Wire tube

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Sectional drawing of the wire cannon BL 6-inch naval gun Mk XII Weight: 6,998 kg
Sectional drawing of the wire cannon QF 6 inch / 40 naval gun Weight: 6,600 kg
BL 12 inch Mk VIII naval gun a wire cannon on the HMS Canopus (1897)
BL 12 inch Mk VIII naval gun a wire cannon on the HMS Caesar (1896)

A wire barrel is a type of weapon barrel where the barrel is wrapped with steel wires. Weapons with this type of barrel are called wire barrel cannons or wire guns . To modernize the artillery with lighter and more powerful guns, new designs were required in the second half of the 19th century. The wire tube, as a variant of the multi-layer tube , was one of these developments.

history

In terms of construction, wire tubes go back to early bar ring guns such as Mons Meg or Pumhart von Steyr and to the later ring tubes . A feature of these guns were rings that enclosed the barrel. James Atkinson Longridge designed reinforcements for weapon barrels, which consisted of profiled steel wire , around 1855 . During the construction, the inner tube was first wrapped in a spiral shape under a defined tension and then the whole thing was protected and further reinforced with an outer tube. The layers of wire applied a compression pressure to the inner tube through their winding tension, which counteracted the expansion pressure of the powder gases. The tensile strength of the wires for the windings was significantly higher than the strength of the material from which normal gun barrels of that time could be made. This enabled considerable weight savings. The draft was examined and rejected by the Ordnance Select Committee in Woolwich in 1855 . Nevertheless, Longridge was elected member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1856 . In 1860, the development of wire tubing in Great Britain received wider attention with a detailed discussion that also included Whitworth and Armstrong . From 1893 both Armstrong via the Elswick Ordnance Company and the Royal Arsenal Company in Woolwich manufactured ship guns using the wire system. Subsequently, important British warships were equipped with around 75 cannons of this type from 1884 to around 1901. For all these guns with the calibers: 15.2 cm L / 50; 23.4 cm; 30.5-cm L / 35, L / 40, L / 50 there were technical difficulties, which led to the exchange of the guns. 1904 basic problems were Rohrkrepierern in English wire cannons in the Imperial Japanese Navy known. Seven of the sixteen guns of the warships Mikasa , Asahi , Shikishima and Fuji were reported to have cracked guns in the naval battle in the Yellow Sea on August 10, 1904. In the period that followed, there was intensive research and discussion in Germany on constructive problems with wire tubes.

See also

literature

  • Charles Dickens : Strong Guns in All the Year round , September 15, 1869
  • Friedrich Dörge: The history of the wire gun barrel . In: History of technology: Contributions to the history of technology and industry . No. 27 , 1938, pp. 30-40 .
  • Otto Lueger: Lexicon of the entire technology and its auxiliary sciences, Bd. 3 Stuttgart, Leipzig 1906.
  • E. Hartmann: Technology and Wehrmacht , War Technology Journal, 1906

Web links

Commons : cannon constructions  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Enke: Fundamentals of weapon and ammunition technology , Walhalla Fachverlag , 2020, ISBN 978-3-8029-6215-8 pp. 133-135
  2. ↑ a b biography of James Atkinson Longridge at gracesguide.co.uk ( Memento from May 30, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ a b Otto Lueger: Lexicon of the entire technology and its auxiliary sciences, Vol. 3 Stuttgart, Leipzig 1906., pp. 31–32
  4. ^ Charles Dickens: Strong Guns in All the Year round, September 15, 1869, pp. 545-549
  5. ↑ E. Hartmann: Technology and Wehrmacht , War Technology Journal v. Bahn, first issue, pages 1 to 9