Quote:
Originally Posted by dragoon500ly
It seems that we've been picking on the ground services...time to spank the Navy!!
The USS Vesuvius was a "dynamite cruiser" armed with the awesome battery of three 15-inch pneumatic guns that were aimed by pointing the ship at the target. The guns fired a 980-pound shell of which some 500-pounds are dynamite.
So what made this awsome ship killer such a bad weapon you ask? The maximum effective range of the "air cannon" was less than a 1,000 yards.
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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.