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Complementing the 16-in/50 caliber Mark 7 gun was a fire control computer, the Ford Instrument Company Mark 8 Range Keeper. This analog computer was used to direct the fire from the battleship's big guns, taking into account factors including the speed of the targeted ship, the projectile's travel time, and air resistance.
USS Wisconsin (BB-64) is an Iowa-class battleship built for the United States Navy (USN) in the 1940s and is currently a museum ship.Completed in 1944, the ship was assigned to the Pacific Theater during World War II, where she participated in the Philippines campaign and the Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
When reactivated and modernized in the 1980s, each battleship retained the original battery of nine 16-inch (406 mm) guns, but the secondary battery on each battleship was reduced from ten twin-gun mounts and twenty guns to six twin-gun mounts with 12 guns to allow for the installation of two platforms for the Tomahawk missiles.
Wisconsin c. 1918; note the secondary guns have been removed and plated over. Wisconsin continued in her service as a training ship into 1917; she was in the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 6 April when the United States declared war on Germany, entering World War I. On the 8th, the ship began to receive men from the Naval Militia to flesh out her crew.
[35] [36] The guns are housed in three 3-gun turrets: two forward of the battleship's superstructure and one aft, in a configuration known as "2-A-1". The guns are 66 feet (20 m) long (50 times their 16-inch bore, or 50 calibers from breechface to muzzle). About 43 feet (13 m) protrudes from the gun house.
The slow-firing 12-inch (305 mm) main guns were the principal weapons for battleship-to-battleship combat. The intermediate and secondary batteries had two roles. Against major ships, it was thought a 'hail of fire' from quick-firing secondary weapons could distract enemy gun crews by inflicting damage to the superstructure, and they would be ...
A battleship gun barrel used by the Navy in World War II that seemed destined for the scrapyard will soon get a second life. Coast Defense Study Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ...
On 19 April 1989, an explosion occurred within the Number Two 16-inch gun turret of the United States Navy battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) during a fleet exercise in the Caribbean Sea near Puerto Rico. [1] The explosion in the center gun room killed 47 of the turret's crewmen and severely damaged the gun turret itself. [1]