[Political Interest]

On ships and on land how do those giant guns work?.

[smashthestate]

Well most of them function like cannons. You load a shell into the barrel (probably mostly automatic these days) and the firing pin hits the primer. Then the primer ignites the gunpowder, and propels the bullet or payload out of the barrel. It's really that simple.

As far as aiming goes, I'd assume most of it is done by computer now.

[Astaroth]

smash is correct. These weapons are still conventional ballistic type, but they are aimed with great accuracy through the use of supercomputers that are submerged deep in the Pacific Ocean---oh wait..that was something else--must resist--fist--of-----death...

Yeah..he's right...and it's true that these ballistic 'cannons' are aimed through some intensive algorithms run by computers. On our tanks, for example, the cannon is still manually aimed, but the gunner does not have to anticipate the movement of his targets. Through triangulational and ballistic targeting techniques, the onboard optics senses the distance and speed of a moving object and instantly corrects for motion at the moment the gunner pulls the trigger. The cannon will 'skip ahead' and hit the target nearly every time at any speed of travel. This is why my friend who served in Gulf War I as a tank gun loader was laughing when he told me this story of a tank wing gunner that kept on missing his target until his wing commander told him to shove off and let another tank take it out...

Ballistics are interesting enough, but there are much more interesting weapons systems...for example, missile subs--do you know how they work? Did you know that a sub fired patriot missile never touches the water when fired from a submerged sub? The physics behind this system is such that when the weapon is triggered, it is released into a bubble of air that completely surrounds the missile, and the natural bouyancy of the system ejects the missile upward. If you have ever held a cork under water, you'll know that when you let go, it has a tendency to pop OUT of the water. This is used in the missile system; when the missile pops out of the water, it is completely and vertically out of the water, at which point the primer fires and ignites the propellant that starts the vehicle going under its own steam

Torpedoes..did you know that even today they are rarely 'point and shoot' devices like the movies seem to imply? Torpedoes are 'fly-by-wire'! A fired torpedo has a very long wire that is spooled out behind it in which a torpedo specialist can manually guide the torpedo to its target...and that target is rarely the hull of a ship either...did you know that? When a torpedo is fired against an enemy ship, the torpedo is targeted BELOW the ships hull and not at it--it is more damaging to explode a torpedo underneath the hull of a ship than on it, simply because the resulting concussion creates a giant 'bubble' underneath the hull of a ship that evacuates all the water supporting the weight of the hull...the result is a catastrophic hull collapse--on its own weight!!!

Air-to-Air or Air-to-Surface missiles...did you know that American missiles are required to not have any stored charge devices in the detonator system? How can this be if you are supposed to arm and trigger a missile's ordinance to be effective? Well, for the safety of Air Force and Naval personnel, engineers have designed complex gyroscopic devices that are built to ARM the missile at a certain acceleration and speed such that it is physically impossible to arm a fighter-jet fired missile by dropping it or by firing the weapon too close to an enemy. (It's a little more complex than that...but that's good for a starter dose )

Being an engineer for the Army has its perks...but I can't say I even scratch the surface...My roommate from college is in weapons research for the Navy as an electrical engineer...he can't even tell me about the stuff he does...hehehe

Astaroth