Spanish Armada defeated by 'super guns'

[coliver988]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7899831.stm

"that that navy had worked out that a lot of small guns, all the same, all firing at once, were more effective than a few big guns"

Must be organized into batteries...

 

[fiat_knox]

H'mm. We need to come up with something for vehicle design that takes into account antique wooden - hulled sailing ships and brass cannon.

 

[mbrinkhues]

H'mm. We need to come up with something for vehicle design that takes into account antique wooden - hulled sailing ships and brass cannon.

MegaTraveller had an article or two on ship design in the CHALLENGE.

 

[Easterner9504]

Gunnery

Don't see applicability to TRAVELLER. Age of Sail combat though measured in yards could easily have been measured in feet. TRAV combat is measured in miles, fleets can engage at thousands of miles. I just finished a close in action at 5,000 miles! Large battery of smalls was obviated at Tsushima and done away with by HMS Dreadnought, smalls made comeback after treaties. Guns now almost completely gone from modern ships.

 

[Madarin Dude]

I could see a few ways that this could be used. The way that the guns were uniform you could make a force with uniform gun sizes basically a ships laser can be mounted on an armored vehicle etc. Maybe the turrets have 2,4.6 lasers instead of 1,2,3 so that they can be uniform from vehicles to starships.

 

[rust]

A nicely written article, but somewhat unconvincing. According to the histo-
rical accounts, the Armada lost only 7 of the 130 ships in combat, and 2 of
those were lost as a result of accidents. It really does not seem that the
English "superguns" had much to do with the defeat of the Armada.

 

[Peter Schutze]

my understanding was that the whole thing came down to methodology rather than the weapons themselves.....

heavily drilled british crews trained to aim vs typically trained crews on the spanish vessels that didnt aim, just pumped out the balls at a steady rate (thus wasting about 30% of shots into the water)

in traveller terms: veteran british crews with a good targetting computer vs trained spanish crews firing on local control

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Previously, all cannons were one-offs, with different calibres, so they couldn't share ammunition. These were all the same, which made life a lot easier.

I don't think the improved training began until later.