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Nebakenezzer posted:People with the boat-smarts can say more about age of sail frigates. Post ww2, frigate became the name of essentially the standard fighting ship class, because it did almost everything all the old ship classes did with precision munitions and advanced sensors. Age of Sail frigates are built for speed and flexibility. The British liked theirs heavily armed as well with one or two gun decks. Over time they keep adding more and more sails and guns to theirs. So a British frigate is going to be heavily armed and fast. They aren't mean to go toe to toe with bigger ships but they can ruin the day of pretty much anything smaller. And they tend to be built as kind of jack of all trades for the frigate role. The Dutch liked theirs lean and light. They weren't ever going to outgun a British built ship, but they could often outrun them. The French designed for endurance. Almost as fast as the Dutch but they tended to be less seaworthy, but with much greater endurance. They were built to deploy out to French colonies with less support expected. Spanish Frigates tended to be the slowest and most heavily armed, and their role tended to be a bit more specialized than other countries. Focusing on convoy escort much more than other roles. All frigates would be used in that role but the Spanish focused on it. And the frigate during the age of sail does pretty much everything that isn't a sailing in a line shooting at the enemies line. You use them for scouting, harassing enemy shipping, protecting shipping, customs duties, communications relays during battle, and sometimes showing the flag. No navy ever felt they had enough of them, and they tended to have the best crews. A good posting for a frigate could make excellent prize money and they tended to be the ships least likely to be stood down during peace time.
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Dec 7, 2020 06:57
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White Coke posted:What does endurance mean in this context? More space to store wine? Travel distance. More storage space for consumables. Spare wood and so forth. Basically French ships were designed to spend longer away from port. Beardless posted:I've always read that the American frigates, the USS Constitution and her sister ships, were built to be bigger and more heavily armed than anyone else's frigates. This is true. But I didn't really include us because when it comes to age of sail, we don't really matter from a naval perspective. In 1812 we have some early successes, and yes the HMS Guerriere did see cannonballs bounce off the USS Constitution. And the Essex does pretty well for itself before captured. But at that point the Royal Navy turns its attention to the US Navy, and outside of battles on the Great Lakes the bulk of the US Navy spends the war blockaded in. During the Age of Sail the American merchant marine matters but the US Navy isn't a big deal on the world stage. But American frigates did tend to be heavier gunned and of a more sturdy build. Mostly because we had access to more old growth forests. HEY GUNS posted:The entire spanish economy runs on massive convoys and they are very serious about it. It's in Rahn Phllips' books: Well yes. French, English and Dutch ships could be full of all manner of cargo. If you catch a Dutch merchant ship full of spices then you will do well. But if you catch a ship full of timber or cotton, you don't do as well. So raiding them is a crapshoot. But Spanish galleons are full of gold or silver*. However gold and silver is heavy and bulky. So Spanish merchant shipping is designed to deal with this. By being big, fat, and slow. Which is fine because it just means you can fill them with more gold and silver. So yes, Spain designs their frigates with protecting those convoys in mind. Because their shipping is super high value, done in massive quantities and are slow as poo poo. If your life goal is prize money than a Spanish treasure convoy is the biggest possible attractive nuisance to you. So they optimize for protecting them. And they were good at it. The only person to take a treasure fleet was Piet Hein. It had enough silver to gently caress with international silver prices. I assume the sailors with him never ever sobered up again. Drake's famous gold and silver hauls came from raiding ports, not the treasure fleets. In the end though frigates change hands a lot. And the Spanish aren't going to turn down a Dutch frigate or vice versa. Just because no one ever has enough of them. *Generally gold and silver to Spain. Sometimes other high value cargo. On the way back it would be trade goods from Spain. But every sailor account from the period I read seems to fixate on the gold and silver.
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Dec 7, 2020 09:40
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zoux posted:The key thing to understand about cavalry tactics in the late middle ages through the napoleonic era is that: the British were bad at it. Except Cromwell and he overthrew the monarchy, for a bit. WWII with the Battle of Krasnobrod?
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Dec 9, 2020 00:01
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LingcodKilla posted:I’m currently serving with a master chief who personally met the incoming sec def who’s a giant himself and said that’s he’s at least 6’6”. Finally, the Air Force's giant anime swords will have someone who can wield them.
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Dec 9, 2020 15:46
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Something fitting Rogue Squadron might be the Flying Tiger's Defense of Rangoon. Or their actions over Thailand and Burma. Their support of the Chinese at the Salween River is perfect if you want to recreate that trench run feel since it's a in a mile deep gorge. It involves repeatedly attacking a pontoon bridge among other things.
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Dec 11, 2020 08:50
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Not steel yet, as the Bessemer process had been proven but not operationalized. But there were improvements in metallurgy and processes with cast and wrought iron. The Confederates managed to produce a number of knock off Parrott rifles. The basic tech behind them isn't complex from a metallurgy perspective but they are a bit more complex than a bronze gun. The basic idea is you surround the breach with wrought iron which is stronger than cast. Since that is where most of the pressure pushing on the barrel is, by strengthening just that area it's less prone to explode in a way the crew wouldn't like. By all accounts, the Southern knock offs were more prone to barrels bursting. But the upside to them is that they were pretty cheap to make. Union producers were making them for around $180 a gun vs the $600 a 12 pounder cost. You get better accuracy with the Parrott but it's canister is less effective. Where the South really struggled was trying to make knock offs of the 3 inch Ordnance gun. One of the big issues with using wrought iron is that when you use a hammer to form it, you don't get uniform strength. So the weak bits eventually crack. Sometimes violently. So with the 3 inch Ordnance gun, what Griffen figured out, and what Reeves improved was, that if you take a core of wrought iron and then wrap bars (later sheets) around it, you can then reheat the whole thing and weld it together. That gets a much more uniform strength. The part the South struggled with was the next bit. Where you basically drill out the center. And all of the wrought iron core were drilled out. The north struggled with it as well. The original Griffen guns only had one good barrel for every three attempts. They got it up to 60% but it was Reeve's variation that got much high production results. The accounts I've read seem to indicate that the Parrott rifles were considered slightly more accurate but the 3 inch Ordnance guns were much more desirable because they didn't blow up.
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Dec 22, 2020 19:25
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oXDemosthenesXo posted:Are there any reenactments that fire actual shot and not just powder charges? I really want to see this now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iy7fSxFpAA
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Dec 23, 2020 04:53
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Xiahou Dun posted:O I know about gyrojects. I specifically meant like a literally normal bullet but with fins in a smoothbore. Sorry if I was unclear. Finned shells exist for shotguns. Some are intended as less than lethal rounds for crowd control. And there some designed for smooth bore hunting. The ACR program had some entries that used flechettes but I believe guns firing them weren't smooth bore. I could be wrong, someone in TFR likely knows better. The issue they found from testing flechettes was that at long range they tended to be hosed by wind. HEAT rounds weigh a lot more so the wind impacts tend to be less. But it's an idea that pops up in military weapon designs periodically.
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Dec 24, 2020 04:40
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PeterCat posted:What are people's thoughts on the Time Life WWII series? For me it's more nostalgia and I'm sure it's just the popular version of the war in the mid 70s,vut I'm still tempted to get a set. An excellent collection of wartime photography. The other bits are eh.
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Dec 25, 2020 03:30
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The HMS Captain wasn't quite a Vasa like boondoggle. It was an early ship with masts and turrets. But she ended up pretty overweight, and had a freeboard of six feet, six inches. Which is low. And her center of gravity was pretty high. The whole building process was a poo poo show. The Admiralty didn't want Coles' design. They cancelled it, he complained till it got uncancelled. During the design process it a bunch of people pointed out some concerns about the freeboard and the amount of canvas it would need. Which was a concern when you're firing big guns near canvas, because it tends to gently caress it up. Coles got sick during the actual build process and the design went from 6,960 lt to 7,767 lt. Which caused the 8' freeboard to drop to 6'6" It was launched in March of 1869. Commissioned in April of 1870. It sank in September of 1870. It ran into a gale where the low freeboard and the high center of gravity combined to capsize it during a gale, killing most of it's crew.
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Dec 31, 2020 03:22
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Cessna posted:I like the T-34 v. Panther duel on the same bridge where Harry Potter defeated Voldemort. The tank hidden in the building was a nice touch. Also I am fairly sure that hiding a tank in a pile of hay results in a tank covered in rapidly burning hay. Hay will burn if you look at it funny.
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Jan 21, 2021 22:46
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Nebakenezzer posted:WTF, why? It's not like anybody who's an actual threat to the nation of China can't get that info anyway. Some of it is for military stuff, and some of it is to make life hard for journalists, and some of it is hide things they'd rather not have people discussing internally. For instance, internment camps for Uighurs and other Muslims are all covered under this policy. If you try to pull up their locations in Baidu, you get blank tile squares. The value of this is if the PRC is saying that these camps are vocational training centers, and the tile square doesn't conflict with that. Where as if you can see the overhead satellite view, you see things like a concrete wall enclosing the facility. Along with guard towers, and a heavily fortified gate. But by making access to that info harder, it makes it easier to sell the lie internally.
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Jan 22, 2021 21:20
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Is there a good book on the chaos of 1919-20 in Germany with freikorps vs socialists and stuff? The Vanquished by Robert Gerwarth covers it. The book as a whole is more about the various conflicts happening through out Europe but it does cover the conflicts with the freikorps in Germany and other countries.
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Jan 26, 2021 17:44
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Cyrano4747 posted:The benefit there is the animal fat they cram into it (it’s not just veggies) and the packaging. Easy to pack a hundred thousand of those into boxes and hand one out to each soldier. Way easier than sacks of dried carrots or whatever and handing out handfuls. A couple of ways. Sawdust was brought up earlier, along with the usual ways of short changing the military by substituting inferior quality items. It's also an early industrial process, so there were some problems with random bits of metal ending up in lots. Sometimes it was caught, sometimes not so much. I've heard of at least one incident with powdered glass being found by Union Army inspectors. And while it doesn't really rot, it is highly attractive still to the usual insects that like food stuffs. The one issue that seems to be unique to ACW desiccated veggies was a film that would form that was considered inedible when you boiled them or re-hydrated them. I'm not sure if it was starches or fat or some other sort of preservative.
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Feb 11, 2021 00:13
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Tulip posted:The main thing I've gotten from the uboat chat is consonant from what I got from german helmet chat and german uniform chat and german tank production chat, which is that Germany pre-Cold War had not made a full conversion to assembly lines and mechanized production in nearly any field, and were reliant on artisans and skilled workshop production techniques to do what the US and USSR were doing with assembly lines. A lot of serial rather than parallel production, and maybe more importantly, they can't really count on any particular element of the construction meeting the same spec reliably. So the engineers just design the best thing they can think of and hope the workers do good enough instead of knowing with some clarity how precise/strong they can expect every weld/seam/drill to be. Is this an inaccurate impression? This is very true. If you look at German tank building factories, you'll see they are industrialized, but they aren't really set up for assembly line work. You'll also won't see nearly as much hard tooling, instead more generalized tooling. Combine this with the Wehrmacht constantly tweaking little poo poo, you end up with tons of tiny little variations. So for these six tanks, the commander's rain cover is here. On the next six it's over ever so slightly. Which does require being communicated to everyone building. So you take smaller workshop style assembly, combine it with a customer who isn't price sensitive but will not stop tweaking poo poo, and throw in the odd bit of supply interruptions due to needing to repair the rail lines...and yeah German production for a lot of stuff is a poo poo show.
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Feb 19, 2021 00:22
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Raenir Salazar posted:IIRC there were attempts at introducing "Fordism" to German factories during and before the war; iirc it was mentioned in the thread in the previous iteration that you'd have factory owners and so on bragging to Hitler about how much like Ford they managed to make their factories, so it wasn't a totally unknown thing either. They kinda got it and kinda didn't. Like for instance the use of hard tooling. The German factory owners saw that Ford was using machining to produce parts so they did. Without understand that Ford tended to have lots of dedicated tooling. The use of dedicated tooling dropped the skill level the worker needed dramatically. The trade off for it is that it's more capital intensive. General tooling can be set up to make lots of parts with a skilled machinist but it's slower. But cheaper. However, the Wehrmacht withheld contracts from companies that used heavy amounts of hard tooling. Because they wanted flexibility and hard tooling doesn't give you that. Generalized tooling does. So the Wehrmacht got it's way. And one of the things that they are consistent with they are the nightmare customer. Too much money to ignore, way to willing to throw their weight around, and having complete control of the specs. Quite a lot of German vehicle factories were using stand methods to make tanks rather than assembly lines. So basically each tank is built in place by a single team. Again, this ups the skill level required for the workers. This is how a lot of naval and aviation stuff is built even now, but for tanks or ground vehicles it's sub optimal. It's slower because you have a team remembering multiple tasks. And the Wehrmacht go apeshit in terms of tweaking. One of the things that made the Model T work, is that once you get to the assembly line ones, there isn't much variation. Same with the Model As. You have the core chassis doing a lot of different roles but once the model for that role is made, it doesn't change a hell of a lot. This isn't something you can say about a lot of German fighting vehicles. It's a bit like Agile is to modern management. Lots of companies saying they are implementing it but not really understanding it. And a lot of it is management saying "We're doing something! See! We add value!". Comstar posted:Was it really that different in the variations of everyone else except the US? I know I read a Russian tank commander (on here?) commenting on how every single T-34 factory would have minor variations that must have made parts replacement a nightmare (or not worth worrying about because the tank has a life expectancy less than it would be for the parts being needed). My understanding is the Soviets tinkered a lot but they were trending toward simplification verses the Germans getting just generally fiddly. The Germans did make design changes for simplification but they also did stuff like moving tool holders. As for building, the French are a lot like the Germans. Smaller factories, more skilled workers, with some of their automobile factories having assembly lines, closer to Olds model of them than the advancements Ford made. I haven't ever looked at Italy but given their production numbers, I am guessing they were lagging behind the French and Germans. The Soviets are very Fordist however. During the 30's they made a huge industrialization push. And they bring in Albert Kahn's firm to design a lot of their new factories. So if you cleaned them up, you'll see a lot of commonality between Soviet tank factories and American ones. My understanding is that Soviet factories tended to be more vertically integrated rather than the horizontal integration you'd see in American factories. But Ensign Expendable will know more about that than I.
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Feb 19, 2021 04:21
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SerCypher posted:Pretty sure US Navy ships were centrally designed too though. At least destroyers and up. It was handled by the US Navy Bureau of Ships. Just before the war, you had two bureaus but they were merged into BuShips and they did the specifications and designs. Also all of the project management bits. Some designs like the Casablanca class escort carriers would have some hybridized design with the US Navy and the Kaiser Shipyards discussing how to make the designs using as much pre-fab and existing designs as possible. But the bulk of ships built during the war were done with BuShips designs. Letting every shipyard do their own thing would become a nightmare quickly.
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Feb 25, 2021 00:17
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xthetenth posted:I might've gotten a bit in depth into how "combat reformer" types see tanks and defense analysis and how real analysts look at tank engagements in LatwPIAT's lovely phoenix command king tiger vs abrams thread (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3959659&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1), should I straight up cross-post it here? I've got a rundown of how Mike Sparks' fursona (may or may not actually be him) sees tanks, the much more insane view of Pierre Sprey (yes, more insane than Mike Sparks which should tell you something) and then a bunch of the guts from a 1950s US military paper on combat experiences of armor in WWII. It's a lot of words, mind. Pierre Sprey's current gigs are record producer and seller of audiophile poo poo. As a record producer he fixates on accurate reproduction of live music and gently caress any concepts of post production. The man has a certain amount of consistency.
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Mar 2, 2021 05:22
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Night10194 posted:Rule the Waves 2 adding in a cowardly rule of 'you can only have up to 20 primary guns on a BB/BC' to prevent you from having superfiring main guns over wing turrets and fielding a BC with 32 11 inch cannons will live in infamy. I'll throw out the USS Vesuvius. A Dynamite Gun Cruiser. The only one of her class. She had three 15 inch guns that were fixed in the front part of the ship. They also had a fixed elevation of 16 degrees. The Dynamite Gun designation came from the shell it fired. It was a slightly less shock sensitive version of dynamite. It was not however less shock sensitive enough to be fired in a traditional fashion. Instead it was air powered. A bit like the world's most hosed up BB gun. A full shell of 550 lbs of explosive had a range of a bout a mile. Dropping the shell to 220 lbs of explosive could push that to a bit over 2 miles. When you combined the range with having manually steer the ship to aim, it wasn't considered a success. I have to imagine if they managed to get into range to fire on a protected or armored cruiser, it would gently caress up it's day but the other cruisers would have almost ten times the range. It's guns were fired in anger during the Spanish-American war. It was used to bombard Santiago Cuba because it's guns were very quiet compared other naval guns. And the shells were pretty heavy. Apparently the Spanish found the combination unpleasant.
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Mar 3, 2021 04:50
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Gaius Marius posted:Wait did the ramming ships not get mentioned yer, like the HMS Polyphemus. Some insane brit decides to go back to Ancient warfare and arm modern ships with rams, pure lunacy. Most famously depicted owning some martians at the end of War of the Worlds. The Polyphemus was primarily a torpedo ship. The ram was a secondary weapon, more a function of not really knowing how this whole torpedo thing would work out. So the designers opted to keep the spar torpedo concept in place. Torpedo Rams as a class tended to be based around the idea of sneaking into ports, firing a bunch of torpedoes at ships at anchor and run away. The design that this calls for shares a lot of stuff with early submarines. You want it be kinda stealthy so you have a very low freeboard, which makes it less likely to stand out. To pass in front of something and have an obvious silhouette at night. And with torpedoes as your primary weapon, then you can go very low in the water. The British went to more of the extreme with this than the Americans did. The optimized for stealth over firepower. The Intrepid and Alarm both had more naval guns, although they kept the spar torpedo as well. The idea behind keeping the torpedo ram is to make them a credible threat to any vessel that might impede their escape. The Admiralty knows the spar torpedo idea works. It's not ideal, and the automotive torpedo is probably gonna be a way better weapon but no one has proved that yet.
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Mar 3, 2021 08:38
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Milo and POTUS posted:How effective was commerce raiding in the age of sail compared to later Fairly effective. During the First Anglo-Dutch War, the English captured close to 1000 ships. The War of Austrian Succession saw almost 7000 ships from both sides taken as prizes or sunk.
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Mar 24, 2021 19:16
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Nothingtoseehere posted:America joining the war is the big "what if" for WW1. Without the guarantee of American manpower, lots of stuff changes. I tend to find the most fun what if is what happens to the world if the Ottoman Empire ends up sitting out the war.
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Apr 2, 2021 19:31
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Milo and POTUS posted:Anyone know anything about the "artillery boats" in the caspian, or the caspian flotilla in general I guess They are designed for work on rivers, lakes and seas, and were designed to fight other small boats and people on land. They have a turret from a PT76B, some rocket launchers and 30mm machine guns. It's an evolution of artillery boats that were used in WWII. But made by the Navy and designed more for port defense.
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May 20, 2021 18:20
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Milo and POTUS posted:Isn't a 30mm firmly in the autocannon territory I double checked, and it's actually a grenade launcher. The machine gun is 7.62mm. It's basically a very upgunned river boat. Cessna posted:
I met him a couple of times at book signings as a pre-teen, and he was a huge dick. You'd wait in line, put your book in a pile, he would do a generic signature to books and you'd pick up a copy from the pile of signed books. We were warned to not interact with him. When I was older, I did my retail time working in bookstores. And not one of the authors I did a signing with was remotely near that level of dick. Even the ones who were going hard on the stereotype of being very introverted generally made an effort to be social.
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May 21, 2021 19:21
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Milo and POTUS posted:I mean I figured about as much. I also figured the Caspian was pretty busy with waves and crap. There's a few vids of people surfiing it Yeah, I imagine that any day that would make for good surfing would be a loving nightmare to take those out into the sea. This is purely speculation but unless it's a super calm period, I imagine they hug the shore when moving around the Caspian.
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May 22, 2021 00:48
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ChubbyChecker posted:How much did an ordinary seaman get prize money from those battles? It depends on the Navy and when. Early on the RN paid a flat rate per ton to ordinary seamen. Later on it would be 3/8ths of the prize money divided among ordinary seamen. One of the richer hauls ended up with ~480 pounds per seaman. I'd have to look it up but that would be 20ish years of pay. But that's an extreme outlier. At various points there was a gun rate for the RN as well. Which was a bonus based on sinking other vessels.
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May 25, 2021 20:33
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Milo and POTUS posted:This lead me down a wikihole that lead me to discover gunboats aren't just "a boat/ship with guns" but a particular role of boat and ship. With guns. Pretty neat! I'd put it in with gunboats, but maybe with an asterisk. The swiftboats were generally intended for COIN. So they tended to optimize a bit more for speed over firepower. Unlike the Russian artillery boats, they weren't intended to deal with armor at all. They were to harass troop movements along the river and act as a patrol craft. I can see someone arguing that they are too lightly armed for shore bombardment, although some had an 81mm mortar.
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May 25, 2021 22:50
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Milo and POTUS posted:They also had those rad rear end automatic grenade launchers right? Wouldn't they mostly be fighting an infantry force? Not going to crack a bunker with it but i wouldn't want to be even in a sandbagged hut I believe usually but from what I've seen the swiftboats tended to have a pretty wide variety of weapons. And tended to be customized a bit more than the Navy would be happy with.
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May 25, 2021 23:12
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Oh this isn't about the torpedo doing torpedo stuff. I'm running the assumption the torpedo wasn't going to detonate anyways. I was pondering what a 2,200 pound dead weight of a useless torpedo could do falling out of the sky on top of the ship. Make one hell of a 'BONG!'.
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Jun 6, 2021 04:13
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Dick Bong was a fighter pilot though. I always wonder if him and Dick Best ever met up.
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Jun 6, 2021 04:34
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VostokProgram posted:Hello Milhist thread. Is there anything I can read, or watch, or look at, to get a sense of how a "front line" in war actually looks? On a map it's just a line but obviously the troops aren't standing shoulder to shoulder in a big wall across the front. There there a particular war you have interest in? Different wars and even different theaters in a war may result in different experiences. If you're trying to get a feel for the day to day experience of war, then memoirs will be the way to go. Poilu is a thread favorite. There are collections like The Unwomanly Face of War which is about the experience of Soviet women serving on the front lines in WWII. Generation Kill was written by a reported embedded with a Marine unit during the invasion of Iraq.
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Jun 6, 2021 20:09
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VostokProgram posted:I was wondering in the context of the eastern front of ww2. Others can probably give much better recommendations but you're looking for what was it like 800 Days on the Eastern Front and The Unwomanly Face of War should give an idea of what the Soviet experience is.
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Jun 7, 2021 00:48
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'd pay to see a well done mini-series about Dumas. That would be pretty baller. But there is probably enough for multiple seasons with him. I would also enjoy the rage it would provoke in certain people.
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Jun 7, 2021 19:06
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everydayfalls posted:Honest question, why would you want to keep the extra mass around? There was tremendous demand for copper during the war, and lots of shell casings (mostly naval but some small arms and heavier guns) ended up as pennies. And why give free brass to the Germans?
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Jun 13, 2021 23:02
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human garbage bag posted:I have a theory that wars would be much less frequent if the soldiers knew the real casualty rate. I'm looking for evidence for this theory with records of soldiers not knowing the casualty rate in various wars. I know that in the end of WW1 the french soldiers refused to fight because they found out the casualty rate. No one knows the real casualty rates for anything but very modern wars and even then numbers can be iffy. But lets say hypothetically you knew the next war would have a 53% casualty rate. You're asking young men between 16 and 24 to do an accurate assessment of risk. People in general are bad at it but that group tends to be super loving bad at it. The schadenfreude thread can produce hours of amusing evidence of this. The OSHA thread can produce hours of much less amusing and much more horrifying evidence of this. Your assumption here is that with accurate information, people will produce good risk assessment. They don't.
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Jun 14, 2021 23:05
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Alchenar posted:Dude be brave, he has bans for 'bad posting' you can can just do this one. Whaling was a big gamble. If the trip went well you could get a big payday. But contracts for whaling ships generally payed on net profits with an advance prior to sailing. So it wasn't unknown for whaling crews to end up in debt after a really bad voyage.
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Jun 15, 2021 15:52
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MikeCrotch posted:I've only ever had it as syrup you can make "coffee" drinks from, just takes like regular coffee syrup tbh. I don't know what it tastes like if you try and make a regular cup of coffee from it though. Chicory is bad. When I was working with an archivist, he insisted on the blackest, most bitter coffee you can brew. Like you could add Starbucks levels of sugar and it would be bitter and burnt. Chicory was worse. And lacked caffeine.
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Jun 16, 2021 19:20
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Milo and POTUS posted:What would you be shooting out of a swivel gun? Musket balls, pistol balls? Would pistol balls be smaller I assume? How many probably? Buckshot? Langridge in an emergency? Generally grape shot. They were anti-personal weapons, for clearing decks and or gun crews. Sometimes you'd see gunners using round shot if they were close enough to engage gun crews. With the hopes the bigger rounds might cause a gunpowder explosion. I don't recall seeing any records of this actually happening, and it may be a sailor's tale.
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Jul 20, 2021 23:44
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Cyrano4747 posted:If they were shooting small caliber (relative to deck guns) round shot in the hopes of taking out guns/crews I’d expect it would have been in hopes of un-seating an enemy gun from its carriage. It's been a long time, and the sources were second hand accounts of sailors. It is entirely plausible that it's a bullshit sailor's story or a tremendous level of optimism. Or an alcohol infused dream.
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Jul 21, 2021 01:58
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The Lone Badger posted:I thought a swivel gun was sized to take a single grape-shot ball, which to it was effectively round-shot. If firing a grape-shot-like cluster of balls the individual balls would be musket sized, like a full-sized gun would load as canister. The cargo manifest for the owner's records listed grape shot and round shot for it separately. It maybe that it's grape shot was more of a canister shot and they did something stupid with naming.
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Jul 21, 2021 18:06
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