Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns and Gunnery
Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns and Gunnery

Author: Norman Friedman

Publisher: Seaforth Publishing

Published: 2014-01-21

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1848321775

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This book does for naval anti-aircraft defence what the author's Naval Firepower did for surface gunnery ‰ÛÒ it makes a highly complex but historically crucial subject accessible to the layman. It chronicles the growing aerial threat from its inception in the First World War and the response of each of the major navies down to the end of the Second, highlighting in particular the widely underestimated danger from dive-bombing. Central to this discussion is an analysis of what effective AA fire-control required, and how well each navy's systems actually worked. It also takes in the weapons themselves, how they were placed on ships, and how this reflected the tactical concepts of naval AA defence. As would be expected from any Friedman book, it offers striking insights ‰ÛÒ he argues, for example, that the Royal Navy, so often criticised for lack of 'air-mindedness', was actually the most alert to the threat, but that its systems were inadequate not because they were too primitive but because they tried to achieve too much.??The book summarises the experience of WW2, particularly in theatres where the aerial danger was greatest, and a concluding chapter looks at post-1945 developments that drew on wartime lessons. All important guns, directors and electronics are represented in close-up photos and drawings, and lengthy appendices detail their technical data. It is, simply, another superb contribution to naval technical history by its leading exponent.

Naval Ordnance and Gunnery
Naval Ordnance and Gunnery

Author: Bureau of Naval Personnel

Publisher: Periscope Film LLC

Published: 2013-05

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 9781937684228

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Naval Ordnance and Gunnery is the most definitive book to emerge from WWII on the subject of naval ordnance and fire control. Encyclopedic in content, the text runs nearly 600 pages and is richly illustrated with photos and diagrams of systems used on destroyers, cruisers, battleships and other warships. Within its pages you'll find detailed descriptions of weapons and ammunition, and discussions on subjects from gun design and construction, to fire control and trajectory analysis. Individual chapters discuss explosives, ammunition, gun assemblies (including barrels, breech assemblies and mounts), turret installations, semi-automatic guns, machine guns, small arms, torpedoes, depth charges and mines, and a history of fire control. Chapters about the fire control problem include studies of gun sight principles, range measurement, the surface problem, the AA problem, fundamentals of director control, dual-purpose battery fire-control system, main battery fire-control system, machine-gun control, torpedo control, spotting, and organization and communications systems and procedures. The book's easy-to-understand text explains the myriad complex problems affiliated with gunnery, and is an indispensable reference for the historian, docent or modeler intent on understanding how WWII gun crews and systems operated. Work on Naval Ordnance and Gunnery began in 1943 at the request of the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Personnel. A capable team of five officers, working as writers and editors, compiled the book from a wide variety of sources including curriculum documents from the U.S. Naval Academy and Midshipmen's Schools, material from the Bureau of Ordnance, and various publications from the General Motors Corporation (which designed and built many of the 20mm and .50 caliber guns described in the book). Although it was declassified after WWII, it's never been easy to obtain a copy of this text. This high quality reprint includes all the original text, diagrams and photographs from the original 1944 edition.

Field Artillery Manual Cannon Gunnery
Field Artillery Manual Cannon Gunnery

Author: Department of the Army

Publisher:

Published: 2017-08-19

Total Pages: 664

ISBN-13: 9781975605674

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Training Circular (TC) 3-09.81, "Field Artillery Manual Cannon Gunnery," sets forth the doctrine pertaining to the employment of artillery fires. It explains all aspects of the manual cannon gunnery problem and presents a practical application of the science of ballistics. It includes step-by-step instructions for manually solving the gunnery problem which can be applied within the framework of decisive action or unified land operations. It is applicable to any Army personnel at the battalion or battery responsible to delivered field artillery fires. The principal audience for ATP 3-09.42 is all members of the Profession of Arms. This includes field artillery Soldiers and combined arms chain of command field and company grade officers, middle-grade and senior noncommissioned officers (NCO), and battalion and squadron command groups and staffs. This manual also provides guidance for division and corps leaders and staffs in training for and employment of the BCT in decisive action. This publication may also be used by other Army organizations to assist in their planning for support of battalions. This manual builds on the collective knowledge and experience gained through recent operations, numerous exercises, and the deliberate process of informed reasoning. It is rooted in time-tested principles and fundamentals, while accommodating new technologies and diverse threats to national security.

Naval Guns
Naval Guns

Author: Hans Mehl

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13:

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The history of naval artillery is a long and complex one and this highly-illustrated, single-volume work sets out to present a coherent story which will appeal both to the enthusiast as well as to the scholar and expert. It starts with the earliest guns, the bronze-cast cannon, which were cast employing the same technology as used for making church bells. A plethora of guns were soon to develop and along with them a multiplicity of names: basilisk, bombard, culverin, drake, minion, saker, passavolante, serpentine, and many others. By the end of the seventeenth century this muzzle-loading, smoothbore weapon had pretty well reached the zenith of its development and not until the introduction of armour and the explosive shell in the nineteenth century was there any fundamental change. With the development of breech loading and rifled barrels the rate of fire, range and accuracy improved dramatically. Today the navies of the world have fully automatic guns which load, train, lay and fire themselves with deadly accuracy.