Quote:
Originally Posted by SethEng
Just to be picky, and to point this out before someone else does, the cannons should be 40cm, or 400mm, but more likely 406mm or 16" guns. 16" shells are pretty massive, although without knowing the exactly shell mass and velocity, we can't really be sure what kind of recoil we're dealing with exactly. 16" guns were, for those who don't know, used on 40,000+ ton battleships, with the Monster carrying half or nearly half of the amount of guns typically carried. To put it simply, the Monster's guns have a lot of boom. 
And you would definately not want to fire them unbraced in the atmosphere or while flying either in space or in the atmosphere. Especially in space where losing thrust is bad. |
Indeed. Someone else pointed the same thing out to me after I had dinner, and I screwed up my units. Each one of those has three times the diameter of an M1A2 Abrams' main gun. And there's four of them.
In contrast, the largest mobile artillery piece currently deployed by the US Military is the M109A6 Paladin... which uses a 155mm (15.5 cm) bore. Big motherfucking rounds, which can be reaction warheads... and the equivalent of an Iowa-class battleship's main guns as you pointed out. The nice thing about railguns, in theory, is that you can adjust the velocity by varying the charge used to throw the round... or have more KE involved as you can ramp up the power.
And should I point out again that the thing's braced anyhow on several struts, two of which happen to be heavily-engineered 'legs' for Destroid/Battroid mode? I'm not even going to address 'losing thrust is bad' - but that the forces here are incredibly high, and I'd want to deal with it as 'part' of a 9500t mass (like a Guantanimo-class cruiser's size) rather than as a measly 100t one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ithekro
If it used American type shells....1,900 pounds for HC or 2,700 pounds for AP...per shell depending on use. (861.8 kg or 1,225 kg)
If we are talking Japanese 16"....938 kg - 1,020 kg with 1,000 kg being more common before the war.
http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/index_weapons.htm |
They wouldn't be shells - or at least, not self-propelled ones. Also, we're not sure if the mass of that shell would be all metal for railgun use, or what the weight of a reaction warhead would be. But, even if we're going to be conservative and say that the normal 'round' for one of those is just a KE round and fairly light (less than a ton)... that's an awful lot of force there to deal with in the 'recoil'.