Hi everyone,
As every report about the performance of the 381/50 OTO/ANSALDO cannon for the Littorios keep getting bounced for “not enough info” I decided to open a post to collect every possible data regarding this gun so that a complete report can be made about it.
The main issues from the report managers seems to be:
- The difference between the charges needed to fire what the italians called “prima carica” (first charge) and “seconda carica” (second charge) durnig their testing trials that made them differ so much in term of fire rate.
- Possible info about the rammer installed in the turret and how much it could have affected the reload rate of the gun.
As a first image here’s a simplified diagram of the tower showing that the charges were loaded in two parallel racks directly into the tower, meaning that the only delay during the reload should be accounted to the rammer’s speed.
Spoiler
Please remember to stay on topic as derailing this post will only slow down the collection of data about this gun.
PS:
Yes, I know that, by logic, even if the “seconda carica” test that reached up to 30s average reload time was made with only 3 charges instead of 6 the rammer inside the tower wouldn’t have screamed “wait a minute!” and waited up to 45s to load the remaining 3 charges, but we need data, as logic is not accepted in a report.
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If I understood correctly the point we must demonstrate is that the only time increase between a “seconda carica” and a “prima carica” is the time taken by the elevator to descend 1 level and by the rammer to ram into the breech the remaining 3 charges bags. Is that correct?
These original footage is from the 1941 film “La nave bianca”, shot on a Littorio Class BB.
IMO these footage are useful because at 3:21 we can see that the loading sequence in the lower elevator occurs simultaneously, even if there were 6 charges (I could not understand the exact number in the video but it seems to me that the number is still more than 3), this would be confirmed because from the images we see that the sailors slide on two slides placed one above the other both groups of charges. And since the transfer to the lower elevator occurs simultaneously and the same thing happens for the transfer from the lower elevator to the upper one, we can conclude that the only increase in time occurs in the loading phase of all the charges in the breech.
Is this enough?
I can also suggest to search for the upper elevators dimensions and speed, distance between the breech and the elevator and the speed of the rammer. With those data we can estimate the time.
Video footage is not accepted as they say it can be tampered by the autor of said film. (like cutting the clip, speeding it up, etc).
It was also already used in an extensive bug report ( I think you participated too ) that was also bounced:
Community Bug Reporting System
Yes, but I’m not using this video for measuring the reload time but more like a sequence of images, which I take in consideration separately.
Edit: I can simply take a screenshot if that’s the problem.
Yes, some screenshots can help provide proof that both trails could be loaded simultaneously.
This should at least check out possible time losses during that phase.
