Really bad weapons...

[dragoon500ly]

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.

[The Dark]

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.

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.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

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.

[dragoon500ly]

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?

[Draq]

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

[dragoon500ly]

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!

[Raellus]

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/

[The Dark]

Originally Posted by dragoon500ly

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?

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.

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!

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.

[Vespers War]

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.

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

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.

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.