Naval Guns (1650 to 1820) - Stop blowing holes in my ship!

[Music] [Music] so when we left things last time guns had a bewildering variety of names and just as boyle during a variety of functions not only that but they could be made of bronze or iron they could be made to shoot iron or stone and when it came to deciding whether you wanted bronze or iron guns well you didn't have to worry about any particular role because there were direct equivalents in both metals however as the 17th century drew on and naval tactics began to evolve more towards the line of battle which required an incredibly large number of broadside guns as opposed to the slightly smaller number of guns that earlier ships had both due to the ships being smaller and also due to the demand for having guns facing in all directions which made it somewhat less important to have a mast battery in any one facing there was now a demand for many and heavier guns accuracy was also becoming something of an issue as whilst naval tactics still did center around the boarding action as a final decisive factor in whether or not an enemy ship surrendered it was also becoming more common to simply batter a ship into surrender or in some rare cases sinking simply with gunfire and if you're going to do that ideally speaking you wanted to shoot at your enemy from as far away as possible there were of course limitations on what the human eye could calculate in terms of range and deflection but there was a difference between that and the point-blank range that most gunfights generally occurred at in the earlier periods a point-blank range gunfight with boarding action was of course still something that could occur and inactions between single ships of approximately the same weight class this was actually quite common however when ships were significantly outclassed by their opponent having more accurate guns would give them an opportunity to pick away at the enemy ship's crew and sails whilst giving an opportunity to escape and in a battle line well a line of capital ships was a relatively unwieldy thing and so getting in close with a full line of battle was a relatively rare event that usually only occurred right towards the end and so again for capital ship firepower accuracy was becoming more and more important with ships having a finer length to beam ratio they were also becoming slightly faster and if they were faster and they were trying to run away then you'd want to try and slow them down if you were the pursuer and so once again accuracy was in high demand as if you had relatively few chase guns in you're relatively speaking narrow bow you wanted to be able to use those to maximum effect to try and dismount so that you could overhaul them and on the flip side if you were the one being chased and you only had a few stern guns then equally you'd want to slow down your pursuer and with older guns that could shoot somewhere in that general vicinity but aiming at something like an individual person or a mast several hundred yards range was more based on luck than judgment this was not really a possibility and so whilst you might think that in the middle of the 17th century ships were firing solid shot from various naval guns and by the early 19th century ships were still firing solid shot from various naval guns and whilst they might look vaguely similar they had in fact been a massive amount of technological change so let's have a look at that we're going to look at materials I'm going to look at accuracy we're going to look at types of shot and we're going to look at types of gun what we might think of as the traditional naval cannon but also two important innovations that were taken to see in this period the mortar and the Karen aid so materials first bronze guns were still around in relatively large numbers however during what in the UK will be called the Tudor period which would be the late 15th and going into the 16th centuries the start had been made on mass producing cast iron cannon now this has had varied results they were of course cheaper as we covered in the previous video but they did have a slightly or distressing tendency to explode as compared to the more refined bronze of Aryans there was also some issue with what was called windage because at the time at least in the early to mid 1600s it was very difficult to drill or fall out cast iron bronze being a softer metal could be turned on a lathe much like a giant piece of wood this meant that iron guns had to be cast in a mold that included a spindle for the bore and in turn this meant that the casting was what was going to be slightly rough which meant you had to allow for a little bit more windage that is the gap between the Cannonball and the gun barrel itself and this in turn reduced accuracy and power because expanding gas could come around to the ball as much as it was propelling it and it also meant that the gun would wear out faster because the ball to a certain extent would rattle its weight down the barrel rather than proceeding in a nice neat orderly straight line there was also the issue that whilst iron guns didn't explode quite as often as they used to as quality control experience and expertise had improved over time thus making the final product a lot more reliable one of the ways that this reliability had been achieved was by casting the guns a lot thicker this in turn meant that they weighed more which was something of a concern when you were on board a ship if you were in a fort or some other land-based garrison then an additional 20 or 30 percent weight on your guns didn't actually make too much odds but if you're on a ship that could mean that you could only carry three guns instead of four if you could have a lighter weapon and the lighter weapons did exist because although bronze is actually denser than iron and therefore for a given thickness of bronze gun would be heavier due to its greater reliability and slightly lower potential to explode bronze guns could be cast a lot thinner and therefore a lot lighter than the average iron gun and of course when you are at sea you were in a saltwater environment and a Bron gun it wasn't anything like the same risk of oxidation as an iron gun was all of these factors meant that whilst iron guns were available in ever-increasing numbers bronze guns remained favored in navies especially for larger weapons although as the price of iron guns decreased through mass manufacture and refinements in technique and bronze became more scarce inexpensive due to demands for bronze outside of gun casting it meant that with the best intentions even a very rich and powerful Navy could not afford bronze guns for all of its vessels and thus bronze cannon became more and more restricted eventually only showing up in the largest and most prestigious vessels for example in the early 1700s HMS Victory a first-rate that was the immediate predecessor to Nelson's HMS Victory was one of the very last Royal Navy ships to have a bronze gun armament the loss of all those bronze guns was one of the major cost items involved in the loss of the ship and it wasn't just the monetary value alone it was also the strategic value because once an iron gun wore out and to be fair they did wear out relatively quickly compared to bronze weapons you could just replace it with another one as an iron gun cost just under half of what it's equivalent in bronze would cost but iron was plentiful whereas bronze could be recast but was also incredibly expensive so you wouldn't want to be bringing in new bronze every time a bronze gone wore out you'd simply take the old cannon and melt it down and cast a new one so with a hundred guns going down on the old HMS victory and that was not just a hundred guns lost which in an iron guns case could simply be replaced from a stock pile it was probably a thousand guns worth of recasting that had gone down with the vessel the weight issue would be another major driving factor behind a technological innovation in the manufacture of ships guns because as we said if the ship's gun is lighter you can fit more of them on a ship that can support a given weight so there were a number of other weight savings that could be made in the late 1600s and even into the early 1700s guns were still a very ornate objects much as they had been in Tudor period plenty of decoration moulding and relief work would take place but all of this used up material and that material weighed a certain amount if you took all of that off you ended up with a much plainer and more boring looking weapon but that weapon might weigh several dozen pounds less than the more decorated item now you could use that in a number of ways you had increased the amount of ammunition that you were carrying or if you factor that small reduction in weight across several dozen guns you might be able to fit two three or four more guns in again for the same weight this change was gradual but by about 1750 guns were generally speaking a lot plainer and a lot simpler they were the kind of weapon that you might recognize on the deck of Nelson's victory and would be seen throughout the Napoleonic Wars also around this time the old hollow casting method with the spindle was abandoned in favor of the newly developed gun barrel boring technology that had been refined by the Swiss of all people which allowed English guns for example to reduce their windage by about 20 percent this tightening of the gap between barrel and cannonball meant that a given powder charge could propel the ball a lot further because less of its energy would be lost going around the side or rattling the ball down the barrel and thus you could afford to make the gun shorter for the same amount of power and of course a shorter gun weighs less which means you can carry even more guns and this wasn't a small change in weight either like you might have by simply taking the decorations off the guns for a 24 pounder or 32 pounder gun which would be the kind that you'd find on a large ship of the line the reduction could be as much as two feet of gun barrel lengths to give the same power when you compare the older less precisely manufactured weapons to the newer more precisely manufactured iron guns this also served to make gunnery easier as it meant that with the same amount of rope and pulley a shorter gun would run further inside a ship thus giving the crew more access to it or alternatively you could tighten up on the amount of rope and pulley work that you had if you were happy to reload the gun at roughly the same kind of muzzle run-in as previously and this would serve to give slightly more space in the middle of the ship which allowed for the easier transport of ammunition powder and wounded men another simple but important advance was the relocation of the guns trunnions to the center of the barrel the trunnions are the two stubby metal cylinders that protrude from the side of the gun and which are used to mount it on its carriage under the old practice the trunnions had been mounted relatively low on the gun so that the gun sat quite high above the carriage this exerted quite a bit of strain on the gun carriage as whenever you fired the gun the force of the blast would try and effectively push the gun up and over by mounting the trunnions more along the centerline of the gun it meant that the force was directed straight backwards which was a much easier thing to compensate for and provided a lot less strain on the upper works of gun carriages which made guns flying off their carriages and flying around the ship something of a less common occurrence than it had been previously and there was also the matter of banding back when guns had been built up like barrels you very definitely did need reinforcements bands in order to ensure that the gun didn't split or at least reduce the chances of it splitting now that guns were single cast pieces and were somewhat more reliable than the early versions these reinforcements were not so much needed although it still did help to have them molded at various points which gave the appearance of a barrel like a gun but these additional points of mass provided a certain amount of strengthening at critical points along the gun barrel in particular at the mouth of the gun that the extra thickness served as something of a heatsink also delayed or prevented the propagation of cracks further reducing the size of the gun needed in terms of barrel length was a slight reduction in the amount of powder used this was as a result of experiments again in the 1700s which demonstrated that at full charge the cannon that were being used at the time could actually shoot a lot further than anyone could reasonably expect them to hit when they were at sea when the target was moving and when the ship that they were mounted on was also moving and so by slightly reducing the charge the guns effectiveness at any kind of practical range remained pretty much the same but since the gun itself was not being fired any with anywhere near as much force you could further reduce the overall weight of the gun either by shortening the barrel length still further or by slightly narrowing the casting all of these elements combined to a point where accuracy with a cannon much as that would have been the subject of much hilarity and division in the 1500s and early 1600s was now by the mid 1700s and early 1800s a very real thing dependent largely on the skill of the gun crew to a certain extent the quality of the powder and a little bit to do with the quality of the shot itself again in the mid 1700s which was something of a watermark period for naval gun development the Royal Navy began adopting flintlock firing mechanisms for its guns although they were accurately called gun locks when installed at water cannon as opposed to a pistol these allowed for the gun to be fired much more precisely in time with the given orders as opposed to the old use of a slow match with a priming hull or even in some cases a short fuse this meant that a well-trained gunner who knew his gun very well could at least over a range of several hundred yards pretty much guarantee to within a yard or so where his shot was going to go now a sniper rifle it wasn't but for naval combat might pretty much had the same effect because this meant the accuracy with these gilligan's especially if simple iron sights were installed on them as was done in some navies and on some particular ships was precise enough that instead of hoping to maybe hit a ship with a portion of the guns that you had on your broadside this individual weapon could track in on specific parts of a ship and whilst the first shot might not hit the second or third almost certainly would and so especially when it came to chase guns but sometimes also with the quarterdeck guns which would be sort of somewhat more use in a broadside action the certain Gunners who were particularly skilled could start to pick off things like the helmsman the ship's wheel or take repeated shots into a ship's mast needless to say in the blazing din of battle you probably would attribute the ship's wheel or a mast or an officer being hit by a cannonball to sheer happenstance and blind luck after all the enemy might be firing anything from one to two dozen and anything up to three or four dozen guns at you and so one of those cannonballs hissing something particularly vital might just be written off but these precision gunners would be able to hit those kinds of targets repeatedly indeed in one of the combats towards the later end of this period the battle between HMS Shannon and USS stress a peak one such gonna abort the Shannon not only shot away Chesapeake's wheel but repeatedly blew away a succession of helmsman who tried to get the ship back under control so with the guns themselves now mostly made of iron and standardised quite significantly in terms of appearance and reliability as compared to their earlier iterations what about the size of the weapons and their shot well these two things were intertwined as most guns were rated by the weight of shot that they fired rather than any particular caliber since the caliber was simply held to be however wide a round shot is when it weighs a certain amount this of course meant that gun calibers were a little bit weird when you look at them in pure measurement amounts for example a and 9 pounder gun in an English ship would usually have approximately 4.2 inches of bore whilst a French and 9 pounder gun would have four point three four inches of ore and you might think well why is that cuz surely they're both nine-pounder guns well yes but tolerance is accepted on the windage in British and French guns were slightly different but also the systems of weights and measures were slightly different in each nation and thus whilst everyone might use something that could be loosely translated to a pound measure a French pound would weigh slightly different to an English pound which would weigh slightly different to a Spanish pound etcetera etcetera and as we said they may have slightly different names for this particular unit of weight but what that meant was that the so called say in nine pound a shot would actually weigh something slightly different in absolute terms on different nations ships now if you were say in the on an English ship or a British ship depending on which side of the Act of Union you were on in this era and your pound weight was slightly less than a French pound weight then you're actually in good fortune because with a little bit of extra wadding you could use your nine-pounder cannonballs in a French gun however if the reverse was applied you were a little bit more out of luck since if you were a French vessel if you were to capture a Royal Navy warship you would find that whilst you could use their ammunition you couldn't use their guns because your ammunition wouldn't quite fit the system of weights for guns had actually been inherited from Elizabethan times that would be the late 15 and early 1600s and generally aboard a Royal Navy warship at least you could find a mixture depending on the size of the vessel of six nine twelve eighteen twenty-four thirty-two or forty two pounder guns of the thirty-two pounder and forty two pounder weapons were generally found only on the largest ships of the line and to be honest the twenty-four pounder wasn't exactly that common outside of ships-of-the-line generally although they would feature in smaller ships of the line as the main battery such as on a fourth-rate 64 gunner most frigates would carry a primary battery of 18 pounder or twelve pounder guns depending on their size with the six and nine pounders being used either on unrated vessels as a main battery as a secondary battery maybe on the quarterdeck or similar for frigates or very high up on the ship as specific sniping weapons chase guns signaling guns and supplementary upper deck weapons ownership of the line in other nations there were similar systems of writing called establishments of guns the French for example setting an early one in the late 17th century using 4 8 12 16 24 32 and 48 pounder guns although they would also later go on to adopt a 36 pounder weapon of these the 40-plus pounder weapons fell out of use by about the mid 1750s the guns were incredibly heavy and to be perfectly honest a 42 pounder or forty eight pounder ball was incredibly difficult for one or two men to manhandle in a pitching and rolling ship to be honest they weren't easy things to handle on land either and so the rate of fire and the casualties amongst the gun crew from simply trying to work the guns were very low and very high respectively and so these began to fall out of use with the Royal Navy standardizing on the 32 pounder as its heaviest main ship's gun and the French on the 36 pounder generally speaking for the so-called classic age of sale which ranges depending on who you ask but from roughly the mid 1700s to the early 1800s at its core and extending slightly bit further beyond it and significantly further back by various metrics the typical armament of a Royal Navy warship that had three decks ie a first or second rate would be a lower deck battery of 32 pounder guns than a middle deck battery of either 24 pounder or 18-pounder guns and then an upper deck battery usually of 12 pounder guns with various other weapons scattered throughout the vessel as we mentioned before smaller lighter guns in a various higher locations on a third-rate ship-of-the-line one with two main gun decks you would either have a primary gun deck of thirty two or twenty four pounder guns it varied depending on the exact size and who had built the ship in question with an upper deck battery of either eighteen or twelve pounder weapons occasionally some weaker third rates would have an upper deck battery of nine pounders but this was very rare a fourth rate typically a sixty-four gunner would carry a main battery of 24-pounders with an upper deck battery of nine or twelve pounders although again smaller weaker vessels might carry an 18 pounder lower deck battery but this was exceptionally rare and generally speaking if you were in a 64 gunner that needed a 18-pounder main gun battery it was probably rotted out and desperately trying to get home anyway in the earlier part of his period there were also 50 Gunners which carried twenty four pounder main deck armaments and upper deck garments of twelve pounder guns but these were d rated in the mid 1750s as being no longer fit to stand to the line of battle and since they were somewhat more bulky and more heavily built from frigates they were broken up in relatively short order although a few would continue to be built for various specific purposes usually overseas stations you would then have your fifth rate frigates these would typically carry an eighteen pounder single deck of guns with various lighter weapons usually nine pounders and the odd six pounder scattered higher in the ship a sixth rate would typically be found with a 12-pounder main armament although sixth rates with nine powder main armaments were not necessarily unknown this then helps put into context the oddballs like the American six frigates which carried a main armament of twenty four pounder guns where typically you would expect to find eighteen pounders and of course it also covers the ear as a frigates which were developed from cut-down ships-of-the-line usually taking a third rate and removing a single upper deck level and these would retain their lower gundeck from their previous incarnation and thus you could have razza frigates which would be running around with twenty four pounder main deck batteries and then upper decks that might be carrying a slightly heavier than average secondary gun battery or you might end up with some of the really heavy ones that might even retain a 32 pounder gun deck battery which would be quite the punch for a frigate sized vessel to be seen with and also would then typically carry a slightly heavier upper deck battery as well so into all of this we have to mention two other types of gun because both they're all called guns at this point and we might as well call them cannon because colloquially that's what we know all know the mass now there were two other primary forms of ship-borne ordnance the mortar which was very specialist and the Karin aide which was slightly less specialist the mortar was a very short barreled massive weapon which was designed to lob various projectiles in high arcs counterpart on land would might be the howitzer all then waters were also used on land and the main distinction and being that the mortars tended to just come on a bed which was not particularly mobile whilst howitzers tended to come on carriages now these weapons were not generally used on the average warship because of their high angle of fire this had to a major problems one of which was that well if you're firing at a high angle that means you have to mount the thing on the deck and they were very heavy as I said which had stability issues but also well guns of that time and guns going forward do tend have something from a muzzle flash and what's above the deck of a sailing warship oh yeah sails and rope which are all very flammable you don't really want to be putting long flares of burning gunpowder up in that particular direction but also they were not the world's most accurate weapons without a lot of dialing in and ships tended to move quite well quickly for a mortar like this and so the chance is actually hitting a moving target like a ship with a mortar were pretty slim if you were on another ship the other factor of course or was that because these guns were firing very much higher and they were sitting on a bed and the force of their recoil would be sent straight down into the deck and a lot of ship's decks was simply not set up for the kind of stress that will be involved with it both putting a mortar on top of them in the first place and then having that mortar fire and the force go into the deck so mortars tended to be found on specialist vessels usually called bomb vessels which tended to be a lot smaller and the mortar would be their primary armament they have a few small guns for seeing off boats and maybe the odd small unrated warship but generally these were siege vessels they would be used to bombard forts cities and anything else on land that needed a good seeing - you could aim these either by varying the powder charge which you would sometimes have to do on the so called fixed mortars which could not be changed in the elevation or you could change the elevation of the mortar which obviously needed setter trunnions but this was perhaps a slightly quicker way of dialing the mortar into its target even if his target was something as basic as a gigantic fort as compared to trying to vary the exact amount of gunpowder that you would use to propel your ball given the obviously every time you fired the gun warm water would get hotter and the longer you left it would get cooler so you would never have quite the right idea as to exactly how much gunpowder you were using one of the reasons they were built so massively and weighed so much was because they had next to no recoil space and so they also had to be very strong to withstand the blast and force of their own charge they also fired two types of ammunition which would not be seen in the more conventional horizontal firing ships armament these were shells and so-called carcass shot and yes that is an explosive shell no we won't be dealing with the more direct fire shell guns until the next episode but these shells were fairly primitive weapons if you've ever seen a wily coyote cartoon or other similar cartoon of that era and you've seen the big metal sphere with the fuse coming out the top you're not too far off the shells of this time they were quite literally big cast iron spheres although there were some that were also stone banded together to make sure they didn't fall apart and full of explosive you would put in a fuse you would light the fuse you would then drop the now live shell into the mortar and fire the mortar the shell would go sailing off and after a certain amount of time and the fuse would burn out and the shell would explode whether this was in midair just on target or where it would come crashing down and then explode and do a lot of damage or whether it would come crashing down split apart and just will fizzle and burn a little bit was all a little bit unpredictable and so this was another reason why mortars tended to be used as general area bombardment weapons for fairly substantial targets like forts and cities rather than in any kind of precision strike role the other type of unique ammunition they used was the so called carcass the carcass shot was an early form of incendiary ammunition like the shell it was a hollow iron sphere but instead of being filled with simple explosive it would be filled with all sorts of interesting burner balls tar and pitch being particular favorites after having been set on fire the carcass shot would again be loaded into a mortar and fired happily into the sky it would burn for between five and ten minutes with quite an intense flame and so when it came crashing down in the middle of your target which usually had a lot of burnable x' in it even if it was on land it would present something of a major fire hazard carcass shot was found in more conventional horizontal firing guns occasionally but it was relatively rare one because it took a lot longer to prepare and load and obviously loading a burning piece of ammunition into your gun when your gun has a powder charge waiting inside of it is a little bit more risky but also because these were spheres and wooden ships was made of wood were still built fairly substantially firing a carcass shot at another ship was generally less likely to be a fire hazard and more likely just a way of splattering the side of the ship with a bunch of low water burning and metal fragments which was not really that much of a threat as opposed to say a thirty-two pound a cannibal punching through the side and demolishing everything in its path so with mortars out of the way let's talk for a bit about the Karen aid now the Karen aid was an invention over this period developed in the 1760s by the appropriately named Karen company which was a gun foundry in Scotland and from which the term Karen aid takes its name initially these were actually developed and marketed for use aboard merchant ships because the Karen company manufactured both the weapon and the shot it meant that they could be built too much tighter tolerances than a generally manufactured cannon could be which might have to accept shot from all over the place with slightly different ideas of exactly what constituted bore size the Karen aid was also a lot more lightly built than the cannon because it only used half the powder charge and it was a lot shorter than the cannon which meant that the projectile wouldn't fly anywhere near as far nor anywhere near as fast as a cannon of the same bore diameter but for merchant ships that this was not so much of a problem since their main hazard was fighting off pirates no merchant ship was ever going to fight off a significant sized warship but pirates with light cannon were something of a problem however obviously a merchant ships value is in its cargo and to get at the cargo you had to board the ship and that meant that pirates would tend to approach to a very close range to first try and batter the ship into submission and then of course to try and board so if they were going to come nice and close to you the short range of the Karen aid didn't make too many odds additionally as a merchant weapon it would only ever be loaded with a single round at a time where as long guns as cannons were sometimes called had to be rated against being a double shotted this was the practice of as the term might suggest loading two shots instead of one for that extra bit of close-range punch but something will come and talk about in a minute thus as a relatively small lightweight weapon that didn't take up too much space didn't need too much gunpowder stored aboard and could be operated by a relatively small crew they were relatively popular amongst British merchant men who of course they were marketed to however over time the military more obviously in the Royal Navy in particular and came to see the Karen aid as a useful adjutant weapon that is it wouldn't replace the main battery of a ship but where a ship might carry a 6 9 or maybe even if they were really lucky a 12 pounder on the bow or on the quarterdeck for general purpose use in close quarters a Karen aid actually had a number of advantages specifically the reason that those guns mounted high up on a warship were so light was first ability reasons now with a Karen aid for the same weight you could have a weapon that had a much larger war and there was another advantage because a cannon had to fire at a relatively speaking a long range at very short ranges being the kind of melee swell of a frigate action or the fine pell-mell action of an L Sounion style fleet engagement or just a simple boarding action a cannonball was relatively likely to just punch a hole clean through the enemy ship now this was bad news for anything that happened to be directly in the way but it produced a relatively little in the form of splinters which were one of the primary casualty causing aspects of gun fire at the time and so the overall effect was relatively small unless you switch to some other kind of shot which again we'll discuss in a minute with the Karen aid however you could fit a much larger bore weapon high up in the ship and this because of its lower muzzle velocity would not only send a very heavy and larger projectile through the side of an enemy ship but with its lower velocity it would have more a smashing than a punching effect and create a lot more splinters thus without affecting the overall fighting power of warship at long range with its main battery of get long guns a small battery of Karen aides high up in the ship could offer substantially more close-range firepower than could a handful of small lightweight long guns a few ships were fitted experimentally with all Karen aid armaments as this would theoretically allow even something as small as a fourth-rate to carry a greater weight of broadside than a first-rate with a more conventional armament but whilst this was very successful at close range the fact that warship battles could and did take place at long range as well meant that this was generally not held to be particularly advantageous as an enemy vessel would notice that it was firing at long range and not really receiving any reply come to the fairly obvious conclusion that the enemy ship must either be incredibly stupid or else armed entirely we've Karen aides and in either case you wanted to stay as far away as possible in the first case because you didn't want the stupidity to stick to you in case it was contagious and in the latter case because well broadside from two-dozen and heavy karen aides at close range would probably be the end of you one famous example of both the advantages and disadvantages of this particular type would be the USS Essex of the American Navy in the war of 1812 whilst its replacement of 12 pounder long guns with 32 pounder Karen aid certainly gave it an absolutely vicious bite for a small frigate at short range it would eventually come a cropper when two small Royal Navy frigates armed with a more conventional long barreled guns were simply shot to pieces outside of the range at which it could effectively reply of course once adopted for military use Karen aids became a significantly larger with 32 pounder Karen aides as with the Essex becoming relatively common weapons giving at least a short range it's very small ships the ability to punch with a few weapons that had the same kind of firepower as a first-rate ship of the lines main guns seeing as they were so light they were also highly favored for simply supplementing the ship's battery instead of replacing existing guns and so in the latter part of the 1700s and early 1800s you would find quite a number of ships that were be armed with significantly more guns than their official rating said and these would be largely made up of these lightweight Karen aides one particularly nasty example of the employment of these military-grade Karen aids was HMS victory at the Battle of Trafalgar where in addition to its just over 100 standard long guns some clever person had installed a pair of massive sixty-eight pound - Karen aides on the bow and some bright spark most accounts say a Royal Marine and decided that firing a 68 pound a cannonball at point-blank range into the stern of the French flagship boo centaur was nasty but not nasty enough for his taste and so grabbed a keg of 500 musket balls shoved that in on top impromptu creating the world's largest and most lethal shotgun and probably blasted several hundred of the French crew into oblivion it took other navies a good while to catch on to this particular tactic and so for a good part of the various wars with France that characterized the late 1700s and as they trend into the Napoleonic Wars British warships tended to find themselves with a little bit of an unexpected punch in their batteries which helped greatly when fighting enemy vessels especially those that were ostensibly more heavily armed the French did experiment with a version of the small lightweight low velocity weapon that tried to fire explosive shells similar to those found in mortars but it proved to be a little bit too difficult to operate and fairly dangerous and was phased out fairly quickly of course Karen aides were used at a great effect by other American frigates during the war of 1812 as they're fairly substantial size meant that not only could they carry an unusually heavy 24 pound a main battery but they could also carry some fairly heavy Karen aid batteries as well with 32 pounder Karen aides not being an uncommon sight on ships such as USS Constitution and so heading back to the ship's main battery of long guns we come to the final part of the discussion for this era which is the ammunition now the ammunition that was used was obviously most commonly the simple round shot which as the name suggests is just a big iron all this is multi-purpose I mean an iron Baldr of any particular size traveling at high speed will kill anything that gets in its way also useful at punching holes in the side of enemy ships dismounting guns badly weakening masts and if you're really lucky severing the odd bit of rigging about the only thing they're not particularly brilliant at is getting rid of an enemy's ability to move by punching holes in the sails because well although punching a hole in the sail does reduce its utility somewhat a single small hole in a bit of canvas the size of a tennis court or larger is probably not going to impair the ship all that much there were a few other types though some types of ammunition found in cannon were just used on land and so we'll focus mainly on those used aboard ships if you were jealous of the Karen aide Gunners in you too wanted to own a gigantic shotgun you had two options there was canister shot and grapeshot canister shot was very much like a smaller version of that ingenious gunner aboard HMS Victory in that well as the name suggested it was a can that was filled with a bunch of musket balls obviously not quite 500 but you take what you can get and unsurprisingly this also made the cannon into a giant shotgun the one problem with this is the with the best will in the world a musket ball even if you're fired from a cannon is not gonna penetrate the side of an age of sail warship even at point-blank range you might stick in the sides but you'd really be wanting to use canister to clear the decks on the upper decks and that's probably about it grape shot on the other hand probably still not to get going to get through the side of the first rate but certainly could get through the lighter parts of smaller vessels and would be a lot more effective against the kind of light to medium cover that you get on the deck of a wooden warship as light canister shot it was a collection of small shops all held together but grapeshot would use a significantly larger projectiles as the name would suggest they could be about the size of a grape they could be up to the size of a golf ball or a large marble and yeah that hurt a bit there was as already mentioned the opportunity to fire double shot which you was normally two rounds shot one on top of the other but you could add an additional form of ammunition on top of a single round shot such as canister or grape or some of the others we're going to discuss in a minute these double shot II guns would be used at close range because of course you've roughly doubled the mass that you're firing but you've not increased your powder charge so they're not going to fly as fast and they're not going to fly as far which is similar to how a Karen aid works but for the reasons we discussed with the Karen aid this actually makes them more effective at close range and well since you're firing to lots of ammunition you're gonna hit hopefully twice as much stuff there was also language which was basically the desperate or poor man's version of grape or canister and this was a lot less well regulated and contained this was basically anything hard that might hurt somebody just stuff it all into a small sack or straight down the barrel and fire that and see what happens there was usually a few bits and pieces of debris lying around a ship after any kind of significant battle had gone on for any significant length of time but it was unpredictable and markedly less effective than the more regulation cannister and grape there was also heated shot this was pretty dangerous to use a border ship it was most commonly used by forts but you would occasionally find heated shot being used on a ship as well and again the name is fairly self-explanatory you would heat a shot usually a round shot up to a very high temperature you'd have to use ether clay or dampened wadding to ensure that putting it down the barrel tin immediately set off the charge and leave you with short one rammer and possibly one arm and then you would fire this at your target the idea of this being that when the shot arrives and hopefully sticks in the hull or runs around inside the hull of the ship it obviously being very very very very hot would set off fires aboard the enemy vessel and also could be fairly uncomfortable to try and pick up fire of course being at the big enemy of wooden warships not something you wanted to mess with but the thing is in order to get it up to such temperature you needed a fairly intense fire aboard your own ship and the ship's cook would usually put the galley stove out already so if you were willing to intentionally risk having a very hot fire aboard your ship whilst enemy shot is running through your ship well you might gain some advantage out of it you might also set fire to yourself yes sir common occupational hazard in a lot of places an older form of projectile that was pretty much being phased out by the start of this period but was still around in a few places was the fire arrow although this would be more called the fire spear because that was really the size of it which was basically a spear size with some usually with some fins on it wrapped up with some incendiaries around the shaft and then this whole collection would be blasted at the enemy like a giant arrow and then would stick into something hopefully and then the incendiaries would do their work it was very complicated not particularly reliable and as gun barrel lengths were cut down for weight saving purposes as we mentioned earlier it became less and less accurate and quite frankly it needed a lot of space to store that in the fact that well again it's an incendiary weapon and thus you have to store in centuries aboard your own ship which puts you at quite a lot of risk the last kind of ammunition was anti sail ammunition this would be a type of shot that you would fire to try and bring down enemy sails by ripping them to pieces as well as cutting up rigging and such like this took two broad forms Barr shot and chain shot bar shot generally consisted of two half spheres or disks which were joined by a solid metal bar in some advanced versions this bar could also telescope somewhat and chain shot was pretty much the same idea although usually used a full round shot at either end linked as will come as little surprise to you again by the name by chains lots of things in this period were fairly easily named and the idea of these was that when you fired them because the masses were never quite entirely right and let's face it one had come out slightly before the other they would start to spin like a pair of demented high-speed lethal bowlers and well you can imagine the effect if one of these things especially a long chain shot say wrapped around a mast spinning round cutting through it to a certain degree and then the two shots slamming into it or whirling through the air wrapping around rigging and tearing apart possibly going through sails putting huge rips through them etc etc it was a very good way to immobilize your enemy pretty quickly the one disadvantage of course being that the individual aspects of bar and chain shot was somewhat lighter and a little bit less aerodynamic than the average round shot and so they would do less damage to the hull of a vessel although to be perfectly frank if you fired a raking blast of change shot from some of your higher guns and down the main deck of an enemy warship that's not going to do good things to the crew on any day of the week towards the end of the period we're looking at as the 18th turned into the 19th century there were a few final advances where the guns for this period gun metallurgy improved to the point that the banding on guns was no longer necessary even as a molded item and so can and began to take on a very elongated and smooth appearance but broadly speaking a cannon in 1820 would be just as recognizable to a sailor from 1650 as the reverse it would be slightly shorter a lot less ornate but the functioning mechanisms with perhaps the exception of the flintlock firing device were pretty much the same internally however the cannon had become a lot more accurate it had become a lot easier to manufacture and a lot more reliable it used less powder to get a better effect it could be used in certain circumstances as a kind of gigantic sniper just as much as it could be used in other circumstances as a kind of gigantic shotgun they really were the Swiss Army gun of the Seas but generally speaking in open ocean combat it was cannon of different sizes and the Karen aid that were pretty much all you would find however as the 1820s rolled on new kinds of guns and ammunition would appear guns would become bigger and heavier and of course the shell gun would make its first major combat debut but that's for another time when we look at the development of naval artillery in the 19th century and taking us from the wonderful solid shot cannon that had viced as the main form of naval firepower pretty much since the inception of gunpowder aboard warships through to the advent of the breech-loading rifle guns that would go on to develop into the weapons that would arm the great dreadnought fleets of World War one and World War two but that's for another time for now thank you very much for listening and hope to see you again in another video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: undefined

Views: 206,861

Rating: 4.937748 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, naval guns, naval artillery, cannon, carronade, mortar, HMS Victory, USS Essex, HMS Shannon, carcass shot, mortar shell, roundshot, bar shot, chain shot, grape shot, canister shot

Id: cCF-yST2E3w

Length: 52min 16sec (3136 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/steve7992]

Oh my friend that isn't just one interesting video on naval guns, that's Drachinifel. That's 450+ videos of almost anything naval. It's insanity and if you watched all of the vidoes you'd probably come out with the equivalent of a bachelor's in naval history.