USS CONSTELLATION guns

[Saphroneth]

It has been a fine few decades for ship restoration. The Warrior in the UK is just another example of that, as is the Danish Jylland, though it's a pity no steam liners survive. But with Victory and Warrior near one another...

 

[63rdOVI]

Not really - penetration wasn't a concern, as armoured warships per se didn't exist yet (and ships with heavy wooden sidewalls that might endure the impact, such as a ship-of-the-line, are not the business of a sloop to engage...). The intent of the shell's low velocity is to avoid overpenetration.
The closer analogy to what you're thinking of is the true Dahlgren guns of the Civil War period, and unfortunately this is an inferior way to penetrate armour - experiments in Britain at the time confirmed that armour penetration could be strongly predicted by the force per unit circumference of the round, and for that you need a round as small as possible for a given momentum (and higher velocity is extremely important, the force goes as the square of the velocity).

In British service, the way it was handled for ships that might fight liners was that they carried both heavy shell guns (such as 8" guns) and armaments of long guns (such as the 6.4" 32-pounder or the 8" 68-pounder). The long guns would have more penetration when firing shot.


Though an interesting aside is that US fuze times for shells were surprisingly long - this wasn't such a problem with the slow shells which were intended to avoid overpenetration, but for the bigger and higher-charge Dalgren guns of the civil war period this could mean shellfire functioned as inferior solid shot against targets within a few hundred yards.

So you're saying here that these shell guns were designed to penetrate to a point, but the most important part of the operation was the explosion of the shell itself inside the enemy ship?

 

[Saphroneth]

So you're saying here that these shell guns were designed to penetrate to a point, but the most important part of the operation was the explosion of the shell itself inside the enemy ship?

Well, yes - as there were no percussion fuzes yet (not when this kind of weapon was being designed, and not in general US Navy use for some years thereafter) then the aim was to get the explosion to take place inside the enemy ship as the alternative is that the shell goes all the way through and you may as well have fired solid shot. It's not until 1862 in the UK that the true armour piercing shell comes in, the Palliser (ignited by the impact on armour itself), and that didn't make its way to the US before the war's end - and nor did the Pillar or Moorsom fuzes, which contact-detonated common shell.

 

[63rdOVI]

Well, yes - as there were no percussion fuzes yet (not when this kind of weapon was being designed, and not in general US Navy use for some years thereafter) then the aim was to get the explosion to take place inside the enemy ship as the alternative is that the shell goes all the way through and you may as well have fired solid shot. It's not until 1862 in the UK that the true armour piercing shell comes in, the Palliser (ignited by the impact on armour itself), and that didn't make its way to the US before the war's end - and nor did the Pillar or Moorsom fuzes, which contact-detonated common shell.

Understood. Thanks for your explanation!

 

[CowCavalry]

..... Whenever I visited or thought about the USS CONSTELLATION, I wondered....... if you kept all the wood that was taken off of the ship over the years, then assembled all those bits back together..... which is the original ship, the one in the harbor, or the one you assembled from all the bits that were saved. . .... Not kidding, I spent a lot of time wondering about it.

lol isnt that the basis for a famous philosophical question?

 

[Saphroneth]

lol isnt that the basis for a famous philosophical question?

The answer is that the ship you built out of the remains is HMS Theseus. No matter what you started with, it's HMS Theseus.