our airspace, so that I could determine its operational sites (airfields) for our air assets to take it out after it got home....IF IT GOT HOME! I was damned good at my job, too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TBrennan Posted February 24, 2004 Author Share Posted February 24, 2004 Builder---Despite the jargon I don't believe you saw A-10s jerking backwards. To think that an oject weighing several tons traveling at high speed could be instantly stopped and then reaccelerated in the opposite direction by the recoil forces of a 30mm automatic cannon is outrageous. Not to mention that not only inertia but the force of the aircraft's engine itself must be overcome. Evidently the 30mm Vulcan is so powerful we need not have developed rockets for the Apollo but simply powered it with an array of Vulcans pointed to the rear. And I thought Project Orion was thinking big. I'm sorry, but as a product of several thousand years of rational Western Thought I must conclude you are telling a whopper here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tankhokie Posted February 24, 2004 Share Posted February 24, 2004 F=ma can't cheat the laws part of that recoil powers the ejection mech and is buffered also. still 2 tubine engines even at modest thrust could not be overcome by the sum of the forces (in the reverse direction of flight) from a sustained firing. show me the training manual that warns of firing causing flight instability and i will quietly eat my crow pie...until then, hold the mayo on my whopper please. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HDBRbuilder Posted February 25, 2004 Share Posted February 25, 2004 I never said it made them go backwards, I said it jerked them back...kinda like how it looks when you watch somebody moving under a strobe light. There is still forward momentum, but it definitely is obvious, when watching from the side, that those depleted uranium rounds' recoil are causing a pause in forward momentum when they are fired from an A-10. It is hard to describe...but when you see it, it is definitely there! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frzninvt Posted February 25, 2004 Share Posted February 25, 2004 While out at Nellis AFB, NV (~ 1985) participating in week long M-60 training course in preparation for a deployment to Tegucigalpa, Honduras I got a chance to watch the A-10's in action firing at decoy tanks and duece and a halfs. As stated they don't seem to be moving very fast but when those things get the 30mm cannons rolling you should see the dust and devastation that they leave behind. I can certainly see that when firing the cannon in cyclic mode it would jerk the aircraft back to some extent. Hell the M-60 I was firing on it's bipod was moving a railroad tie completely buried in the ground. I loved shooting targets 800 yds away and watching them fall over from a 3-4 round burst. I was assigned the 82 Tactical Control Flight (Forward Air Control) at Holloman AFB, NM (A division of the 602 Tactical Air Control Wing at Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ) for a couple of years and the vehicles and weapons that I was trained to use was amazing. My 90 day stint in Honduras pretty hairy as well, I sure felt bad for the Army folks stationed at the tent city in Pamerola AS seeing as they put us up in 5-7 bedroom mansions with satellite TV and armed guards front and rear we also drove around in Type IV Presidential Suburbans and Toyota Land Cruiser's reworked my the Seabees. With the additional weight those big Suburbans could hardly make it up the hills in Hondo. Oh the fun! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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