The jacked-down sleepers are visible at full-size. This French 320 mm railway gun uses sliding recoil. It is not well-suited to firing at steep upward angles because it cannot absorb much of the vertical component of the recoil force. Return to battery is effected either by gravity, through the use of inclined rails, which the gun and carriage have run up, by springs, or even by rubber bands, on some improvised mounts. The gun and upper carriage recoil together, restrained by the usual hydraulic buffers. Top-carriage recoil is the situation in which the gun is mounted in an upper carriage that moves on wheels on fixed rails mounted on the lower. This is the most common method used for lighter railway guns and for virtually all field artillery designed after the French introduced their Canon de 75 modèle 1897. It is returned to battery, or the firing position, by either helical springs or by air in a pneumatic recuperator cylinder that is compressed by the force of recoil. There are four primary methods to absorb the recoil force for railway guns: cradle recoil, top-carriage recoil, sliding recoil and rolling recoil.Ĭradle recoil means that the gun recoils backward in its cradle, retarded and stopped by hydraulic buffers. Ĭradle recoil (top) top carriage recoil (second) sliding recoil (third) rolling recoil (bottom) The American post– World War I assessment of railway artillery considered that the utility of even a small amount of traverse for fine adjustments was high enough that either of the two latter traversing methods is preferable to a fixed mount. With few exceptions these types of mounts require some number of outriggers, stabilisers, or earth anchors to keep them in place against the recoil forces and are generally more suitable for smaller guns. This usually requires the gun to be mounted on a central pivot which, in turn, is mounted on the car body. The third choice is to allow the separate gun mount to rotate with respect to the rail car body, known as a top-carriage traversing mount. The design of the foundation is the only limit to the amount of traverse allowed in this latter case. Generally this is limited to a few degrees of traverse to either side unless an elaborate foundation is built with a centre pivot and traversing rollers. The second is to traverse the rail car body on its trucks, known as a car-traversing mount. The first method of traverse is to rely entirely on movement along a curved section of track or on a turntable with no provision to traverse the gun on its mount. Methods of traverse īritish 12-inch howitzers on top-carriage traversing mounts, traversed 90°, Catterick, December 1940 moved from side to side to aim how the horizontal component of the recoil force will be absorbed by the gun's carriage and how the vertical recoil force will be absorbed by the ground. Namely how the gun is going to be traversed – i.e. The design of a railway gun has three firing issues over and above those of an ordinary artillery piece to consider. Only able to be moved where there were good tracks, which could be destroyed by artillery bombardment or airstrike, railway guns were phased out after World War II. Smaller guns were often part of an armoured train. Many countries have built railway guns, but the best-known are the large Krupp-built pieces used by Germany in World War I and World War II. French 370 mm railway howitzer of World War IĪ railway gun, also called a railroad gun, is a large artillery piece, often surplus naval artillery, mounted on, transported by, and fired from a specially designed railway wagon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |