The 800mm Heavy Gustav

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Winston

Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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Dumb, but cool:

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/a-nazi-war-train-hauled-the-biggest-gun-ever-made-a05e20070ebd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav

Gesch%C3%BCtzDora2.JPG


80cm_Gustav_shell.jpg
 
During WWI and WWII era most of the participating countries had railway guns, the steels, trucks, propellants, etc were not up to the standards we have today. Things had to be more massive, and in Nazi Germany, it had to be bigger than everyone else's.
 
Things had to be more massive, and in Nazi Germany, it had to be bigger than everyone else's.
Thanks to Adolf and friends even beyond the point of being practical. That's why I called it, "dumb." Other examples: their Tiger II which, while a very impressive tank, was too heavy to go across many small European bridges; the Messerschmitt Me 323 Gigant for obvious reasons.
 
Too cool:cool: Great weapons (for size and engineering) but drained manpower and materials, plus it was basically a static weapon in the air power age.
Being a N Scale modeler, I had a chance to get a N Scale Brass model of a railway gun, about 10 years ago. I can't remember which one, but it was a German gun. It used standard gauge N tracks (2 rail) so I do not know how accurate it was. Unfortunately I was out bid for it (eBay), I think my max bid was $200.:mad:
 
Obviously not a very practical system, but still an impressive piece of engineering and manufacturing.

Still, the terminal effect of one of those shells had to be impressive. I wish there was an intact one as an museum piece.
 
Railroad? We don't need no stinking railroad!!

Ours was only 280mm but didn't need a railroad :)

atomcannon.jpg
 
Railroad? We don't need no stinking railroad!!

Ours was only 280mm but didn't need a railroad :)

The Rushkies new where they were in Europe and had them targeted at ALL times:mad:
But stll impressive & the video of a test shot is must see TV:eyepop:
 
Dumb but cool: The A4 - V2! about the dumbest weapon system, very ineffective for the price. ME 163 a total failure as a weapon. Natter, Horten, same as ME 163. But they do make good model rockets!
 
Dumb but cool: The A4 - V2! about the dumbest weapon system, very ineffective for the price. ME 163 a total failure as a weapon. Natter, Horten, same as ME 163. But they do make good model rockets!

Failures perhaps. Far ahead of the curve- oh hell yes. The Germans had so many ideas it was amazing. We were still developing weapons ideas they had twenty years later. I am glad they did not succeed.

Picture if they had a nuke, and could stick it on a V2. It would not have to be that accurate. Imagine if they had concentrated their air efforts on the ME262 and made no other planes.

It is a little scary.
 
The ME 262 is surrounded in myth and was plagued in reality with a bunch of technical and logistic problems. In many ways it was very deficient and couldn't have been sped up to make any real difference. Colossal blunders in estimating the resources needed to fight an extended war in 1940-41 left the Luftwaffe in a real bind that no technological wonder weapon could fix. Time had run out on the production side and even old Albert the Architect couldn't turn around that math.

Bad German math during the same period also ruined any real effort to build an atomic bomb. Whereas some ex-Germans did good math and were working for the Allies. It all came down to one equation and we got it right. Now there is some bang for the buck and with a B-29 carrying one you had a technological war winner.

Lots of REALLY BIG WHAT IFS on those History channel shows. All the big time German toys were, in the big picture, ineffective disasters. Every one I can think of had at least one major fault that did it in. I am even having a hard time with the MG 42 and 88mm gun. Ok, I am going to have to go with the Gerry can, nothing beat that, it was dern perfect.
 
The MG42 worked pretty well. The 88mm gun also worked well.

Agreed about the other weapons ultimately being failures. They were interesting ideas, and expansions in methodology. Far too many projects with limited resources.
 
A completely ridiculous weapon as it took huge amounts of manpower. Wikipedia says it took a crew of 250 to set up and operate the gun and another 2500 men to lay the double set of tracks for it to fire from. Set up time was about 3 days. The tracks had to be laid in a curve as the gun could not traverse on its platform; it could only elevate. To aim it you literally had to turn the entire weapon, which is why they used a curved section of rail. It took 30 to 45 minutes to reload, so you got off about 14 rounds a day. In addition to the crew it had two flak battalions for protection.
 
Another "Weird Nazi Weapon", The TRIEBFLUEGEL! a fantasy version of this A/C was in the Captain America Movie along with a fantasy version of the Horton Amerika Bomber
photo.JPG
Then was this by Convair, the POGO. For the USN.
pogo.JPG
Don't forget about the first Assault Rifle. The MP44 designed by the Germans, and another weapon that Hitler did not like.
 
You want to see dumb but cool?

One problem railway guns like with Schwerer Gustav was that it would be completely useless if the Allied air forces bombed the German railway network, which they did routinely. Wouldn't it be a good idea if a big gun could make its own way across land? And two guns are always better than one.

Meet Landkreuzer P.1000 Ratte, a proposed 1,000 ton beast which would have been armed with a pair of 28cm cannons mounted in a turret similar to the one on the battlecruiser Gneisenau, minus one gun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte

I know what you're thinking. This would have been far too small and lightly armed. So let's see what happens if you take the Schwerer Gustav and put it on a tracked mount, along with a couple of 15cm howitzers as backup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1500_Monster
 
I read a history of Nazi Germany’s railroads and how they fared during WWII and the short answer to that question was, BADLY.
On a side note; did you know that the short stubby fins used on the V2 were a design concession made so the rocket could fit through the narrow rail tunnels of the time?

By the time Germany surrendered there wasn’t a single functioning mainline locomotive left in the inventory. After the collapse of the Luftwaffe when the Allied powers had complete air superiority, fighter planes such as the P-51, P47 and even the P38 were outfitted as ground attack aircraft and shooting up trains was a #1 priority.

Not that having a working locomotive would have done them any good as there wasn’t a mile’s length of mainline track that hadn’t been bombed, rocketed or otherwise rendered useless; much of it by the retreating German Army to prevent its use by the Allies.

As for German “Wonder Weapons”; most of them were a “Flash-N-The Pan” though the V2 was used to devastating affect against the port of Antwerp. One of the minor weapons the German Army fielded was a light machinegun whose rate of fire was phenomenal way, way faster than anything deployed by any of the Allied powers. Its only drawback was that it used up ammo so fast it was hard to keep it supplied.

If anybody has details on this particular machinegun I’d like to have it.
 
If anybody has details on this particular machinegun I’d like to have it.

MG42 had one of the highest average cyclic rate of any single-barreled man-portable machine gun: between 1,200 and 1,500 rpm, which results in a distinctive muzzle report. The US made a propaganda film for GI's telling them it was inaccurate!
 
So I looked up that MG 42 and I was stunned.
I knew it had an insane rate of fire but I didn’t realize it did that using such a big round 7.92mm x 57mm!!
Yikes; I figured with a 1,200-1,500 RPM it would have been using something smaller like a 5mm round.

No wonder that thing was so devastating and it’s amazing that its barrel didn’t melt what with it being an air-cooled weapon.
 
All military gunner are trained to fiire machine guns in 6 to 9 round bursts, reality is some what different especially when providing cover fire.
 
So I looked up that MG 42 and I was stunned.
I knew it had an insane rate of fire but I didn’t realize it did that using such a big round 7.92mm x 57mm!!
Yikes; I figured with a 1,200-1,500 RPM it would have been using something smaller like a 5mm round.

No wonder that thing was so devastating and it’s amazing that its barrel didn’t melt what with it being an air-cooled weapon.

Designed to stop Soviet human waive attacks over open ground so it had a very high rate of fire. I believe most of the carnage on Omaha Beach was caused by something like 14 MG 42 emplacements! You had change the barrel often and quick firing like that, get out the asbestos gloves.

Our M 60 machine gun sure looks a lot like it. It is so good even the Imperial Storm Troopers in Star Wars carry them.
 
Designed to stop Soviet human waive attacks over open ground so it had a very high rate of fire. I believe most of the carnage on Omaha Beach was caused by something like 14 MG 42 emplacements! You had change the barrel often and quick firing like that, get out the asbestos gloves.

Our M 60 machine gun sure looks a lot like it. It is so good even the Imperial Storm Troopers in Star Wars carry them.

But those “Blasters” used by Imperial Storm Troopers were clumsy and random, not at all an elegant weapon such as a Light Saber.

At least that’s what Obi-wan told me, but after that whole, Vader killed Luke’s father fiasco, I take anything he says with a grain of salt as big as a Tatooine sand dune.

And now this topic has gone completely off the rails.


Get it?

Off the rails. . . when the topic was rail guns?
 
MG42 had one of the highest average cyclic rate of any single-barreled man-portable machine gun: between 1,200 and 1,500 rpm, which results in a distinctive muzzle report. The US made a propaganda film for GI's telling them it was inaccurate!

[video=youtube;uhOrY88MGbM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhOrY88MGbM[/video]
 
Our M 60 machine gun sure looks a lot like it. It is so good even the Imperial Storm Troopers in Star Wars carry them.
There's a reason the M-60 looks like the MG42. It was based partly on the MG42. Meanwhile, the Germans, knowing they were onto a good thing, rechambered it for the NATO 7.62x51mm cartridge, renamed it the MG-3, and continued using it with the West German army.

Imperial stormtroopers, however, use the MG-34, which is probably why they lost. If they'd used the MG-42 then the fate of the Rebellion might have been very different.

Another German machine-gun was the MG 151, originally designed in 15mm calibre and subsequently upgraded to 20mm to fire explosive shells. As well as being used in aircraft, a triple mount could be used as an anti-aircraft gun, and was intended to be part of the Flak armament of the Landkreuzer P.1500. The main armament of this massive tracked vehicle was to be the 800mm Schwerer Gustav, which otherwise was used as a railway gun, and whose only useful function was to bring this thread back on topic. :lol:
 
The MG42 worked pretty well. The 88mm gun also worked well.

Agreed about the other weapons ultimately being failures. They were interesting ideas, and expansions in methodology. Far too many projects with limited resources.

MG 42 is now the MG3. Used by many NATO countries. I fired one in Turkey during an inspection. Quite impressive, 900 to 1400 rounds per minute. Not a failure at all.

Mike
 
MG42 had one of the highest average cyclic rate of any single-barreled man-portable machine gun: between 1,200 and 1,500 rpm, which results in a distinctive muzzle report. The US made a propaganda film for GI's telling them it was inaccurate!

I believe the sound was described as "ripping cloth." Probably absolutely terrifying.

As far as other Nazi wonder weapons, the ME 262 was a very good aircraft. Biggest problem was getting fuel for aircraft by the end. V2 was an engineering marvel, but I believe more slave laborers died producing them than enemies were killed by its use as a weapon. Type XXI u-boat was way ahead of its time but too little, too late.

How about some Allied Wonder Weapons? Besides the atom bomb, how about Ultra and the Enigma Bombes? Cavity magnetron and cm radar? HFDF?
 
How about some Allied Wonder Weapons? Besides the atom bomb, how about Ultra and the Enigma Bombes? Cavity magnetron and cm radar? HFDF?
Hedgehoghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_(weapon), a forward-throwing anti-submarine weapon (and the US rocket-propelled version Mousetrap).

Tallboy, a heavy, streamlined bomb designed by Barnes Wallis (who also designed the "bouncing bomb" of "Dambusters" fame, and indeed Tallboy was used by the same squadron). Responsible for destroying the V-3 cannon before it could fire a shot, and for the final demise of the battleship Tirpitz. Primarily intended to destroy hard structures, not by a direct hit but by penetrating the earth next to the target creating underground shockwaves, effectively an earthquake, which is why bombs like this are sometimes called "earthquake bombs".

Grand Slam, big brother of Tallboy. The US copied the idea with the T-12 Cloudmaker and, more recently, the GBU-43/B MOAB.

But those were successful weapons. Back to the topic of dumb but cool, there was the Great Panjandrumhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjandrum, a rocket-propelled double wheel carrying an explosive payload in the central drum. There are various things that can go wrong with a wheel that has a lot of solid-fuel rockets attached to the rim and most of them happened during the trials. The Panjandrum never went into service but was immortalised in the "Dad's Army" episode "Round And Round Went The Great Big Wheel":
[video=youtube;H1fC8VmM4Ao]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1fC8VmM4Ao[/video]
 
I believe the sound was described as "ripping cloth." Probably absolutely terrifying.

As far as other Nazi wonder weapons, the ME 262 was a very good aircraft. Biggest problem was getting fuel for aircraft by the end. V2 was an engineering marvel, but I believe more slave laborers died producing them than enemies were killed by its use as a weapon. Type XXI u-boat was way ahead of its time but too little, too late.

How about some Allied Wonder Weapons? Besides the atom bomb, how about Ultra and the Enigma Bombes? Cavity magnetron and cm radar? HFDF?


The atrocities involving the V2 construction program were so horrible I won't relate them here. It was Himmler's job to get them out and he was the worst of the worst. He was responsible for the Death Camps....enough said.... :(
 
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