Читать книгу Champions of the Fleet. Captains and men-of-war and days that helped to make the empire онлайн

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[Curve of flight, or trajectory, of 850 lb. projectile from a Dreadnought 12-in. turret-gun fired with full service charge.]

[The 12-in. gun is about the same weight as an ordinary railway passenger train engine.]

“Mark X” is the official style for the Dreadnought class of 12-inch gun. It is the most powerful piece of ordnance in the world. It weighs upwards of fifty-eight tons, about the weight of a larger “tank” railway engine of the kind that brings the suburban bread-winner up to London every morning. Its muzzle velocity—the speed at which the shot flashes forth from the gun—is 2900 feet (966⅔ yards, or well over half a mile) in a second. The force with which the shot starts off is enough to send it through a solid slab of wrought iron set close up in front of the muzzle of the gun 4¼ feet thick. When fired with full charges, each gun develops a force able to lift the Dreadnought herself bodily nearly a yard up, exerting a force equivalent to 47,697 “foot-tons,” in gunnery language. The entire broadside of eight 12-inch guns, fired simultaneously, as at the gun trial off the Isle of Wight, develops a force sufficient to heave the huge vessel herself, 21 feet up—nearly out of the water, in fact.