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M’off…… Pas de Calais
- Thread starter Wapping
- Start date
Thank you.
I have been to the Chinese cemetery, a couple of times. Once, definitely on a Wander I organised. I seem to recall that it’s on rue de l’abattoir, or summat like that.
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The Germans certainly used a railway gun to shell Paris in WW1.
I have been reading about their totally bonkers plan to build a ‘railway gun tank’, using conventional tracks instead of moving on train tracks. Barking mad, the lot of them. Meanwhile, they never got around to building a decent four engined conventional bomber; a schoolboy error.
They certainly liked fitting caterpillar tracks to what you would think would be incompatible vehicles as the Kleines Kettenkraftrad HK 101 (catchy name) bares testament.
en.wikipedia.org
Although not as daft as this French effort?
thegentlemanracer.com
Sd.Kfz. 2 - Wikipedia
Although not as daft as this French effort?
The Caterpillar Track Motorcycle - The Gentleman Racer
thegentlemanracer.com
The tracked super gun thing was, had it ever got beyond Krupp’s drawing board, said to have weighed over 1,000 tons.
I can only assume that it would have been transported by rail in pieces, then assembled. The tracks would then used to swivel / move the gun around, giving (hopefully) a better arc or direction of fire, than a fixed circular railway track.
Bonkers. Stark raving bonkers.
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As an aside to the V3 site I went to see. I remembered that we were insurance brokers to Sheffield Forgemasters, who - amongst others - were embroiled in the Iraqi ‘super gun’ scandal, employed by the Canadian engineer, who climbed into bed with Hussein. He came to a sticky end, courtesy of Mossad, unsurprisingly.
They had a section of the "Super Gun" outside the Firepower Museum at Woolwich Arsenal, It looked like a large diameter bit of pipe with flanges either end for bolting to the next section, it didn't look like it would fire many rounds before falling apart.
That is exactly what it looked like, some 130 metres long.
The diameter was comparatively narrow. The flanges, like a herring bone, held charges, that fired in sequence as the projectile went up the tube, the charges ignited by the hot gasses as it passed. The sequence of explosions, accelerated the projectile, each herring bone accelerating it further. At least that was the theory. It didn’t work in small scale tests, yet the Germans pressed on with the full scale thing.
Time was against them, so they reduced the number of planned sites. This reduced the quantity of ot]ordnance that could be delivered on London. It was crazy mathematics, born out of hubrice and madness.
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