Artillery Through the Ages: A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in AmericaManucy, Albert C.
History
Artillery Through the Ages: A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America
Manucy, Albert C.
Artillery -- History; United States. Army -- Ordnance and ordnance stores
The great weight of its projectile gave the double cannon its name.
The warden of the Castillo at Milan had some 130-pounders made, but
such huge pieces were of little use, except in permanent
fortifications. It took a huge crew to move them, their carriages
broke under the concentrated weight, and they consumed mountains of
munitions. The lombard, which apparently originated in Lombardy, and
the basilisk had the same disadvantages. The fabled basilisk was a
serpent whose very look was fatal. Its namesake in bronze was
tremendously heavy, with walls up to 4 calibers thick and a bore up to
30 calibers long. It was seldom used by the Europeans, but the Turkish
General Mustafa had a pair of basilisks at the siege of Malta, in
1565, that fired 150- and 200-pound balls. The 200-pounder gun broke
loose as it was being transferred to a homeward bound galley and sank
permanently to the bottom of the sea. Its mate was left on the island,
where it became an object of great curiosity.
The third class of ordnance included the guns firing stone
projectiles, such as the pedrero (or perrier, petrary, cannon petro,
etc.), the mortars, and the old bombards like Edinburgh Castle's
famous Mons Meg. Bars of wrought iron were welded together to form
Meg's tube, and iron rings were clamped around the outside of the
piece. In spite of many accidents, this coopering technique persisted
through the fifteenth century. Mons Meg was made in two sections that
screwed together, forming a piece 13 feet long and 5 tons in weight.
Pedreros (fig. 23c) were comparatively light. The foundryman used only
half the metal he would put into a culverin, for the stone projectile
weighed only a third as much as an iron ball of the same size, and the
bore walls could therefore be comparatively thin. They were made in
calibers up to 50-pounders. There was a chamber for the powder charge
and little danger of the gun's bursting, unless a foolhardy fellow
loaded it with an iron ball. The wall thicknesses of this gun are
shown in Figure 24, where the inner circle represents the diameter of
the chamber, the next arc the bore caliber, and the outer lines the
respective diameters at chase, trunnions, and vent.
[Illustration: Figure 24--HOW MUCH METAL WAS IN EARLY GUNS? The charts
compare the wall diameters of sixteenth-seventeenth century types. The
center circle represents the bore, while the three outer arcs show the
relative thickness of the bore wall at (1) the smallest diameter of
the chase, (2) at the trunnions, and (3) at the vent. The small arc
inside the bore indicates the powder chamber found in the pedrero and
mortar.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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