Post by director on Feb 8, 2017 11:04:28 GMT -6
Some of the extreme range guns work like the German design, where additional charges are fired off as the projectile accelerates down the barrel. Others use a conventional gun and a rocket-assisted shell, like the US Navy's 16" round used during the Vietnam war. Bull seems to have favored very long barrels (allowing the full force of the propellant to work) and did a lot of work with smoothbore guns firing finned darts. I can't say if that was the basis for his Iraqi proposal, but this from the Wiki:
He had already done work at McGill University on long-barreled smoothbore guns firing rockets (Martlett project) so this was probably going to derive from that. Obviously if you can send it to orbit you can land it anywhere.
A smaller 45-meter, 350 mm caliber gun was completed for testing purposes, and Bull then started work on the "real" PC-2 machine, a gun that was 150 meters long, weighed 2,100 tonnes, with a bore of one meter (39 inches). It was to be capable of placing a 2,000-kilogram projectile into orbit.
He had already done work at McGill University on long-barreled smoothbore guns firing rockets (Martlett project) so this was probably going to derive from that. Obviously if you can send it to orbit you can land it anywhere.