I'm guessing the 5-10 hour lifespan was due to the jet engines of the era primarily.

That matches what I have read.

There's no way around pilot quality. The Big Week was so hard on the Luftwaffe because they lost 400 pilots. The airframes could be replaced. Aircraft production increased virtually to the end of the war. Without fuel, though, the new pilots couldn't get into the air to learn their new profession. Hitting fuel production was a shrewd move on the part of the Allies. The Komet, with its unique fuel requirements and stupendous performance, might have accomplished something significant if they had overcome the hazards of using said fuel and had been able to get a significant number of them operational.

True! The F2A Buffalo was roundly damned by the RAF, RAAF, Navy and Marine pilots as combat ineffective...yet the Finns loved the aircraft and actually had several aces who perferred to fly that aircraft.

Kind of like the USAAF's experiences with the P39 Airacobra - didn't do well at altitude in the Pacific theater so they lend-leased as many as possible to the Soviets...who promptly used it at 0-15k/ft and proceeded to blast the crap out of the Nazis with it. They loved the Airacobra!

More really bad weapons, let's talk (more) really bad aircraft (production only). The F-4K. The British (like us) have occasionally a case of "not built here" myopia so with their F4 purchase they insisted on the higher-performing Rolls-Royce Spey engines rather than the ol' smoky J79s. Better engines! Higher performing!

...except the Spey engines had to be modified to such an extent to fit in the Phantom that any design advantages were lost, and as a result they were only as good as (some say inferior) to the Phantom's...

Or how about the Gutless Cutlass? The F7-U was a terrible aircraft that served for a tiny, tiny amount of time - despite 300+ being built. Let's see...horrible roll characteristics, such anemic engines that it's takeoff AOA required a huge front wheel strut that was apparently made from balsa wood: rough landings (you know, the kind every landing on a carrier deck is) would smash the oleos into their own telescoping length...on the Cutlass this would and did typically break the entire assy.

Still, it was the first guided-missile armed Navy plane, and responsible for several kills (...of its own pilots...)

The A-5 Vigilante. Okay, this one is a 50/50. The RA5 Viggie was a decent dedicated recon platform. Problem was when everything on a carrier comes at a premium (fuel, replacement parts, berthing for pilots, space to park the A/C either on deck or beneath) the idea of a dedicated recon-only bird becomes problematic. But once converted to Recon duty the Viggie wasn't that bad. Where it sucked was its original role as a dash nuclear strike fighter (hence the "A") - shockwaves would form behind the aircraft when it would drop its ordinance in a high-altitude vertical drop-and-dash laydown attack that would (and in tests, did!) bring the bomb along behind the plane. That's right - the test articles would just sort of bob along behind the airplane for a distressingly long amount of time. On occasion, some bobbed into the actual aircraft, damaging it.

While in the event of a nuclear war there'd be all kinds of horrible things to worry about, finding out the nuke you just dropped out of your aircraft was floating along behind you would really take the starch out of your shorts...

The F5! Now...let's be fair, in terms of "MiG-21, only better" the F5 actually is a decent aircraft. But poor Northrop can never, ever catch a break, ever when it comes to building military a/c. A descendent of the T38 Talon, and cousin of the F18 family, the F5(a/b/c/d/e/g) was an anemic, day-only, Mk. 1 eyeballs only aircraft. A Honda Civic DX when the USAF was in to buying Cadillac El Dorados. Northrop shopped it around and found some customers - Iran, Pakistan, Kenya, S. Vietnam (which meant that shortly thereafter, North Vietnam became a operator, although not for long as they quickly ran out of parts)...Then came the F20 (in reality, the "F5-II"). They put it up against the F16. The USAF wasn't buying. And because the USAF wasn't buying...nobody was buying.

But hey lest anyone think I'm picking solely on the US side, and to go back to the skies, how about the Yak-38? Whoa Nellie, that was a shitty aircraft. In the Soviet's defense it...well, no, there is no defense for putting that thing in the air. Seriously, that's what happens when you don't have a free press and governmental oversight of projects. Couldn't fly in hot air. Couldn't carry more than a couple hundred pounds of bombs. So unstable it had to have an automatic ejection system for the crews when it got past a certain AOA since there was no way in hell a pilot could regain control once that happened...what a horrible waste of everything that bird was.

The MiG-25. V. Belenko's defection taught us that all is not gold that glitters. The Foxbat turned out to be a paper (well, stainless steel) tiger. It did have some innovations, like an all-digital integrated hands-off weapon system - but this was because Soviet aviation treated aircraft like flying SAM platforms rather than like, y'know, aircraft with pilots. Designed to intercept and destroy the (X)B70 Valkyrie, it found itself without a job once the Valk was cancelled. However the Soviets never let that stand in the way of producing something anyhow! The engines had the lifespan of a mayfly. The whole bird had a turning radius of about Rhode Island at speed. Still, it gave us the F15 and that is a truly awesome weapons system!

I've been scouring my resources but I cannot find the entry for the Soviet cold-war era bomber that literally barely had the range to hit targets in Western Europe. It was pathetic, I wanna say it was the M50 but that never got produced. There was a whole "Wings of the Red Star" episode about it...

In defense of the F-5, the USAF was never the target market for that. It was supposed to be an export fighter, I am told, for folks like the Saudis, South Vietnamese, all of South America, maybe even the Israelis. It was a cheap fighter for those who didn't have to worry about facing a high-quality air force, but needed to replace whatever WW2 cast-offs they were still operating in the 1970s. If your opponents are flying day-only MiG17s, or French Mirages, then you shouldn't need two-seat Phantoms or other all-weather interceptors.

Trouble was, as you say, if the USAF and USN weren't buying it, no one wanted it.

I've read that the latest F-5 upgrades are quite serviceable, provided you can get around the small combat radius. The advantages of relative simplicity and cheapness of operation have to count for something to somebody.

Maybe the F-5 counts as "too much of a good thing". When we look at the USAF, we see a number of truly stellar performers. However, we also see very good but much cheaper airframes like the F-16 (compared to the F-15). That should mean that there is a place for an aircraft like the F-5. As Adm. Lee points out, perhaps the quality of the F-5 that prevented it from becoming a success was the fact that the US didn't use it extensively.

I always liked the F-5 even if it was just base on looks.

When it was modified to its F-20 Tigershark (originally F-5G), it was a match for virtually any light fighter out there (at the time it was being marketed). And Northrop was willing to produce different builds (as the guts of the F-20 were modular to a large degree). The buyer could choose from sets of electronics, radar, air-to-ground capability, AAM carriage capability, even the amount of rounds for the aircraft's cannon. The Tigershark, despite seeing much interest around the world in the design, lost in the sales department by the US Government. Northrop was for most of its time as an independent company looked down upon by the USG, and they cajoled, persuaded, undercut deals, and even threatened the procurement agencies of other countries into buying either surplus USAF/Navy aircraft or more expensive aircraft like the F-16 series.

Let us not forget...

The Anzio Battle Sleds!

These were open steel tubes, each just wide enough and long enough to hold an infantryman, mounted on runners for stability and then connected in pairs to carry a 12-man rifle squad. The intent was to tow a battle sled behind a Sherman tank, the men would be protected from small arms fire and anti-personnel fire and yet remain close enough to support the tank.

The "gizmo" proved to be difficult to tow, especially in turns and when they were used in their first combat, a drainage ditch proved to be too much for them to be towed over.

I realize this is a 4+ year necro, but the maximum range of the Zalinsky pneumatic dynamite guns was one and a half nautical miles, not "less than a thousand yards". Where it failed as a naval weapon was that it was a fixed mount (and thus nearly useless in ship-to-ship combat), and the ship could only carry a total of 30 rounds (10 for each gun). It ended up being of limited use for shore bombardment off Cuba, because it was almost silent when firing, so targets had no warning to get under cover. Interestingly, the USS Holland (SS-1) had an 8.4" dynamite gun in its nose for "aerial torpedoes," although I haven't seen anything on whether it was ever actually fired.

Roosevelt's Rough Riders also had a pneumatic gun, the half-ton 2.5" Sims-Dudley, which was the gun that had a maximum range of less than a thousand yards (it could only reach 900 yards on a good day). However, it really was a dud. It required a high arc of fire to even achieve that range (Roosevelt refers to it being used "like a mortar"), and the fin-stabilized shell was prone to being blown off-course. It suffered technical problems every few shots that could require a couple of hours to repair, and it only had a high explosive shell that weighed 10 pounds, contained 5 pounds of nitro-gelatin, and would not detonate until ~6-7 seconds after impact. The muzzle velocity was only 600 feet per second, so that 900 yard shot took almost 5 seconds for the projectile to reach the target. Roosevelt thought it out-performed regular artillery, but mostly because it used smokeless powder to generate the pneumatic pressure, and thus did not attract counter-battery fire.

I think most people here have no problem with thread-necro if it's to add or correct something.
The info you provided was quite interesting.
I'm left with the impression that although pneumatic guns were not uncommon from 1880 till 1900, there isn't enough information about them.
So then we get the confusion about their capabilities such as the notion that the Vesuvius' guns were limited to only 1000 yards when, as you mentioned, they actually were capable of ranges out to 1760 yards with a 250kg (550lb) projectile and ranges out to 4000 yards with a 100kg (200lb) projectile.

When I first posted the pneumatic gun, the only source material I could find mentioned a maximum range of a thousand yards, glad to see more info is out there! But please, what is the source?

There's mention of a pneumatic machine gun in Final Blackout. https://books.google.com/books?id=b3...ackout&f=false

You can see a lot of info on pneumatic guns or "air cannons", for the most part these tend towards the toy side. What I'm trying to locate are the military uses, most information tapers off after the start of 20th Century, and there are few, if any technical mentions....at least those I can afford!

This year's Pumpkin Chuckin' event was cut short after an air cannon blew up, badly injuring a couple of crew members.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/t...dent/94162012/

For the Zalinski gun (the 15" on Vesuvius), I started with an article from the Transactions of the Royal Martian Geographical Society and also checked NavWeapons. The best site I know of for the Sims-Dudley is the Spanish-American War Centennial page; I had found this one a while back when trying to stat the gun for the Soldier's Companion rules for S:1889.

That's because use tapered off once stable high explosives were developed. The pneumatic guns were built because the shock of conventional cannon had a nasty tendency to detonate early high explosives in the tube, so a gentler firing method was needed. Once stable high explosives could be fired from a conventional cannon, the pneumatic cannon had no advantage to counterbalance its disadvantages, and they left service.

Necroing the thread again to come back to dynamite guns, I think I finally found enough information to stat out three dynamite guns, using the DP for dynamite (even though they used various early high explosives, it should be close enough) and the Demolitions rules from page 221 of v2.2 to convert to concussion damage. Their shells are generally too light for effective shrapnel, but if fired into something that could produce appropriate fragments (brick walls, etc), they follow the rules from Demolitions for that (primary burst equal to HE concussion radius, secondary burst double HE concussion radius).


The SS-1 Holland, the first submarine commissioned by the Navy, had either 1 or 2 (sources vary, but I suspect 1 is correct) dynamite guns of roughly 8" caliber. The ship carried seven rounds for the gun (referred to as "aerial torpedoes"), along with three Whitehead torpedoes that fired from a tube under the gun. A June 1897 article from The Princeton Union states her projectiles were 180 pounds with 100 pounds of high explosive as the payload. This would be C:50 and Pen 25C in T2K terms, with a range of approximately 1 mile. As a compromise between the 0 add for a set explosive and the 2d6 of a standard shell, I'd add 1d6 to Pen for the lighter dynamite shell.

The 2.5" Dudley-Sims would be roughly C:11 and Pen 6C with its 5-pound charge, and I'd either add 1/2d6 (1d3) if I wanted a variable Pen or just stick with the constant given that it's a low-velocity semi-mortar. The semi-accurate range is 900 yards. For a 1000 pound 1890s artillery piece, it's decent. With each shell weighing only ten pounds and a half-pound smokeless powder charge as propellant, ammo transportation shouldn't be too difficult.

The weights provided (on a lot of websites that seem to be copying from someone that misinterpreted data) are the amount of explosive in the shells. The 1,760 yard range was with a 980 or 1,150 pound shell (different sources provide different weights), of which 550 pounds was explosive, or C:117 and Pen 59C. The lighter shell with 200 pounds of explosive and a 4,000 yard range would be C:71, Pen 35C. Vesuvius only carried a total of 30 shells, 10 for each gun.