What are the Different Types of Shells that the 16in Guns Fire?

[Music] hi i'm ryan zamanski curator for battleship new jersey museum and memorial today we're on the lower shell handling deck of turret number two and we're finally going to talk about the different types of 16-inch shells that uh battleship new jersey could have fired uh we've gotten this question a ton of times including when we were over at battleship north carolina the other week they still use the same size shells yeah i can never remember the marks off of my mind either but yes all of the american battleships even the older like colorado maryland west virginia one of our guests who showed up to see us was specifically asking about well there were older types of 16-inch shells could these fire those could those fire the the types that we fired and so since then i've done some research and we're just going to do a video on all of the different types of shells these guns fired first off they come in two separate flavors and everything else we talk about is just going to be a variation of one or two other so we've got a mark eight armor piercing shell and we've got a mark 13 high capacity round the high capacity round is probably better known as a high explosive that's the one that explodes on impact whereas the armor piercing one has a .033 second time delay fuse which gives it enough time to punch through armor and then explode before it punches completely through a target right now you're seeing fiberglass replicas of the two types here this one painted black and yellow is a replica of an ap shell the ap shells are painted black and the yellow stripe at the top tells you what sort of explosive is inside these would have about a 35 pound bursting charge and explosive d is the compound so all the shells with explosive d have a yellow band painted around the top so besides the paint job you can tell from looking at these fiberglass replicas so first off the mark eights should be six feet tall and the mark 13s should be five feet tall roughly now our fiberglass replicas are all the same height it was just easier to cast them that way but they do look differently so the the ap ones you can see a band right here and they go up to a point that's because this 2700 pound projectile is actually shaped like a bullet it's got a rounded nose under there which is great for punching through armor particularly deck armor so this big pointy cap on top the nose cap is just an aerodynamic windscreen meanwhile the mark 13s are actually shell-shaped conical and they've got uh you'll notice this notch on the top that is because both of these shells have a base detonating fuse which means when they hit something there's there's a timer that goes off that'll set them off the high explosive also has a fuse on the nose which is what this is uh showing now you can fire this with either or both installed but basically nose fuse means it hits the target and explodes like that uh from contact from the nose base detonating means it hits the contact and the shell coming to an abrupt stop causes the base to detonate or set a timer as is the case with the detonator in the ap round simple so that's why they're cast a little bit differently so the bulk of the uh over 1200 of these that nile-class battleship could carry were armor-piercing or high-capacity shells uh and what they carried specifically differed over time and we're not 100 percent sure what the the mix-up would have been from ap to h-e we can say with with a pretty educated guess that probably during world war ii there was a larger number of ap shells and then that number of projectiles decreases and the number of high-capacity rounds increases over time but i can't give you any numbers in 1982 it would have been x number or whatnot for the mark 8 armor piercing shell there is a training round called the mark 9 and that is what's known as a blnp round blind loaded and plugged instead of being filled with explosive d it is filled with sand so this whole shell body is painted blue to show that it will not explode it is still a real shell it still has a brass base ring so you can fire it out of the gun so if you're firing on a target sled maybe um you would use one of these you don't need an explosion you're just trying to put a hole in a piece of paper like using wide cutter rounds in your revolver likewise the mark 13 has blmp rounds also which are called the mark 14 and the mark 15. and they're pretty much the same thing it's the same shell body instead of being filled with powder it's filled with sand and painted blue and you can tell the difference between the two because of this size so in addition to these blue painted blmp rounds which are real shells just filled with sand instead of powder there is a dummy shell and the dummy shell is just a big brass mock-up a solid brass mock-up of one of these and as far as i can tell there's only one type of that they don't distinguish between the five inch and the or the five foot in the six foot variety it's just a here is a one ton brass projectile and that's just something the gun crew can use like sliding around the deck here to learn how they work so i have seen it written that each turret would have had about nine or ten practice rounds like that and then traditionally about 130 rounds per barrel which would have been split between the high capacity the armor piercing and the various blind loading and plugged rounds and in wartime i suspect they were carrying less blmp unless they were going to be doing target practice and more actual war shots and in peacetime i suspect they never carried a full complement of anything uh but a mix of all the different types depending on what they were doing before world war ii was the inner war period the u.s navy developed the mark ape which is known as a super heavy shell and that's what makes the american 16-inch gun special lots of people had 16-inch guns and lots of people had different caliber guns that could arguably be said or better the italian 15-inch guns had the longest range of any of them they use light shells and high velocity charges to get really high ranges uh in practice this isn't always work out like that but theoretically they excel at range the battleship yamato has 18 inch guns with over 3 000 pounds worth of projectile with the armor-piercing shells so that is a lot of stopping power right there but historians come back time and again to the iowa class battleships and say that the 16-inch 50 caliber guns are the best battleship caliber guns ever made and this is debatable like i said other ships did things better the guns are very accurate they had very long lives and they were highly developed in the post-world war ii age to get even longer barrel lives and better accuracy but the thing that makes them special is the 16-inch shell we can still par-buckle these shells around the deck they're not too heavy for that at 2700 pounds but they're so dense that we can still punch holes in battleships like yamato even though they're running around slinging heavier shells so the mark viii is a huge improvement how big of an improvement the earlier mark v shell only weighed about 2200 pounds and the mark iii that that replaced which the earlier 16-inch 45-caliber guns of the colorado class were designed for only weighed about 2100 pounds both of these projectiles are about five feet high like the high capacity round with the newer fast battleships north carolina class south dakota class and iowa class the shell hoists were larger and could accommodate a larger round so by making the armor-piercing projectile a foot taller they were able to develop the mark 8 with extra weight so how do these weights stack up to other countries battleships well great britain built a 16-inch battleship the nelson and that used a projectile that was right around 2000 pounds so significantly lighter than either the mark iii the mark 5 or especially the mark 8. japan used a 16-inch or 16-inch point one on the nagato class and that weighed 2250 pounds similar to the earlier mark iii so the mark 5 were getting a heavier round and the mark we're really getting a heavier round than what everyone else is using and that plays in to the us strategy we figure that our ships are not going to be able to hit a target at extreme extreme range so there's no point in developing a high velocity weapon like uh what the nelson and rodney had or like those italian battleships with their 15-inch guns had the lutorio class plus a high velocity round is going to wear out your rifling a lot more we figure you know beyond 20 miles we're not going to be able to hit the target so these have a range of about 41 000 yards at 45 degrees elevation which is about 20 nautical miles or 23 land miles and that's kind of on the shorter end because they're going really slow at only about 2 400 feet per second and they're really heavy it's called the super heavy round 2 700 pounds that is a lot of freight train to send through the sky uh and that was done intentionally so that our shells would have a really high long arc that would then drop through the thinner deck armor of an enemy battleship rather than into the thick side of an enemy battleship so these shells are optimized for plunging fire that's why they've got the type of round bullet shaped nose that's why they've got the low velocity and the high weight so they go up and then they come straight back down through your deck armor and they're designed to be effective at uh pretty oblique angles as well so whereas normal shells might hit and decap at different angles and not be able to punch through these are designed to have a little bit better performance as far as that goes that brings us back to the mark 13 high capacity why is that five foot when the shell voice can accommodate a six foot shell like the mark viii well it was one thing to design a much better armor-piercing round but the navy decided to standardize the mark 13 round between all of the battleships whether it was the older colorado class or the newer fast battleships so they all fire the mark 13 but only the fast battleships fire the mark 8 the slower standard type have to stick with the mark fives make sense so older battleships with a 16 inch 45 caliber gun have a slightly shorter range than the iowa's 41 000 yards or what have you because their gun is a lower caliber the there is less rifling inside because it is a shorter barrel so the gun the shell isn't spinning as much ours like throwing a football gets up to about 70 rotations per second as it's flung out of the muzzle and this helps it go through the air and it helps it stay on target without wobbling and going all over the place that gets us through the main projectiles for these guns and like i said every other projectile is just a modification of one or the other by and large what i've just described is what these ships would have had during world war ii in the 1950s the major addition is a nuclear-armed projectile or project katie which is the mark 23 16-inch shell they took a much smaller i believe it was an 11 inch artillery projectile which had a nuclear warhead in it and they basically took that warhead and they either put it in an existing mark 13 shell body so it is a 16-inch shell or they made a new shell which for all intents and purposes looks the same as a mark 13. so it's unclear whether they developed a whole new shell or if they were just able to put the warhead in an existing modified shell those shells there's one in existence at a museum in new mexico and that has a green body and a silver nose and stripe i have also seen it with a white body with a silver stripe but i'm not sure if that's just black and white photographs throwing people off or an army coloring scheme if that was different from the navy or what i'm not entirely sure all i can tell you is the only existing 16-inch nuclear shell is painted green uh with the the white stripe so we we've done a separate video on project katie and there's a link in the description below that's one of my favorite videos we've ever done because i feel like it answers a question that we commonly get asked so there's more information on that down below but i'll just say the real shell was a mark 23 and because you always need to practice that was the mark 24. each battleship would have been armed with roughly 10 of each 10 live shells and 10 practice shells 50 total were made and in the early 60s the iowas are no longer in service so they're removed from the inventory again more about that in that other video we did some cool research to find that information during the vietnam war they were doing some interesting things with 16-inch shells the ship was only in commission for a year so even though a couple of research projects were opened up to come up with sabo rounds that would have really long range for for sure bombardment nothing really went anywhere as far as i know the only modifications were what i always call unauthorized ship alts where the ship's crew made modifications during the vietnam war we fired a lot of the high-capacity rounds we could fire one to create a landing zone by defoliating an entire section of jungle and we would do all sorts of bombardments with them the issue is the north vietnamese are very smart they're very good insurgents we start firing rounds they leave the area the firing stops they come back to the area so apparently at some point this phenomenon was passed on to the ship's crew i don't know if it was ground troops who would call them for naval gunfire support and then they don't find any bodies and then a few hours later they're being shot at again after new jersey's no longer there uh or or how this happened i do know captain snyder talked to a bunch of infantry commanders and was always talking to people going ashore bringing them on his ship to show him around so he certainly could have been told that uh something was going on so in this ship's own machine shop they went through and they modified the fuses on these projectiles one they found that the nose detonating fuses for the 16 inch high capacity rounds when they were fired during the vietnam war if they hit raindrops during heavy rain it would explode not too far outside the muzzle so they decided that's a problem they've still got the base detonating fuse so just remove the nose fuse entirely which is something you you can easily do well maybe i can't easily do it but a gunners mate could easily do it and again they were designed with a base detonating fuse in addition to that for this very purpose although they aren't supposed to detonate when they hit raindrops i don't know what went wrong there uh the the second modification that they made on board that's actually a cool modification is in the ship's machine shop they removed the base detonating fuses and they put an overly long time delay fuse on it so at the end of your fire mission where you've dropped a bunch of shells around the enemy you then drop a couple with the long delay fuse in it and maybe they go off an hour later maybe it's 24 hours later i'm not entirely sure what what the length was that they used but it means that when north vietnamese infiltrators come back into the area they assume the ship has left and then boom you've got 133 and a half pound burster charge going off also the north vietnamese were very efficient and recovering duds extracting the ammunition and then using it to fire back in fact communist artillery pieces like the mortar are always slightly larger than american artillery pieces so let's say we've got 81 millimeter mortars we fire that at the north vietnamese well they've got soviet 82 millimeter mortars so they can drop our dud 81 millimeter round in their mortar and fire back at us we cannot drop their dud 82 millimeter mortar in our 81 millimeter mortar tube and fire it back at them so very crafty with things like that so if they try to extract the explosive d from this shell while they're in the middle of that the time delay fuse goes off and vaporizes them as far as i know that's a modification that was only made on new jersey shells during the vietnam war project katie was a modification only made on new jersey iowa and wisconsin because missouri had already been returned to the reserve fleet at that point but then the 1980s come around and all of these other types disappear and we go on to uh a whole new development thread and because the battleships were around for a little bit uh for around a decade in the 80s they did have time to develop some new stuff so first of all in 1981 when the battleship project started they do an inventory they found 15 and 500 mark 13 high capacity shells in the inventory they found 3 200 mark 8 armor-piercing shells in the inventory and they found 2300 practice shells in the inventory the 50 nuclear shells the mark 23s have already been destroyed removed from the inventory any other modifications have been returned to their base configurations uh so these world war ii manufacturer shells are the same ones that these ships are using throughout the 80s and they're the same ones that were demilitarized and given to the various museum battleships as they're turned into museums later on so if you come and visit our parking lot you see a bunch of shells lying around those are some of these roughly 20 000 shells that were left over from the world war ii manufactured inventory into the 80s the the ones that uh are no longer in use by museums i believe have been completely removed from the navy's inventory and scrapped the army also had 16-inch 50-caliber guns as coastal defense that were navy guns designed after world war ii that were a slightly different pattern than the kind used on iowa class battleships so the army had a number of 60-inch shells in their inventory and i remember reading an article not too long ago that they are disposing of them now so that would be by scrapping unless museums were to reach out to them and say hey we want this in which case at the museum zone expense you'd have to go and transport them now at over a ton a piece that's kind of difficult so i'm not sure that anybody has reached out to try and acquire those if you're looking for a 16-inch shell first you've got to become a non-profit organization and then you might be able to reach out to the army if they still have some and take it away at your own expense so when we get into the 80s they start making a bunch of new shells that sort of start renumbering so you've got mark 143 on are these new manufactured shells and by and large these are all just modifications of the existing mark 13 high capacity rounds that are laying around so first off mark 143 yourself which is an he cvt or controlled veritably timed in the video link below we talked about the vt fuse or the proximity fuse this is basically just modifying the point detonating fuse with a variably time fuse which means when you've got the shell in the spanner tray before you ram it into the barrel you turn it for a specific time and then it will detonate after that much time this works really well with short bombardment if you want to use it as an anti-personnel weapon because radar that it's shooting out will hit the ground and receive and explode in the air rather than making a hole in the ground so all that shrapnel goes down on guys in foxholes instead of only destroying the foxhole that it hits i should say at this point the u.s navy did modify some of these hc rounds during world war ii time delay fuses on the nose that were called hc aaa rounds any aircraft now i've often talked about how the japanese navy used in any aircraft shell for their main battery guns and the american navy did not well it does seem like there were some modified for that in the u.s navy inventory i have no evidence of them ever being done but i have seen range tables that show what range and what times you're setting on these fuses and again you set it on the loading tray it doesn't have a uh fuse setter for that kind of fuse in the projectile hoist like the five-inch guns have although there is a fuse setter in the projectile hoist i suspect even though they're called hcaa that it was used for short bombardment rather than aa but i can't say for certain so next we've got the mark 144 round which is an icm or anti-personnel improved conventional munition basically uh the mark 44 you're putting 400 mark 43 a1 bouncing betty hand grenades inside of the cavity of a high capacity shell in place of the 133 and a half pound burster charge so these submunitions are scattered either with an air burst or when it hits the ground and explodes and they bounce up i'm not entirely sure which and then that is a much smaller submunition that is great for anti-personnel or destroying a bunch of unarmored vehicles as opposed to dropping an hc shell on one vehicle similarly the mark 145 is an h-e-e-t-p-t round or high explosive electronic time point detonating uh which again they're just modifying the fuses in this thing they're not really modifying anything else then you get the mark 46 which was a planned projectile and i'm not sure if it was ever deployed but that would have had 666 bomblets in it which would have done the same thing as the the 144 with those bouncing betty bombs same idea just a different submunition on the inside then we've got a round which i have seen listed as the mark 147 but i don't believe was actually ever assigned a mark designation it was a planned round that was never developed and this would have been a 2240 pound hc round uh which would have basically been a whole new shell they instead of using the five foot tall hc round they make it six feet long like the armor-piercing round and so with this new shell you've got a heavier shell with a heavier bursting charge a longer range at 51 000 yards instead of the 41 000 yards that the regular one gets and a higher velocity at about 2 825 feet per second as opposed to 2 400 feet per second for a regular so again that was a plan we've got the shell hoist that can take these we no longer have the older battleships that need the five foot shell so why not make a six foot shell and the iowas are decommissioned this plan goes away around 91. likewise the mark 148 which is an h-e-e-r was also planned tested but canceled in 91 when the battle should start being decommissioned for this they took a 13.65 inch projectile with a sabo on it so it would fit in a 16-inch gun they packed it with 300 grenades submunitions the projectile itself was going to be 300 pounds so much lighter than normal it was going to have a 70 000 yard range or 35 nautical miles so significantly further than any of these because it is a sub caliber round and it was going to travel at 3 600 feet per second it's lighter it can go faster so this is part of the idea of developing longer range shells for the battleships it's a really cool idea it would have required that the mark 8 computers be replaced with an actual digital computer but again as far as i know never actually deployed on the ships and finally another round that doesn't have a number but i've seen it sometimes referred to as the mark 149 that is an h-e-e-r again high explosive extended range round and this one would have only had an 11 inch diameter with a sabo to bring it up to 16 inches so it'll fit in the gun which gets discarded after it leaves the muzzle uh so that the round then goes down to 11 inches and it is light and can go far in this case it goes about 100 nautical miles and only weighs 650 pounds so you are extending the battleship's reach far inland and you are creating a projectile that is much much cheaper than a missile which could also go that range so why use a missile when you've got accurate naval gunfire like this and this concept is one that still exists today the battleships have never been replaced by a cheap gun platform that can provide naval gun fire support at any distance in land so the zumwalt-class destroyers they tried to create extended range guns but because of the small number of ships developing a whole new gun system for them proved to be prohibitively expensive and they have not replaced the battleship's ability to do this uh really the navy doesn't do amphibious invasions anymore and so we don't need this sort of shore bombardment because you can just airlift in your army or marine corps units well behind enemy lines that said something like 75 or 80 percent of the earth's population lives within 20 miles of the ocean so that is within the range of the battleship's guns so maybe it is worth keeping battleships around and developing these shells let us know in the comment section down below what do you think is the coolest type of shells that these ships could fire i'd love to hear from you in the comments section battleship new jersey receives operating support from the new jersey department of state and also from a number of other businesses and private individuals like yourselves there's a link in the description for ways you can support the museum and our youtube channel and we appreciate your donation you can also support us by liking sharing and subscribing that way more people hear about us and learn about the work our museum is doing thanks for watching

Channel: Battleship New Jersey

Views: 199,208

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Id: lGEXyrX8b6g

Length: 30min 23sec (1823 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021