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Alchenar posted:Gunnery practice was a thing in the Age of Sail, and naval officers talking shop or writing papers would have arguments over whether you wanted to fight at range or just get yardarm to yardarm and fire broadsides faster than the other guy. The fact that those debates happened says that accuracy was a real option. But that's accuracy vs. a similar ship: fairly large and fairly slow, with a fairly predictable course. PT boats are comparatively small and vastly faster and more maneuverable. I'm reminded of the Martians in War of the Worlds: they weren't invulnerable, with artillery fire and the Thunder Child managing to kill a few tripods. But they were extremely difficult target to hit with turn-of-the-century weaponry due to their small size and speed. And that's pre-dreadnought ironclads, with powered gun turrets that can track and elevate through a wide range of angles.
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Apr 13, 2020 22:53
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Pretty sure you could arm the PT boat with nothing but equivalent cannons and it would still do really bad things to a sailing warship. The ability to move completely independent of the wind, and the obscene speed advantage would be decisive.
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Apr 13, 2020 22:58
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Oh wait I missed the context. In that case the PT boat just sits on the frigate's stern and shoots away the rudder, then bits of the rigging for fun, then demands surrender.
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Apr 13, 2020 23:15
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What do we mean by "at range" for an age of sail cannon? 250 yards? A thousand? Two thousand? My knowledge of this class of weapons is zero.
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Apr 13, 2020 23:17
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Captain von Trapp posted:What do we mean by "at range" for an age of sail cannon? 250 yards? A thousand? Two thousand? My knowledge of this class of weapons is zero. Massive number of variables here, but two skilled frigates might shoot it out at 800 yards. You could go for rigging at that range but probably not expect to do much to the hull of a ship.
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Apr 13, 2020 23:26
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The .50s and a 20mm are good out to about 2000 yards, and a 40mm can hit past 3000 yards. There's also the 37mm What's really going to mess the sailing ship up, and badly, is incendiary effects. API and I ammo is available for the .50s, and the cannons will be starting fires too. And the only thing that will save the crew if the PT goes for a rake is that the boat will be shooting at an upwards angle if they're close. I'm pretty sure the boat could rake the ship from astern at a 1000 yards with the .50s - just shoot in through the windows. There's not much to stop a .50 round other than the guns, and you'll get ricochets and fragments from hits to the guns. Even with the flintlock firing mechanisms I don't think you can lead a moving PT boat with a black powder cannon. You'd have to just shoot a lot of them at an area and hope the boat is passing through. Any hit could be really bad. Even a 12-lb ball is going right through a PT boat unless it hits an engine, and it's going to wreck that engine. To make matters worse, at range a cannonball is likely to be coming in at a downward angle and exit under water. What happens if the PT strays into range of canister rounds is going to be loud, messy, and fatal for the boat. Remember, only the Germans armored their boats at all, and even they just had armored conning towers. Everyone else was tooling around in hulls made out of half-inch plywood, with the crews almost completely exposed. Okay, now I'll put my War Thunder hat on. You can spray targets smaller than even a 65th rate with automatic fire from 20mm and .50s out to 2000 yards. They don't call them Tall Ships for nothing, they present an amazing target profile for WW2/modern automatic weapons. Just the thought of taking on such a target is making me giggle. Try PT boats in War Thunder, they're great fun.
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Apr 13, 2020 23:54
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Captain von Trapp posted:What do we mean by "at range" for an age of sail cannon? 250 yards? A thousand? Two thousand? My knowledge of this class of weapons is zero. A British 32-pounder with its maximum 10-lb powder charge (8-lbs was the norm) could physically throw a ball over 2000 yards, but at those ranges aiming at anything more specific than 'the ship' is next to impossible and the ball will have lost most of its energy when it lands. The effective range was about 1000 yards, which was generally considered the upper limit of 'gunshot range' when making action reports etc. At that range you had a chance of being able to damage the target's rigging. That becomes much more likely at about 750 yards, at which point you'll also start doing damage to the hull - not full-on splinter-shredding but enough to open up seams and split timbers. Close to 500 yards and the splinters start flying. At 300 yards a 32-pounder could easily penetrate ten inches or so of wood planking. Get to grappling/boarding distances - 50 yards and less - and that 32-lb shot is going 'clean' (apart from the thousands of splinters...) through up to four feet of solid oak. Carronades were light and short-barreled so they couldn't throw shot as far, but their lightness allowed them to be mounted up high so you could pour heavy shot onto an enemy's decks - a 24-pounder carronade had a maximum effective range of about 450 yards.
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Apr 13, 2020 23:55
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Alchenar posted:Oh wait I missed the context. In that case the PT boat just sits on the frigate's stern and shoots away the rudder, then bits of the rigging for fun, then demands surrender. This. The PT boat's crew would have to actively want to be shot at. Full speed, not caring about the wind, get up in the frigate's posterior and lay waste with nothing to fear but muskets.
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Apr 14, 2020 00:49
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Are Age of Sail cannons any good at all against a highly mobile target? My impression was that there's a fuse that has to burn down to set off the powder and launch the projectile, and the amount of time that takes is pretty variable, which would make carefully-timed shots pretty dicey. And they can't really track...do they even elevate at all? before the friction primer and the weird flintlock cannon they used a linstock. the fuse sticking out of the vent is from cowboy movies.
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Apr 14, 2020 01:05
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PeterCat posted:Was male beauty viewed that much differently during that time period?
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Apr 14, 2020 01:07
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Cythereal posted:This. The PT boat's crew would have to actively want to be shot at. Full speed, not caring about the wind, get up in the frigate's posterior and lay waste with nothing to fear but muskets. Or maybe the stern chasers, but being anywhere near the stern of the victim ship is going to be profoundly unhealthy once the .50s open up. Even being below the waterline farther forward is going to be bad once the fires take hold. We forgot the depth charges ! The PT absolutely doesn't want to get in close enough until the victim ship has been thoroughly suppressed, and by then it's probably well afire, but a depth charge will open every seam in the ship simultaneously.
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Apr 14, 2020 01:28
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HEY GUNS posted:yes. you are not not allowed to say a dude's hot. I was hoping for something less petulant
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Apr 14, 2020 01:31
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Also, the maneuverability of the PT boat is likely so high that it could easily stay at a diagonal to the man o' war where none of the cannons can really angle to get a shot off.
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Apr 14, 2020 01:31
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PeterCat posted:I was hoping for something less petulant it's not petulant, it's the truth and i had meat grease on one hand. it's completely fine to notice that a dude is hot in The Past.
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Apr 14, 2020 01:41
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Alchenar posted:Massive number of variables here, but two skilled frigates might shoot it out at 800 yards. You could go for rigging at that range but probably not expect to do much to the hull of a ship. In that case I'm going to agree with the thread consensus of "stay back and shoot it until it catches on fire". With a more modern PT boat, given the no torpedoes restriction, I'd say fire an ATGM from a kilometer out and call it a day.
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Apr 14, 2020 01:42
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Why would a PT boat even need to use guns? A single torpedo with a contact detonator would blow any wooden ship to Hell.
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Apr 14, 2020 01:46
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Why would a PT boat even need to use guns? A single torpedo with a contact detonator would blow any wooden ship to Hell. That's why I specified "no torpedos." If you start allowing 1940s explosives, a single man is enough to sink an 18th century warship.
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Apr 14, 2020 02:02
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mllaneza posted:The .50s and a 20mm are good out to about 2000 yards, and a 40mm can hit past 3000 yards. There's also the 37mm Rifle rounds will go through tree trunks up to about two feet thick pretty easily. I don't know exactly how many feet of wood a 40mm cannon will go through but it's gotta be at least ten.
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Apr 14, 2020 02:12
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How did they do the superthick hulls? Big trees? Multiple layers?
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Apr 14, 2020 02:12
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Pryor on Fire posted:Rifle rounds will go through tree trunks up to about two feet thick pretty easily. I don't know exactly how many feet of wood a 40mm cannon will go through but it's gotta be at least ten. There's a reason why iron-clad hulls pretty much instantly obsoleted old wooden hulls. Some of the ships of the line had rather massively thick wooden sides and the iron plating start to replace them (well, supplement as much as replace) with a far bigger savings in total bulk. Of course the guns got better too so the iron had to get thicker, and then steel was incorporated, and then you had cemented armor, and then...
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Apr 14, 2020 03:20
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Why would a PT boat even need to use guns? A single torpedo with a contact detonator would blow any wooden ship to Hell. If it's a pre-1943 torpedo then there's a good chance the torpedo goers under the target, goes cluck and fails to do anything, or the gyro goes crazy and sinks the PT boat.
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Apr 14, 2020 03:46
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One of the targets PT boats were used for were shallow draft barges and landing craft, which tended not to set off torpedoes. They were used against all sorts of soft shoreline and littoral targets, though, and once they started getting upgunned to 40mm they were used in an infantry fire support role on top of everything else. If you've got the production capacity to crank them out and the logistics to keep them out at the end of your supply chain, it gives your enemies a tremendous headache to have a bunch of fast cannon armed craft out there chewing up anything that's not a real warship.
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Apr 14, 2020 03:57
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Were the 40s on PT boats high velocity cannon designed to penetrate armour, or relatively low velocity HE lobbers?
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Apr 14, 2020 04:02
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Laughing at the PT boat desperately running away not from the enemy but it's own weapons
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Apr 14, 2020 04:08
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Comstar posted:If it's a pre-1943 torpedo then there's a good chance the torpedo goers under the target, goes cluck and fails to do anything, or the gyro goes crazy and sinks the PT boat. Jokes about inferior American torpedo impact triggers aside, PT boats are faster than torpedoes so at the very least a self-kill should be out of the question.
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Apr 14, 2020 04:09
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Don't torpedoes sometimes either accidentally get armed or don't properly launch, leaving a live explosive to deal with? At least I read about that happening with submarines.
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Apr 14, 2020 04:12
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Jokes about inferior American torpedo impact triggers aside, PT boats are faster than torpedoes so at the very least a self-kill should be out of the question. They'll make it back to base and head to the barracks. They'll open the door and the torpedo will be waiting for them
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Apr 14, 2020 04:26
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PeterCat posted:In 1519, when Henry VIII was just twenty-eight years of age, the Venetian Ambassador Sebastian Giustinian visited the English court. He had the honour of seeing Henry VIII and recorded that he was "extremely handsome; nature could not have done more for him. He had a beard which looks like gold and a complexion as delicate and far as a woman's" (Fraser, p. 66). He also stated that it was the "prettiest thing in the world to see the King playing tennis, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture". This may or may not have been embellished for political reasons, but it still meant this was okay. Nobody was going into gay panic reading it
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Apr 14, 2020 04:26
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"that's impossible, unfeasible and all around silly" you might say. What, like a time travelling PT boat is more likely?
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Apr 14, 2020 04:27
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maybe its a Victorian ship from Victoria: 4th Generation war regressing back in time to the pure days of sailing ships.
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Apr 14, 2020 04:35
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:This may or may not have been embellished for political reasons, but it still meant this was okay. Nobody was going into gay panic reading it
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Apr 14, 2020 04:37
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The Lone Badger posted:Were the 40s on PT boats high velocity cannon designed to penetrate armour, or relatively low velocity HE lobbers? US PTs used Bofors 40mm AA guns, L60 caliber and very high velocity. The British used a mix of the Bofors and their domestic 2 lbr, with the Bofors being the better gun. The Germans topped out at their 37mm AT gun in a QF mounting. The Lone Badger posted:How did they do the superthick hulls? Big trees? Multiple layers? Ideally big trees, but multiple layers if supplies were short of the good stuff or too expensive for a cheap warship. They went so far as to bind trees so that branches would grow at just the right angle to make a Y-joint with the trunk when fully grown. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Apr 14, 2020 |
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Apr 14, 2020 04:44
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Chillyrabbit posted:maybe its a Victorian ship from Victoria: 4th Generation war regressing back in time to the pure days of sailing ships. don't remind me of that book
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Apr 14, 2020 08:34
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mllaneza posted:US PTs used Bofors 40mm AA guns, L60 caliber and very high velocity. The British used a mix of the Bofors and their domestic 2 lbr, with the Bofors being the better gun. The Germans topped out at their 37mm AT gun in a QF mounting. The RN used no less than five 40mm guns on its light craft. The 2-pdr Mk VIII was the famous 'pom-pom', basically a Vickers/Maxim MG scaled up to 40mm calibre. It fired a slightly heavier shell than the Bofors, but had a lower rate of fire and muzzle velocity. The Mk XI and XII were developed from the sub-calibre guns used for target practice on destroyers. These guns were mainly used on the smaller, slower Harbour Defence Motor Launches. The Mk XI had a short barrel and was used to fire case rounds, while the Mk XII was a more versatile weapon. They were low-velocity guns, especially the Mk XI, and to inaccurate to use at ranges over 1,500 yards. The last 2-pdr gun used was the Mk XIV, a semi-automatic weapon designed by Rolls-Royce. Pressed into service before it was fully ready, it was poorly balanced and hard to use in a seaway, but had a fair rate of fire. Details on the ammunition are scarce, but I think it fired the same rounds as the Mk VIII. Finally, we have the 40mm Bofors gun. The RN also had a number of heavier weapons. Old 3 and 6 pounder Hotchkiss guns, developed in the 1880s, and still in service as saluting guns, were used on a significant number of gunboats. While obsolete, they were fairly effective HE chuckers. The Army's 6-pdr AT gun was also used, when fitted with the Molins auto-loader also used on the Mosquito. The propellant charge was reduced to limit flash, and only HE shells were carried. With a rate of fire up to 40 rounds a minute and a heavy shell, it was a very effective weapon. Towards the end of the war, they were developing a light 4.5in gun, though this didn't enter service until after the war.
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Apr 14, 2020 08:57
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HEY GUNS posted:absolutely everyone is ok with saying a good looking dude looks good. Also, no one gives a poo poo about sexual violence against women, so "drat, he's hot so I'll let him get away with it" isn't really an issue.
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Apr 14, 2020 09:23
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I've used all of those extra, lovely, 40mm guns in WT, and I've been very diligent about killing the brain cells that remember the experience. Thank you.
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Apr 14, 2020 09:23
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Go into hypnosis, and tell us how it was. It's for science 
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Apr 14, 2020 10:12
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Also, no one gives a poo poo about sexual violence against women, so "drat, he's hot so I'll let him get away with it" isn't really an issue. I felt like it was more "Ah, yeah, I can see why my daughter let you do that now. Pretty understandable really."
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Apr 14, 2020 10:17
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:the Thunder Child managing to kill a few tripods. But they were extremely difficult target to hit with turn-of-the-century weaponry due to their small size and speed. And that's pre-dreadnought ironclads, with powered gun turrets that can track and elevate through a wide range of angles. Actually Thunder Child was one of these, more or less, not a battleship (and not armed with battleship-sized guns).
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Apr 14, 2020 11:55
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feedmegin posted:Actually Thunder Child was one of these, more or less, not a battleship (and not armed with battleship-sized guns). Actually Actually it's complicated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQBund8uLmo
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Apr 14, 2020 13:35
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