16-inch/50-caliber Mark 7 gun

The 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 – United States Naval Gun is the main armament of the Iowa-class battleships and was the planned main armament of the canceled .

Description

thumb|left|A cutaway of a turret mounting 16-inch guns

Due to a lack of communication during design in 1938, the Bureau of Ordnance assumed the Iowa class would use the /50 Mark 2 guns constructed for the 1920 South Dakota-class battleships and Lexington-class battlecruisers. However, the Bureau of Construction and Repair assumed that the ships would carry a compact 16-in/50 turret and designed the ships with barbettes too small to accommodate the 16-in/50 Mark 2 three-gun turret that the Bureau of Ordnance was actually working on. The lightweight 16-in/50 Mark 7 was designed to resolve this conflict.

These guns were 50 calibers long, 50 times their bore diameter with barrels long, from chamber to muzzle. Each gun weighed about without the breech, and with the breech. They fired projectiles weighing from at different muzzle velocities, depending on the projectile. When firing armor-piercing projectiles, their muzzle velocity was with a range of up to . At maximum range the projectile spent almost minutes in flight. Each turret required a crew of 79 men to operate. The turrets cost US$1.4 million each, excluding the cost of the guns. As recent as in 2022, retired Navy Admiral James G. Foggo III reiterated this myth in 2022 in a Insider Inc. Youtube video. the ships did not move sideways noticeably when a broadside was fired; this was an illusion. With the enormous mass of the vessel and the damping effect of the water around the hull, the pressure wave generated by the gunfire was felt as just a slight change in lateral velocity. The sea surface on the side of the ship to which the guns are trained is roiled by the guns' muzzle blast, which creates the illusion of motion in still photos.

The guns could be elevated from −5 degrees to +45 degrees, moving at up to 12 degrees per second. The turrets could rotate about 300 degrees at about 4 degrees per second and could be fired back beyond the beam, sometimes called firing "over the shoulder". A red stripe on the wall of each turret, inches from the railing, marked the limit of the gun's recoil as a safety warning to the turret's crew.

Complementing the 16-in/50 caliber Mark 7 gun was a fire control computer, the Ford Instrument Company Mark 8 Range Keeper. This analog computer was used to direct the fire from the battleship's big guns, taking into account factors including the speed of the targeted ship, the projectile's travel time, and air resistance. At the time the was set to begin construction, the range keepers had gained the ability to use radar data to direct fire. The results of this advance were telling: the range keeper was able to track and fire at targets at greater range and with increased accuracy, day or night. This gave the US Navy a major advantage in the latter half of WWII, as the Japanese did not develop radar or automated fire control to the level of the US Navy. With a few exceptions, such as the Japanese battleship Yamato, Japanese warships at best used basic radar sets that were not connected to fire control, still relying on optical rangefinders. Even the few Japanese warships that had radar-assisted guns did not directly link their fire control and radar, having to input the locations of targets spotted on radar into the fire control manually.

The 16"/50 caliber's advanced fire control was designed to allow it to fire accurately at its maximum range, which exceeded any opposing ship's effective firing range. However, this proved not to be possible. The US soon learned that projectile dispersion was not something fire control, no matter how advanced, could solve (this remains true: modern guns with more advanced radar cannot fire accurately from maximum range, being limited to a shorter accurate effective range). Several live-firing tests were conducted by Iowa-class battleships in which the 16"/50 displayed shockingly low hit rates from the extreme ranges, it was designed to fight from shorter range, even with its very advanced radar. Most notably USS Iowa bombarded the former battleship target Nevada over five days, with an extremely low hit rate, failing to sink the target ship, demonstrating that a ship armed with these guns could not fire accurately at an enemy ship while remaining out of range of the enemy's guns.

During their reactivation in the 1980s, the up-to-date Mark 160 Fire Control System was used to guide the fire of the Iowa-class battleship Mark 7 guns.

The Mark 8 shells gave the North Carolina, South Dakota, and Iowa classes the second-heaviest broadside of all battleship classes, even though the first two ship classes were treaty battleships, exceeded only by the Yamato-class battleships.

Each D839 propellant (smokeless powder) grain used for full charges for this gun was long, in diameter and had seven perforations, each in diameter with a web thickness range of between the perforations and the grain diameter. A maximum charge consisted of six silk bags (hence the term "bag gun"), each filled with of propellant.

1960s

The gun was also used as the basis for Project HARP, an experimental gun-based space-launch research program.

Notes

References

External links

NavWeaps – mentions several newer ammunition types
Video The 16"/50 Gun & Turret: US Navy Instructional Film
USS Missouri rolling fire
16in Barrels: Construction and Maintenance Battleship New Jersey Museum