Part of the problem for the 'supergun' was that it was the answer to the question nobody asked. It didn't really offer any advantages over mobile IRBMs and SRBMs, but came with a massive number of disadvantages. The whole concept originated in a relatively innocent space launch concept, which was not to be a weapon, hence not on the receiving end of fire... As an artillery gun, it was pretty much useless, since it wasn't mobile, hence could be hit before it fired its first rounds. In some ways it just recreated the Paris gun of world war one, and if you look at world war two, you notice that there was no new Paris gun!

 

Put simply, it wouldn't have changed the war at all, it would just have been one more fixed, easy to kill target on the list, and as soon as it makes moves towards firing, it hits the top of the list for attacks. Arguably, a coordinated firing of cluster warhead armed Scuds would have been more use than the huge supergun.

 

It is sad, of course, because there was, arguably, some merit in the supergun idea as a satellite launcher, though it did bring with it a whole load of its own problems in that role too.

Oops, sorry, had temporarily forgotten about the V-3 supergun, but it wasn't a success, since it was overrun by the allies before it came into operation.

As a gun, I believe it would have been an abject failure. Scud missiles were fired at israel were quite inneffective and the patriot missiles gave comfort (if slightly misguided), to those on the ground. I was wondering if this would have been more effective at drawing Israel into the war - in spite of American efforts. This is what the Scud missiles were supposed to do. Saddam seemed to feel if Israel joined in the war, then the muslim countries would abandon the coalition. I'm curious how people feel about this, and what a difference it might have made.

 

My contention, is that in this light, the gun could have had made a significant contribution - albeit shortlived.

Had the Supergun been operational at the time of the 1991 Gulf War I sincerely doubt that it would have had any impact on the war, primarily because it probably would have been one of the first targets destroyed by the Coalition Forces.  Once the air campaign began the Supergun most certainly would have been a high priority target for the US Air Force.  More than likely a single aircraft could have taken it out of commission.  It would have been a high priority target for all of the reasons listed above.  I'm sure that the Coalition brass were very concerned about what would happen if the Israelis were to retaliate against Iraq.  The Israelis should a tremendous amount of restraint in not attacking Iraq, but they knew the score.  The only thing that would have guaranteed an Israeli response is if Saddam had attacked Israel with chemical or biological weapons, but I think Saddam probably rightly felt that the Israeli, and perhaps the United States, might have retaliated with nuclear weapons.  It would have been a suicidal move, and as we found out twelve years later, Saddam wasn't all that interested in going down in a blaze of glory. 

The shells would probably been tough enough (after all, they would be designed for be fired from a cannon) that the Patriot missiles could not knock them out, but the rate of fire would probably not exceed 6 rounds a day. 

 

Since it had not ever been fired, it probably would have taken several rounds to range the target, maybe more because of the problems with barrel erosion.  Consider the all the problems that the Germans had with the Paris gun in WWI, and it had only a fraction of the range and muzzle velocity. 

 

Those rounds are big enough to spot on radar, fast enough to cause alarm, and easy to backtrack.  And the launcher has a massive muzzle blast.

 

You might survive to fire a 2nd round, but no way you would get to fire a 3rd.

The G-forces involved would seem to be prohibitive for launching satellites. Maybe if you used an insanely long barrel (even more insane than the 160+ caliber long barrel of the Paris gun, more like on the order of miles) and used a combustion system that released gas relatively slowly to provide a more moderate acceleration.

The accelerations in the Bull supergun are probably lower than in the 155mm.  The real limitation is the small size of the saboted projectile.

i doubt that it was ever intended as a gun, you look at the sort of pressures involved in launching a cannon shell..

would you fire a rifle that's barrel was bolted together in sections?

the scuds were already filling the role , and if saddam had had WMD to fill the warheads with, it would have been way more effective

Bolting a large artillery gun's barrel together in sections isn't exactly unheard of. Look at the aforementioned Paris gun for example.

andyf       12/23/2007 7:31:10 PM

i doubt that it was ever intended as a gun, you look at the sort of pressures involved in launching a cannon shell.. would you fire a rifle that's barrel was bolted together in sections? the scuds were already filling the role , and if saddam had had WMD to fill the warheads with, it would have been way more effective

 

Gerald Bull was an artillery genius.

No, he was THE artillery genius.

He was no sloucher when it came to figuring out the engineering behind ever-increasing ranges in artillery performance (his SRC-developed GC-45 was the first production gun utilizing the more aerodynamically streamlined shells that enable current artillery to shoot so far without RAP- the GC-45's 38+km base bleed range caused some concern for western militaries, whose 39-cal tubes struggled to fire accurately with a RAP out to 36km, especially moreso when it didn't spark much interest in NATO militaries, but did so in embargoed-and-sanctioned South Afrika, and to an even more un-nerving extent, a certain questionable Middle Eastern dictator.

 

Bull was typical of any engineer who wanted to see his ideas and projects brought to fruition.

His work in western artillery test projects the likes of HARP only further honed his skills.

But it was ignorant and self-righteous politics that wrecked everything: western military bureaucracies that expressed minimal, if any, interest in 155mm tubes over 39 calibers, favoring instead tactical aircraft and rocket-based artillery to defend Cold War Europe.

 

And what have we now?

It isn't the US who's garned the top artillery prize in range: it 's the German 52-cal PzH2000 firing South Afrikan ammunition, to a near-75km range, something even MLRS rockets struggle for.

(and the coming generation of bolt-on accuracy-enhancing mechanisms will increase artillery accuracies at those ranges).

 

As far as bolting together sections of a gun tube (necessary because no one even today could fabricate and machine a 1-meter diameter bore artillery tube to a length of >500feet long), the physics of the design were actually sound: torqued to the proper tensioning, even thousands of bolts would've been sufficient to hold the weapon together: just as in today's high performance tank- and artillery gun tubes, the propellant tech in the Bull supergun allowed for a much greater controlled burn, and thus reduced bore erosion, than the much more erosive propellants used in something the likes of the Paris Gun, even several HARP expirements.

 

Suggested reading: anything on Project Babylon. (   link

Ignore all the politics involved and finger-pointing as to who's to really blame over his death.

Bull was indeed an artillery genius, and if anyone could've gotten the formulations down pat to get just such a weapon into service, it would've been him and his team.

Not that I care to entertain the thought of 1300-pound shells raining down on Israeli cities, or anyone else downrange (current efforts in course correction technologies could've placed a considerable number of northern Afrikan and southern European nations in harm's way, from a single fixed installation),

but it would've been fascinating to see in action, if just to prove it would work

(and considering the small fortune the US sunk into HARP...).

 

A foolish waste of resources?

Possibly.

But since when has that ever stopped militaries from spending booku $$$ on a project, up to the point it's nearly production ready (or a lot of useful info and data is gained off the project, only to be swept by the wayside until who knows when it's drug out, dusted off, and resubmitted as yet another money-snatching project, just to reprove sh*t that was discovered years earlier), only to cancel it on grounds of costing too much more money (in addition to what's already been spent), and in the name of politics?

 

My final question in all this still is - if Bull's gun had been able to slam a few of its rounds into a populated Israeli area - with resultant deaths - would Israel or the US have taken out the gun?  It was difficult enough to keep the Israeli's at home when the scuds started flying.  The constant US fear was that a couple of scuds would be very successful, and the Israeli's would retialiate.  Saddam's hope was that this would cause the coalition to lose its Muslim members. I wonder if a few rounds from Bulls gun, unstoppable by the Patriot - or even the appearance of stoppable as with the scuds and patriot - would have created sufficient terror to have made the Israeli's react. If so, its significance might have gone beyond its thereafter extremely short life.

But I was thinking about the question of gun-launching satelites, and that if you made the barrel long enough, you could reduce the acceleration needed to actually orbit something. 400km would reduce the acceleration to something like 5g. If you made the barrel straight you'd have to prop it up on a really tall tower though.

 

But what if you dug it into the ground instead, and the barrel would be in the form of a steel or better yet, ceramic-lined tunnel. You'd have to dig pretty deep. I'm calculating around 15km. The problem is that down that deep it would be really hot.

 

But then I thought what about clamping the launch vehicle in the barrel and pumping in water behind it until the water becomes superheated. Then releasing the clamps would allow the water to boil. Nice thing about phase-transitions is that they happen at a constant pressure so you could get constant acceleration.

 

I'm just not sure about the physics of boiling that much water that fast, and if the steam could physically expand fast enough to propel an object into LEO, much less GEO.

 

It would be incredibly expensive and challenging to build, but probably simplicity itself compared to an elevator. Once it was built, orbiting anything would be extremely inexpensive.

oops, I got myslef confused on the acceleration needed. Escape velocity for a 400km cannon would be 20g. I'm not sure what velocity would be needed at the ground to get LEO or GEO.