Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Paris Gun
The Paris Gun was an abnormally large artillery piece first used to fire upon Paris, developed by the Germans. It was able to shoot targets at distances of 65-75 miles away, firing up so high (about 24 miles) until the shells actually reached the upper stratosphere. They were so far away that the accuracy was affected by the Coriolis effect, the turning and spherical quality of the Earth. When the Parisienne people were first bombarded by these guns, they believed it to be an air raid and wondered why the air raid sirens had not sounded. In fact, it was these "superguns" firing from so far away. However, because of this great range, they were not actually all that accurate in hitting military targets, and so were not that effective in gaining a military advantage, as compared to the smaller guns with high fire rate but less range. The gun was actually based on a naval weapon and so was manned by a crew of naval personnel. Dr. Fritz Rausenberger was in charge of the development of this massive but short-lived gun.
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5 comments:
Although highly ineffective in war, it's still hard not to marvel at how cool some of these guns were. Using the technology at the time and shooting an explosive shell over 100km while falling back down into earth at speeds around 2000 mph is pretty impressive.
I believe there was like 3 in total, was this the only weapon? Add the different ones that they had in the war and maybe provide there names.
In a time of war when technology was still in its infancy, this gun was somewhat revolutionary in the creation of more accurate guns that had a huge range to destroy.
It's interesting to see how many of the common attributes of weapons we know of today were still in development and not viable yet. The Paris Gun is a prime example of a military advancement in the range that could be covered by artillery, since it was actually able to shoot the shells into the stratosphere. Range had advanced, but accuracy hadn't, and we can see that weapon technology was greatly developed as time went on during WWI.
Although these weapons were very interesting, it's scary to think that they were being used against other people and were often inaccurate and would hit civilian targets instead of their intended target.
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