Gustav Gun - The Largest Gun Ever Built

[Lankan Ranger]

Gustav Gun - The Largest Gun Ever Built

 

[Lankan Ranger]

 

[jayron]

Thanks for the awesome pics Srilankan

 

[darkhand08]

Does anyone have info about this gun....i mean ...how effective was this gun....was it ever used in a battlefield scenario et al..??
This gun does look like a piece of work...:O

 

[paritosh]

they said it could fire from berlin to moscow...!

 

[StingRoy]

@darkhand... look at the following link. It was also called the Railway Gun.

Railway gun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Jungibaaz]

This thing only fired three rounds in anger in WWI, it was de-assembled and then reassembled every time it moved.

It has a huge 800mm round and takes about 30-45 minutes to reload.

 

[Tayyab1796]

I have had the opportunity to look at the crater made by the exploding shells fired by this gun in Belgium . ... The crater is about 15-20 feet deep and about the size of a football field ... The shells fired by this gum was larger then the size of an average man . It was not money well spent though because this gun had inherent flaws owing to the fluid nature of the battlefield in WW2.

 

[BritishBangladeshi]

Sorry sri lankan but I don't know my history very well, this seems very intresting to me but it looks more like a artillery than a gun, I am really confused

 

[Chogy]

Gigantic guns have come in many flavors and sizes between the world wars. In WW1, there was the fabled "Paris Gun":

The Germans never made it to Paris, but this thing did - it dropped a large number of shells into Paris and caused a lot of terror.

There was another huge piece fielded by the Germans in France across the straights of Dover - WW2 - and it couldn't make London, but it terrorized farmers who worked the fertile plains above the chalk cliffs.

Their effectiveness was rendered moot by aircraft, who could not only carry a larger load, they could attack giant guns like these with ease.

 

[Chogy]

Lest we never forget the REAL largest gun - Atomic Annie:

 

[Muhammad-Bin-Qasim]

Have all of these guns on video... How far away does the atomic Annie fire Chogy? If I remember correctly there is a scene of Atomic Annie firing in the documentary "Fog of War"

 

[Chogy]

Atomic Annie fired only ONE real nuclear shell, the test from the photo above.

Pretty intense when a somewhat fragile nuclear package was subject to the severe forces upon firing. I'll bet a few guys near the gun were pretty nervous! I'm sure they fired hundreds of shells without the nuclear core to ensure it could be safely fired with a real core.

It was deployed in Europe in small numbers during the cold war, and I don't think it was ever fired in anger. 280mm shell, 20 mile range.

Atomic Annie

 

[Water Car Engineer]

Atomic Cannon

SCHWERER GUSTAV

 

[Chogy]

The Atomic Cannon video was cool, but it was a composite of several tests. When it cuts to the car, the trees, and the bus, that was from a larger nuke test.

Watching the car is a good lesson in nuke effects. The first to hit the car is the thermal pulse. The car doesn't move, but the paint is instantly burnt, and flashes to dust. Same with the bus. Then, the blast and shock wave hits, and the car is tossed like a toy.

The trees show the shock wave outwards, then the return airflow to fill the void. Really interesting (and frightening) stuff.

The cannon shell was a very small nuke with a yield of a kiloton or less.