WEIRD WEAPONS

 Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about

Paris Gun

The German Paris Gun, also known as Emperor William Gun, was the largest gun of World War I. In 1918 the Paris Gun shelled Paris from 120 km (75 mi) away.

The Paris Gun (German: Paris-Geschütz / Pariser Kanone) was the name given to a type of German long-range siege gun, several of which were used to bombard Paris during World War I. They were in service from March to August 1918. When the guns were first employed, Parisians believed they had been bombed by a high-altitude Zeppelin, as the sound of neither an aeroplane nor a gun could be heard. They were the largest pieces of artillery used during the war by barrel length, and qualify under the (later) formal definition of large-calibre artillery. 

Also called the "Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz" ("Emperor William Gun"), they were often confused with Big Bertha, the German howitzer used against Belgian forts in the Battle of Liège in 1914; indeed, the French called them by this name as well. They were also confused with the smaller "Langer Max" (Long Max) cannon, from which they were derived; although the famous Krupp-family artillery makers produced all these guns, the resemblance ended there.

As military weapons, the Paris Guns were not a great success: the payload was small, the barrel required frequent replacement, and the guns' accuracy was good enough for only city-sized targets. The German objetive was to build a psychological weapon to attack the morale of the Parisians, not to destroy the city itself.

Due to the weapon's apparent total destruction by the Germans in the face of the final Allied offensives, its capabilities are not known with full certainty. Figures stated for the weapon's size, range, and performance varied widely depending on the source—not even the number of shells fired is certain. With the discovery (in the 1980s) and publication (in the Bull and Murphy book) of a long note on the gun written shortly before his death in 1926 by Dr. Fritz Rausenberger, who was in charge of its development at Krupp, the details of its design and capabilities were considerably clarified.

The gun was capable of firing a 106-kilogram (234 lb) shell to a range of 130 kilometers (81 mi) and a maximum altitude of 42.3 kilometers (26.3 mi)—the greatest height reached by a human-made projectile until the first successful V-2 flight test in October 1942. At the start of its 182-second trajectory,each shell from the Paris Gun reached a speed of 1,640 m/s (5,400 ft/s) or 5,924 km/h (3,681 mph).

The distance was so far that the Coriolis effect—the rotation of the Earth—was substantial enough to affect trajectory calculations. The gun was fired at an azimuth of 232 degrees (west-southwest) from Crépy-en-Laon, which was at a latitude of 49.5 degrees north.

Seven barrels were constructed. They used worn-out 38 cm SK L/45 "Max" 17,130 mm gun barrels that were fitted with an internal tube that reduced the caliber from 380 millimeters (15 in) to 210 millimeters (8 in). The tube was 21 meters (69 ft) long and projected 3.9 meters (13 ft) out of the end of the gun, so an extension was bolted to the old gun-muzzle to cover and reinforce the lining tube. A further, 6-meter–long smooth-bore extension was attached to the end of this, giving a total barrel length of 37 meters (121 ft).

The unfinished V-3 cannon would have been able to fire larger projectiles to a longer range, and with a substantially higher rate of fire. The unfinished Iraqi super gun would also have been substantially bigger.

The Paris Gun shells weighed 106 kg (234 lb).:120 The shells initially used had a diameter of 216 mm (8.5 in) and a length of 960 mm (38 in).120 The main body of the shell was composed of thick steel, containing 7 kg (15 lb) of TNT:120 The small amount of explosive – around 6.6% of the weight of the shell – meant that the effect of its shellburst was small for the shell's size.

The thickness of the shell casing, to withstand the forces of firing, meant that shells would explode into a comparatively small number of large fragments, limiting their destructive effect.[6] A crater produced by a shell falling in the Tuileries Garden was described by an eyewitness as being 10 to 12 ft (3.0 to 3.7 m) across and 4 ft (1.2 m) deep.

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