Why doesn't everyone just make bigger and bigger guns? The bigger the gun the longer the range and the higher the payload. Especially with modern wars having a frickload of counter arty and smart artillery shells becoming more common even something like 250mm or 300mm seems to make sense. And even then the vehicle will only weigh similar to an MBT.
precision>fire power
With a bigger gun you'd get bigger Excaliburs with more payload and range.
Heavy for logistics.
Checked
The reason 105mm tube existed in the NATO arsenal for so long is because the 105s could be air deployed but 155mm tubes couldn't, the guns were too heavy for the helicopters. M777 with its titanium build is now light enough to be air-deployed so 105s are being phased out.
If weight concerns apply for the standard 155mm imagine what happens with the 8" guns or even bigger. Moving them around is a nightmare, not to mention the shells to go with them. The West used to have 8" guns but phased them out almost entirely by the year 2000.
If you really need big warheads on a forehead really far away, use rocket artillery that get lots of range and the platforms are far more manouverable than equivalent gun artillery. If you still need to go bigger use a bomb or missiles. Those will have even more boom. No gun is useful or worth the cost at that point.
Also, any stupid huge gun is stupid huge target. Look at how quickly TOS-1 systems are targeted in Ukraine and those are somewhat survivable compared to any massive cannon would be. Anything that can deal a lot of damage is a high-priority target it may be better to not put all your eggs in one basket with your super mega cannon
>stupid huge gun is stupid huge target
>looks at BBs and CVs in ww2
Yeah
>105s are being phased out
No they aren't. They are much cheaper and much more mobile than 155s. 120mm mortars didn't make 81mm or 60mm mortars obsolete.
155mm shells (about 100lbs / 50kg) are about as heavy a person can reasonable lift, Same as the 120mm mortar about 30lbs / 15 kg, is all a person can lift up and drop in a tube.
holy quints of sad truth 🙁
Heavy shells do heavy damage so you need to fire less of them which means that you have to haul less of them so the logistical impact is the same.
no because 1 precision shell landing on an artillery piece isn't worse than 1 heavy precision shell landing on an artillery piece.
Too big of a gun becomes awkward in many ways, you need a lot more logistics to get an equivalent number of shells up, price of the gun and shells, they are slower to load, the guns are slower to move. A 300mm shell is going to weigh about 8 times as much as a standard 155mm shell and to load it you will need crane. A lot of basic artillery support or duels relies on fast follow up shots which you can't achieve with this system.
Longer range and more payload is something that is more easily covered by GMLRS rockets, JDAM's, ATACMS and other various long range systems that don't need a massive gun to launch.
>And even then the vehicle will only weigh similar to an MBT.
And that's really fricking heavy. If the weight can be brought down it's much easier to transport. They experimented with mounting 240mm Howitzers on a stretched tank chassis during WWII to make the T92 Howitzer Motor Carriage, which weighed about 60 tons. They built a handful, found they were hard to use because of their high weight, and didn't bother to order more.
Bigger guns were for bombarding dug-in fortifications before smart weapons. The 155mm began as a spec for killing platoon sized bunkers.
But the bigger the shell, the slower the ROF, due to heat but also physical loading. A 155 is the largest shell which is practical to manually carry.
It's also a ROF fast enough (2-4 shells/minute x 6 guns = a minimum of 1 shell per 5 seconds) to suppress enemies which is the modern role of guns.
If a large payload is what you want rockets are superior to guns in both range and rate of fire. Guns are for volume, and 155 is the meta/cap.
Before guidance, 203mm was a thing for dumb bombardment of deeper bunkers, and it competed against 155 to become the standard but barrel problems in the Vietnam war ensured that didn't happen.
>t. Gerald Bull
I know they faked your death so you could create the ultimate supergun in a secret Antarctic lab.
What you've just described is MLRS.
The problem with bigger guns becomes something akin to the cubed square law. Bigger bullet means bigger pressure which means bigger gun which means bigger support structure. Eventually you reach a point in size where the found out it was just easier to strap the massive shell onto a rocket and just send that instead.
>square cubed
my bad brain said that backwards
the real implication of the square law is that the bigger you make a bomb, the more explosive power you waste. To make a blast radius twice as large, you need 4x the explosives. pic related
This. Blast damage is probably not even a square of the charge, but a cube, due to energy dissipation in 3 dimensions. It's a lot more efficient to send a bomb that does just enough damage with optimal charge size and precision to accomplish a particular task you.
*you want it to accomplish.
I've always kinda considered this the reason that Russia went so hard into Thermobarics. The only real way to add explosive bang for the soldier's capacity buck.
Esp given their history with huge explosives (Tsar Canon, Tsar Bomba, etc)
Missiles are more efficient at long range.
>Why doesn't everyone just make bigger and bigger guns?
It has been tried and abandoned.
Above a certain point, you start getting diminishing returns, like with everything else.
It'll be more effective targeting an area with a dozen of 155mm guns that can fire rapidly and then scoot than a corresponding number of bigger caliber guns.
With big guns you get clumsy transportation (making it a juicy target for retaliation in many forms), slow reload times, big strain on logistics and high rate of wear.
Big yield nukes also got abandoned in favor of MIRVs which can saturate an area better.
Look, you're right... but how the frickoff huge super guns just look awesome.
Heavy artillery is more important than ever, but after WW2 it become obvious to everyone that rockets filled the role better than guns. A rocket has a longer range, a larger payload, and it's much easier to fit with guidance mechanisms.
When did rockets actually surpass tube artillery in the traits you describe?
My understanding of rockets during WWII was that they were fricking awful and required a LOT of saturation (ie katyushas, nebelwerfers to a certain degree) to be effective. What was the breakthrough design for this?
the gulf war when the MRLS system schwacked Saddams guns and Anti Air guns. That war was basically the death of the old dominance of big guns in warfare, the guided missiles reigned as king after that.
Too bad that the BVLL of BIG GUNS isn’t around anymore… he was too based for this world.
Bigger guns tend to have slower rates of fire and higher costs. In terms of raw kill count you're better off with smaller guns that are cheaper and shoot faster.
Bigger guns need bigger roads and bigger trucks/trains to move them about. And you can forget about setting up off-road when you're so heavy you immediately sink into the earth.
because rocket propulsion exists
Guided Missile Artillery seems to be winning the day over Guns at the moment.
>What is square-cube law?
At a certain point a missile just becomes more efficient
We should make precision 16 inch shells.
>WHY DONT WE JUST???????
so tired of these threads
Too hard to steer at speed.