Amazon Ad

Friday, July 13, 2007

So, how heavy would a cannon ball for an 11in Dahlgren be?

Probably, no one but me worries about such things, but I wondered how heavy the cannon ball was for an 11in smoothbore Dahlgren gun, such as used by the USS Monitor in 1862. I have an empirical formula for cannon balls from the "Age of Sail". This is the formula:
Shot weight = (gun bore in inches)^3 / 8

For an 11in gun, that gives a shot weight of 166-3/8 lbs. For comparison, a smoothbore 32pdr would have a bore of about 6.35 inches. While my system is inexact, it gives a rough idea of the relationship between bore size and cannon ball weight. For stone shot, the divisor is 22. The shot weight of an a nominally 8 inch stone gun shot would be 24 lbs, but this this actually requires a slightly larger bore of 8.08 inches. This is not a large difference, but enough to matter. You might ask why my interest? For one, I have an Old Dominion University College of Sciences calendar in my cube, and the picture for June was of a professor standing next to a Dalhgren gun that they had raised from the wreck of the Monitor.

No comments:

Amazon Context Links