Photos like this are the spearhead of every propaganda campaign to soften the American opinion of war. I’m deeply sorry Venezuela. I didn’t vote for this. No one did.
You got me. Donald Trump personally paid me $20 to take photos of a WW2 battleship and specifically post it here on Lemmy to influence the userbase. He told me if he loses the Lemmy support then his whole plan falls apart.
i know this is a joke, but it wouldn’t be the most absurd thing he said recently 😄
plenty of people voted specifically for this
Where’s the banana for scale?
And more importantly, why is that one in the back missing his hat?
Designated dud.
“I just couldn’t weight to open the gift!“
Battleships were an interesting chapter in naval history. They were first developed around 60 years before aircraft carriers, increasingly designed with the idea that they would be able to hit enemy targets while remaining out of range of returned fire. That ended up being an unrealistic expectation. Those 16 inch guns can lob a 1 ton shell nearly 24 miles but not very accurately at that range.
Battleships probably outlived their tactical usefulness. They were definitely good for projecting force. Few things say “I’m going to obliterate you” like a large, fast ship armed with 9 giant-ass canons.
I am by no means an armaments expert but those look bigger than 16 inches
16 inches is the caliber, or the diameter of the shells.
The propellant is not shown here, and would be loaded separately in canvas bags behind these shells.
I assume those rounds are blanks?
There are three ways to answer that, which boil down to “no, no, kinda yeah.”
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These almost perfectly aren’t “blanks.” In small arms, a “blank” is a cartridge with primer and propellant but no projectile. Makes the gun go bang but throws nothing. The shells in the picture above are projectiles with no propellant or primer. No “cartridge” of any description is used, the propellant is stored separately in cylindrical 110 pound bags, 6 of which are required to fire the gun.
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The black shells on the left of the image are armor piercing shells, the green ones on the right are “high capacity” aka maximum kaboom. They do carry a number of inert shells that are filled with sand instead of high explosives, those are for training, but they are painted blue. Again not “blank” because a projectile is fired, but they don’t explode on impact, they just land with the force of a Corolla going mach 1.2.
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Because this is on the tour route of a museum ship, these shells have either had their bursting charges removed to render them inert, or they are fiberglass replicas.
USS North Carolina hasn’t really published much media to the internet, but the USS New Jersey museum has a very good Youtube channel. Head over there and my main main Ryan will tell you all about it. Compared to North Carolina, New Jersey is a couple years younger, a bit larger, and had a longer career. North Carolina is a WWII museum, New Jersey is mostly in her Gulf War trim.
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They’re randomly loaded. It’s a little game they like to play.
Even though those say AP on them, I’m pretty sure those are the heavier APBC shells used later.
The pictured shells are solid bodied all the way to the top fuze threading. There’s no distinct ballistic cap, like with the below picture.
TIL. I always thought it was the opposite.
This picture is a totally different caliber, but it is a good illustration:
A “cap” on a round is a solid piece shaped to help with armor penetration, but the shape is not good for flight. So a “ballistic cap” is staked on top of it. A hat on a hat, if you will. In the smaller photo in the illustration is a general idea of how these rounds look at a distance.
Ahhh.
Ok, so then the real thing I’m learning here is that the shell is made out of the lighter, softer material to deliver the energy. They put the penetrator cap on, usually made of steel or some stronger heavier material, but it’s thin so not significantly decreasing shell velocity. However, the shape of the penetrator allows for the energy to be delivered all at one precise spot, but it causes the flight characteristics to suck. To get the flight back, they add a thin lightweight material back over the penetrator that is negligible in terms of reducing the energy the penetrator delivers.
Cool
Almost.
The cap (the “penetrative cap” as the above picture calls it) protects the hardened tip of the shell itself, so that the tip doesn’t deform immediately on impact with armor. Soft metal caps did exist and work, but hard metal caps became more common since the hard cap would survive a little bit longer and thus get the shell better positioned to penetrate by the cap hopefully going through the outer layer of armor before the tip on the shell came forward to penetrate the remaining armor.
![[OC] Projectile ring for ammunition inside the 16 inch main gun of the USS North Carolina](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b54e0d3c-047a-4cd3-b73f-aaaff9c09feb.jpeg){kind=link}