24 Facts About Naval artillery

Naval artillery is artillery mounted on a warship, originally used only for naval warfare and then subsequently used for shore bombardment and anti-aircraft roles.

In 1489 John of Portugal further contributed to the development of naval artillery by establishing the first standardized teams of trained naval gunners .

Early naval artillery was an antipersonnel weapon to deter boarders, because cannon powerful enough to damage ships were heavy enough to destabilize any ship mounting them in an elevated castle.

Mary Rose, like other ships of the time, was built during a period of rapid development of heavy Naval artillery, and her armament was a mix of old designs and innovations.

Consequently, for men aboard these vessels, going up against shore Naval artillery firing heated shot was a terrifying experience, and typically wooden fleets were not expected to brave such fire except in cases of great emergency, as a single heated shot could easily destroy the entire ship and crew, while the same ship could typically be expected to survive numerous hits from normal solid shot.

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Naval artillery carried out an extensive series of experiments in gunnery, embodying his results in his famous treatise on New Principles in Gunnery, which contains a description of his ballistic pendulum .

Naval artillery compared the results of his theory with experimental determinations of the ranges of mortars and cannon, and gave practical maxims for the management of artillery.

Naval artillery made observations on the flight of rockets, and wrote on the advantages of rifled gun barrels.

Naval artillery's shell was a hollow cast-iron sphere filled with a mixture of balls and powder, with a crude time fuze.

The inadequacy of naval artillery caused the naval ram to reappear as a means of sinking armored warships.

Naval artillery'slls are inherently dangerous to handle, and no solution had been found to combine the explosive character of the shells with the high power and flatter trajectory of a high velocity gun.

Naval artillery advocated using flat-trajectory shell guns against warships in 1822 in his Nouvelle force maritime et artillerie, and developed a delaying mechanism which, for the first time, allowed shells to be fired safely in high-powered flat-trajectory guns.

Large-caliber breech-loading naval artillery became practical with French development of the interrupted screw obturator by Charles Ragon de Bange in 1872.

Breech loading Naval artillery overcame barrel length limitations of cast cannon imposed by the necessity of retracting the cannon into the hull for reloading through the muzzle.

Naval artillery's Palliser shot, approved in 1867, was made of cast iron, the head being chilled in casting to harden it, using composite molds with a metal, water cooled portion for the head.

Naval artillery added a gyroscope to allow for the yaw of the firing ship.

Naval artillery was encouraged in his efforts by the rapidly rising figure of Admiral Jackie Fisher, Admiral Arthur Knyvet Wilson and the Director of Naval Ordnance and Torpedoes, John Jellicoe.

Naval artillery addressed this in two ways: he devised training aids and put his signallers under instruction and he devised a new more effective flashing lamp.

Naval artillery devised a new sub-calibre gun which involved fitting a one-inch-calibre rifled barrel inside the barrel of the main armament but which used the main gun's controls.

Naval artillery came up with new sights employing telescope optics and new training targets.

High-velocity naval artillery intended to puncture side armor at close range was theoretically capable of hitting targets miles away with the aid of fire control directors; but the maximum elevation of guns mounted within restrictive armored casemates prevented reaching those ranges.

The light anti-aircraft Naval artillery typically consisted of autocannons such as the Bofors 40 mm anti-aircraft guns and 65 single Oerlikon 20 mm cannon.

Naval artillery gunfire was used extensively throughout Normandy, although initially the surprise nature of the landings themselves precluded a drawn-out bombardment which could have reduced the Atlantic Wall defences sufficiently, a process that fell to specialist armoured vehicles instead.

Ships who remained in service equipped with old large-caliber artillery were used only for naval gunfire support, as the anti-ship missile has supplanted naval guns for ship-versus-ship combat.