Thursday, October 23, 2014

Slugging It Out, Toe-to-Toe

This is a test of a replica 17th Century naval gun against the hull of a warship.


First off, that's the smoke from just one long gun. The Vasa carried 48 24-pound cannon. While broadsides were not a common tactic in the early 17th Century, the line-of-battle tactics soon evolved and you might have had a ship pounding another with broadsides of 30 guns or more.

Second, note the damage wreaked by that iron cannonball. Besides the ball itself, the splinters thrown from the inside of the hull would have caused fearful damage to the gun crews of the ship so hit.

1 comment:

Dr. Bubbles said...

Have you seen the video of carronades fired against a deck section replica of Oliver Hazard Perry's brigs?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfsuIaTU92Y

It's from 1998 and the video quality isn't great, but still. Since they fired more than the Swedes' single shot it would be nice to know more about it, but all I could find were a couple copies of the same video.