So long a go this stuff was built. How in the hell did they get it all to come together and work so well. Lot of iron in those turrets.......HEAVY iron.I can't imagine the the magnitude of it all.... in building it and making it work.
That is wonderful My dad was on the New Jersey during Vietnam. The was in charge of the smaller sized turrets on the side. He told me that they routinely shot at stuff over the horizon.
Swatting files with a sledgehammer though. He told me that the only time that they were even a little bit threatened was when someone was taking shots at them with a howitzer type gun on land and they didn't even have armor piercing rounds. "Don't scratch the paint! I just had it done!"
The Navy's working on the next generation of big gun: the LRLAP (Long Range Land Attack Projectile). The range is 80-100 nautical miles. I did the heat treating on a couple pieces of the projectiles. Big chunks of steel. If I remember correctly, they were 60# each. Thats not the whole projectile, either.
I was on the Missouri this past June. I've got a picture around here somewhere with me standing next to a high explosive round and a armor piercing round. Those suckers are HUGE! I also was able to go into the turrets where the above video was taken. Pretty cramped quarters in there. Even worse in the powder room. If you are outside on deck when one of those guns fired, you were killed by the shock wave.
The fire control room for the guns was pretty cool too. It was quite a ways away from the guns. All analog computers. When the Mighty Mo was refitted with more modern stuff, they had to get the old timers back to train the youngins how to shoot the big guns. They even tried to modernize the fire control with new computers. Miserable failure. First time they fired them all the computers crashed. They went back to the old analog system. I'll see if I can find the pictures and post some of them.
Brad, did I ever tell you that after WWII, my dad worked on the Navy's first vacuum tube computer? He was a radio engineer for B-24s in England, and they needed some one familiar with vacuum tubes. 10,000 tubes, and it was the size of a large room.