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 Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)