German Rail Gun

[browningautorifle]

If I'm not mistaken Gerald Bull was assassinated.

I think they used a plane crash to do it.

[CINDERS]

From wikipedia the Mossad were implicated in the assassination of Bull as he agreed to assist Saddam in extending the range of the SCUDS which made him an enemy of Israel also the range for the HARP ~ The project was based on a flight range of the Seawell Airport in Barbados, from which shells were fired eastward toward the Atlantic Ocean using an old U.S. Navy 16-inch (410 mm), 50 caliber gun (20 m); it was later extended to 100 caliber (40 m). In 1966 the project installed its third and final 16-inch gun at a new test site in Yuma, Arizona. On November 18, 1966 the Yuma gun fired a 400 lb (180 kg) Martlet 2 projectile at 7,000 ft/s (2,100 m/s)[1] sending it briefly into space and setting an altitude record of 180 km (590,000 ft; 110 mi); that world record still stands as of 2013.[2]

As for Gustav this about sums up the two of them, however I did not know one of these rounds capsized a large ship in the harbor though ~ The largest gun ever built was the "Gustav Gun" built in Essen, Germany in 1941 by the firm of Friedrich Krupp A.G. Upholding a tradition of naming heavy cannon after family members, the Gustav Gun was named after the invalid head of the Krupp family - Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. The strategic weapon of its day, the Gustav Gun was built at the direct order of Adolf Hitler for the express purpose of crushing Maginot Line forts protecting the French frontier. To accomplish this, Krupp designed a giant railway gun weighing 1344 tons with a bore diameter of 800 mm (31.5") and served by a 500 man crew commanded by a major-general.

Two types of projectiles were fired using a 3000lb. charge of smokeless powder: a 10,584 lb. high explosive (HE) shell and a 16,540 lb. concrete-piercing projectile. Craters from the HE shells measured 30-ft. wide and 30-ft. deep while the concrete piercing projectile proved capable of penetrating 264-ft. of reinforced concrete before exploding! Maximum range was 23 miles with HE shells and 29 miles with concrete piercing projectiles. Muzzle velocity was approximately 2700 f.p.s.

Three guns were ordered in 1939. Alfried Krupp personally hosted Hitler and Albert Speer (Minister of Armaments) at the Hugenwald Proving Ground during formal acceptance trials of the Gustav Gun in the spring of 1941. In keeping with company tradition, Krupp refrained from charging for the first gun - 7 million Deutsch Marks were charged for the second (named Dora after the chief engineer's wife).

France fell in 1940 without the assistance of the Gustav Gun, so new targets were sought. Plans to use Gustav against the British fortress of Gibraltar were scrapped after General Franco refused permission to fire the gun from Spanish soil. Thus, April 1942 found the Gustav Gun emplaced outside the heavily fortified port city of Sebastopol in the Soviet Union. Under fire from Gustav and other heavy artillery, Forts Stalin, Lenin and Maxim Gorki crumbled and fell. One round from Gustav destroyed a Russion ammunition dump 100 feet below Severnaya Bay; a near miss capsized a large ship in the harbor. Gustav fired 300 rounds during the siege wearing out the original barrel in the process. Dora was set up west of Stalingrad in mid-August but hurriedly withdrawn in September to avoid capture. Gustav next appeared outside Warsaw, Poland, where it fired 30 rounds into Warsaw Ghetto during the 1944 uprising.

Dora was blown up by German engineers in April 1945 near Oberlichtnau, Germany, to avoid capture by the Russian Army. The incomplete third gun was scrapped at the factory by the British Army when they captured Essen. Gustav was captured intact by the U.S. Army near Metzendorf, Germany, in June 1945. Shortly after, it was cut up for scrap thus ending the story of the Gustav Gun.

[Gil Boyd]

Flying10UK,
Yes it is still there on show at the IWM Duxford. How things might have been so different had that gone into use before it was spotted!!!!

[CINDERS]

Yes and I am quite sure Saddam would not have used conventional explosives in the rounds rather nerve agents and plague type diseases mind you with the amount of Nuclear subs left rotting in the Soviet union whose to say uranium or plutonium was not accessible to him, money and promises do funny things to people............

[Gil Boyd]

I might have this wrong, but I thought it was being built in a direction to drop "whatever" onto Isreal.
Now that would have been a different outcome to where we have spent the last 15 years in both Iraq and Afghanistan!!

[Flying10uk]

What was slightly brilliant about some of Bull's designs of shells for some of his large calibre guns was the thick outer protective sheathing which was fired with the shell. This then parted company shell shortly after it left the muzzle and then dropped away. This meant that the diameter of the shell was significantly smaller than the bore of the gun but also allowed for the provision of stabilising fins to be incorporated into the design of the shell. I would guess that these fins would more than compensate for the lack of a rifled barrel.

[imntxs554]

I think they used a plane crash to do it.

Jim, You might be correct. There were several ways mentioned as to how he was assassinated. Several years back I saw this Special on the History Channel about the Doomsday Gun. This man they interviewed said he was walking towards his apartment and was shot 3 times in the back and 1 behind his ear with a .22., but it could of been a story to not tip off who had done it, but I think a lot of people knew it was done my Massad. They even mention when they found him in his briefcase there was documents, schematics and 20,000 thousands in cash. Go Figure somebody didn't want that gun pointing towards somewhere.

[CINDERS]

Money and promises a bad idea that some one did not like, I have seen doco's on the Mossad apparently they are renown for blending in and getting away.

[Mk VII]

A 28-cm German railway gun exists at the Batterie Todt Museum near Calais. It slumbered in a French artillery depot after the war until disposed of to M. Davis Krupp K5 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[imntxs554]

Money and promises a bad idea that some one did not like, I have seen doco's on the Mossad apparently they are renown for blending in and getting away.

That movie "MUNICH" showed how well they blended in.