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Originally Posted by richardphat
:hmm: Hmm Hmmm, ahoy kaluen! Just wondering about something...... How do you think about a deck gun shooting AA shell.........:hmm: Wonder if any of you has thought about this before.. It would be cool lol!Open fire and break the wing of a aircraft wing!!!!  |
Richardphat,
Letum is correct that it wouldn't be very practical on a sub. Manually training and elevation a gun would have been way too slow to target a WWII aircraft.
Small (3" & 5") naval guns were used extensively by the US Navy during WWII for AA. The 3" guns were mostly for AA although they were also good against small vessels. The 5"/38 guns (we had 12 on my ship) were referred to as a dual-purpose gun; the 2nd purpose being for AA fire.
However, the 3" & 5" guns were electrically trained and elevated. They also were under a gun directors control and not typically controlled by the gun crew in the mount. The gun director was is a trainable 'pointer' that can track the target optically and, by mid war, with radar. The gun director's operator would calculate the bearing and elevation needed for the gun to lead the target (So that the shell will arrive at the same place the aircraft is going to) and the signals were sent out to drive the motors of the guns under it's control.
By the way, my ship shot down a MiG over North Vietnam waters using an 8" gun with fragmentation rounds and timed fuses. The poor **** just flew into a wall of steel up around 25,000 feet. That had to come as a surprise!
Bob