Sixty-Four Pounds Is 64 Pounds

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by nikimcbee

Especially naval artillery. A 12lber is about a 4inch bore amd that's waaaay too whimpy for a naval gun. The main armament on the USS Constitution is 24 lber(?). So a 64 pounder almost sounds like a Rodman(?)

I completely forgot! Here is a video of the exact same type of 64pdr as used on Iris being fired.
http://www.go2gbo.com/forums/index.php?topic=256671.0

Nevermind, I just looked up the specs for a Rodman. 12 inch bore and......225 lbs shell. Love to see the crew fire that three times a minute. They also made a 20 inch rodman.

That's wimpy from my point of view. Twelve-inch guns from the pre-Dreadnought era fired a shell weighing 850 pounds.

Originally Posted by magic452

Since someone brought up 64 pounders and such, something that I often wondered about but never bothered to do the research on, when did they change from just shooting steel balls and start using exploding shells?

As Raptor1 pointed out, exploding shells were experimented with as far back as the 1300s. They came into common use for ships in the early 1800s. Solid shot was okay for trying to pound in a ship's sides, but the answer to that was to just make the sides thicker. It was realized that an exploding shell could not only kill lots of enemy sailors, but could also start fires, something truly terrifying on a wooden ship with cloth sails and lots of gunpowder lying around. French officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans designed the first gun specifically designed to fire a flat-trajectory exploding shell in 1823. American John A. Dahlgren improved upon this by designing a gun that could fire both shot and shell.

Much earlier than this, in 1784, a British army officer invented a hollow cannon ball filled with musket balls and a small explosive charge, designed to shred a line of troops en mass. It was called case shot, but the flying metal itself still bears his name: Henry Shrapnel.

In the 1890s they developed the base-fused Armor Piercing shell, but it took a decade or so before it was trusted. Throughout that period it was common for ships to carry both AP shell and solid shot, just in case.

Originally Posted by Hottentot

Very few historians write a book completely based on the original sources. That would imply it's a subject that has never ever been written about, not even closely, and it's based on some completely new material. Even if the material is completely new, some research on the subject still probably exists. And I can't think of many things more insulting to the fellow researchers as well as the whole science itself than to ignore everything anyone has ever said and claim your work is the ultimate revelation.

John Campbell wrote a series of articles for Warship Quarterly magazine, of which I have several of the bound collected volumes, titled 'British Naval Guns: 1880-1945', detailing the design, construction and use of every British naval cannon of that period. He actually went through the first-hand records to gather his information. Same with David Lyons' The First Destroyers, Campbell's Jutland: An Analysis of the Fighting, R. A. Burt's British Battleships series, Norman Friedman's books on American and British Destroyers and Cruisers, and a great many more. Their reputations allow them access to all sorts of official records, and the money to travel to where the primary sources are.

Just refer to the already written books properly and build your own ideas based on them, develop their points further or disagree with them. Building new is based on improving the old.

I can show where different books disagree with each other, but mostly all I can do is collect them and work on my game.

Out of curiosity, what prevents you from accessing the primary sources?

Money, mostly. Travelling to where the material is kept isn't cheap.

In general, I agree that you already know a lot, have read a lot and definitely know how to put your thoughts on the paper (or the Internet forum in this case) in a constructive way. That's a great start for writing a book.

The truth is, while there's no money in it I'm having fun just putting my game together.