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Post by ulzgoroth on May 20, 2020 11:54:24 GMT -6
My understanding was that dynamite guns had dynamite for the main explosive charge. They were pneumatic because metallurgy and explosive technology wouldn't permit dynamite to be used as propellant - it would shatter a gun. One was used by Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the Spanish American War and apparently functioned quite well. Its disadvantage was short range but the advantage was a lack of smoke and noise, so an enemy would not know where the bombs were coming from. Dynamite guns were abandoned as cordite was developed. No, they were pneumatic because the 'dynamite' in the shell was too shock-sensitive to be fired from a conventional gun. Pneumatic dynamite guns became a pointless notion when more stable high explosive shell-fillers became available.
I'm sure somebody at some point tried to use dynamite as a propellant, but I've not heard anything about that egregiously bad idea - high explosive is exactly what you don't want in propellant.
EDIT: The dynamite gun Roosevelt used (though not the ones on Vesuvius) used smokeless-powder charges to produce the compression for the pneumatic firing.
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Post by brygun on May 20, 2020 12:25:07 GMT -6
I just launched an airstrike against- ...a droplet of apple juice on my screen. "Um, when they return to the carrier lets skip the debrief on this one, ...or at least I will..." Ah yes the glorious squinting to ID specks of screen filth in a combat game.
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Post by dallan007 on May 20, 2020 13:13:28 GMT -6
I just launched an airstrike against- ...a droplet of apple juice on my screen. "Um, when they return to the carrier lets skip the debrief on this one, ...or at least I will..." Heard in CIC: "Should we tell them what we did or just let the CAG take the heat for it?"
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Post by rimbecano on May 20, 2020 14:08:31 GMT -6
I'll see your gunboat with one 16" gun and raise you a dynamite cruiser with THREE 15" pneumatic tubes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Vesuvius_(1888)One wonders if they named her 'Vesuvius' because of what would happen if her dynamite magazine was hit? In the RN, it had been a tradition to name bomb (mortar) and rocket vessels after volcanos. Ironically, though, in the case of Erebus and Terror, which were part of the squadron that provided "the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air" to the bombardment of Fort McHenry, there do exist a Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, but the volcanos are named after the ships in their later role as Antarctic exploration vessels. Later US practice was to name ammunition ships after volcanos. It is a further irony that both USS Mount Hood (named after a volcano) and HMS Hood (named after the guy the volcano was named after) were lost to magazine explosions in WWII.
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Post by brygun on May 20, 2020 21:07:10 GMT -6
Later US practice was to name ammunition ships after volcanos. What could possibly go wrong...
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Post by polygon on May 21, 2020 3:17:15 GMT -6
Later US practice was to name ammunition ships after volcanos. What could possibly go wrong... A better idea than naming your lightly armored battlecruiser "Invincible"!
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Post by sailortroubles on May 21, 2020 23:16:45 GMT -6
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Post by tordenskjold on May 22, 2020 4:36:08 GMT -6
Ha, I'd often like to think of Jackie Fisher's twin from a parallel dimension, who is constantly preaching that "armament is the best protection". This could be one of his favourite designs.
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Post by director on May 22, 2020 11:14:57 GMT -6
ulzgoroth - "My understanding was that dynamite guns had dynamite for the main explosive charge." As I said, the main explosive charge - the bursting charge - the bit that goes boom when it hopefully hits something owned by the enemy - was dynamite. My apologies if that was not clear. Experiments had been conducted with using dynamite as a propellant, but no gun barrel could withstand the very fast sharp explosive shock. And, of course, that would set off the dynamite in the explosive charge. Black power and smokeless powder could also set it off. So, as you say, black powder or compressed air was used to propel the shell, by which I mean EITHER black powder was used to compress the air, or air compressors in the case of 'Vesuvious', and the compressed air was used to 'fire' the shell out of the barrel. 'Vesuvius' undoubtedly would have delivered quite a punch, if it had been possible to adequately aim and hit anything. Because of their size they were fixed and the entire ship had to be turned, and the guns 'fired' - IE the shell containing the dynamite pushed out by compressed air - on the up-surge. It was impossible to hit anything more specific than a very general area, and at close range at that, and with the creation of cordite the entire class of dynamite guns was bypassed. It was an example of genius invention that almost-but-not-quite worked, and the only other thing I can think of that was like it was the steam-powered machine gun of the civil-war era.
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Post by ulzgoroth on May 22, 2020 15:21:35 GMT -6
ulzgoroth - "My understanding was that dynamite guns had dynamite for the main explosive charge." As I said, the main explosive charge - the bursting charge - the bit that goes boom when it hopefully hits something owned by the enemy - was dynamite. My apologies if that was not clear. Experiments had been conducted with using dynamite as a propellant, but no gun barrel could withstand the very fast sharp explosive shock. And, of course, that would set off the dynamite in the explosive charge. Black power and smokeless powder could also set it off. So, as you say, black powder or compressed air was used to propel the shell, by which I mean EITHER black powder was used to compress the air, or air compressors in the case of 'Vesuvious', and the compressed air was used to 'fire' the shell out of the barrel. 'Vesuvius' undoubtedly would have delivered quite a punch, if it had been possible to adequately aim and hit anything. Because of their size they were fixed and the entire ship had to be turned, and the guns 'fired' - IE the shell containing the dynamite pushed out by compressed air - on the up-surge. It was impossible to hit anything more specific than a very general area, and at close range at that, and with the creation of cordite the entire class of dynamite guns was bypassed. It was an example of genius invention that almost-but-not-quite worked, and the only other thing I can think of that was like it was the steam-powered machine gun of the civil-war era. It was clear that you knew that dynamite was in the shell, but they weren't pneumatic because dynamite didn't work as propellant but because normal propellants like black or smokeless powder didn't.
All reports I'm seeing are that the Sims-Dudley Dynamite Gun used a smokeless charge to compress air, not a black powder charge. If you have a contrary citation, please share, my sources aren't great.
Cordite entered service in 1891, well before the close of the brief era of dynamite guns. The things that made the dynamite gun concept lose its appeal were availability of other high explosives (mostly picric acid at first) that could be fired from conventional guns, and possibly improving range of said conventional guns (from both propellant and metallurgic advances) making the pneumatic launcher hopelessly outmatched.
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Post by seawolf on May 22, 2020 17:11:21 GMT -6
I want to prefix this with "Devs, please don't fix this its amazing" If you get a message saying something like Usually from ignoring tonnage limits, hit no and it makes the design legal. Example
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Post by director on May 22, 2020 18:06:28 GMT -6
ulzgoroth - I don't have a source on that ready to hand. I spent some time researching dynamite guns a few years ago and that seems to have stuck - but I could very easily be mistaken. Dynamite guns were one of the things that inventors tried hard to sell and the press got a lot of coverage from - but they were a flash in the pan, quickly and tracelessly gone.
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Post by garrisonchisholm on May 22, 2020 18:54:35 GMT -6
I want to prefix this with "Devs, please don't fix this its amazing" If you get a message saying something like Usually from ignoring tonnage limits, hit no and it makes the design legal. Example It let you BUILD that? lol ... ok, time to have 2 or 3 days of fun before Fredrik patches it.
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Post by seawolf on May 22, 2020 19:26:02 GMT -6
I want to prefix this with "Devs, please don't fix this its amazing" If you get a message saying something like Usually from ignoring tonnage limits, hit no and it makes the design legal. Example It let you BUILD that? lol ... ok, time to have 2 or 3 days of fun before Fredrik patches it. All of my weird ships in the 1900 start use it, honestly, it shouldn't be patched because its not very obvious or usable for exploit ships (those DDs have strange fuel) Additionally, it allows you to define battlecruisers under 28 knots as battlecruisers after 1920.
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Post by seawolf on May 22, 2020 19:29:40 GMT -6
I want to prefix this with "Devs, please don't fix this its amazing" If you get a message saying something like Usually from ignoring tonnage limits, hit no and it makes the design legal. Example It let you BUILD that? lol ... ok, time to have 2 or 3 days of fun before Fredrik patches it. And yes, it lets you build them all, the only restriction using this method is dock size
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