Description
The built-up gun with a tube, full-length jacket, and side swing Welin breech block with Smith-Asbury mechanism weighed about 2.7 tons. Fixed ammunition (case and projectile handled as a single assembled unit) with a 14.5-pound (6.6 kg) charge of smokeless powder gave a 33-pound (15 kg) projectile a velocity of 2,900 feet per second (880 m/s). Range was 9 miles (14 km) at the maximum elevation of 20 degrees. Useful life expectancy was 500 effective full charges (EFC) per barrel.
Increasing awareness of the need for improved anti-aircraft protection encouraged mounting of dual purpose guns on destroyers beginning in the 1930s. The dual-purpose 5"/38 caliber gun became standard for United States destroyers constructed from the 1930s through World War II. United States destroyers built with 4"/50 caliber low-angle guns were rearmed with dual-purpose 3"/50 caliber guns. The 4"/50 caliber guns removed from destroyers were mounted on Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships like SS Stephen Hopkins.
Read more about this topic: 4"/50 Caliber Gun
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)