Gustav Gun - The Largest Gun Ever Built

Here's a video with German heavy artillery:

WW2 - German heavy artillery: Schwerer-Gustav 800mm (1942)


Amazing size indeed!

Originally posted by TortoiseKweek
reply to post by thedarktower

 

Exactly. This thing could do some serious damage, but as you said thank God they didn't use it. Why they didn't, remains a mystery to me

It's not a mystery, the gun was built to assault the Maginot Line. German Army went through the Lowlands (Holand, Belgium) and came up the back side of the French defenses. Just another 'super weapon' that wastes resources. We have a few of those today, too.

wow, a 16,000 LB projectile.

I'll take 6. with better barrels, though. And an auto-loader. With a swivel.

that thing looks like metal gear

Originally posted by obixman
I believe I read somewhere that the gun was used in the Crimea at the siege of Sevastapol (but that could be wrong).

Big Bertha was used in WWI and was much smaller.

Yeah! that's correct!

Schwerer Gustav was used in the Soviet Union at the siege of Sevastopol.

Schwerer Gustav (English: Heavy Gustaf, or Great Gustaf) and Dora were the names of two massive World War 2 German 80 cm K (E) railway siege guns. They were developed in the late 1930s by Krupp for the express purpose of destroying heavy fortifications, specifically those in the French Maginot Line.

Gustav was used in the Soviet Union at the siege of Sevastopol during Operation Barbarossa.

en.wikipedia.org...

One of the most impractical weapons of all time imo. I'm sure in retrospect they were thinking "WTF were we thinking?"

reply to post by TortoiseKweek


Hello, schwere gustav as it was called by the Germans shelled sevastopol (pronounced sevas-stopol) one shell penetrated 200 feet underground and set off a magazine, near the end of the war is was found by the Russians in bits.

Freud would have a field day with the guys who ran this project.

The problem with a gun that big is it's an easy target from the air. If there was no such thing as air power/bombers, then this big gun would be a force to be reckoned with.

The flip side of this is that it's not nearly as effective as a bomber fleet. Air bombers have a much longer range, and can drop much more fire power than this gun could deliver.

In-other-words, this gun was already obsolete when they completed it.

That is a big weapon and would have done serious damage.The one problem that this gun has is when you fire it how fast can you hide it. As soon as you fire you would give away that position instantly. Its not like you can hide anywhere. Plus being on rails makes it even that much harder to hide. You have to give them some credit though that was some great engineering for those days. If they could have made it more mobile who knows what could have been the outcome of that war.That is some serious killing power.

Originally posted by OldDragger

WW2 was the swan song of the big guns, on land and on sea.
Airplanes can deliver explosives much farther and better than big guns.
Not to mention that aircraft could easily reduce this thing to a heap of scrap metal, just like they did to battleships. A range of 20 some miles is paltry compared to aircraft.
Another example of impractical and ultimatly useless weapons that Germany spent so much time and money on.

Spot on. The resources wasted on these 3 guns could have produced several hundred Panther tanks instead. I suppose it's a good thing the Germans wasted so much time and effort on useless weaponry like this and the Maus tank.

Back in WWI the Germans made a rail gun called the Paris gun which could fire shells almost 50 miles.

[edit on 28-7-2010 by Asktheanimals]

The Schwerer Gustav (Heavy Gustav) railway cannon was the largest weapon ever built. It had a caliber/bore diameter of 800mm, or 31 1/2 inches. It travelled on 4 specially built rail tracks, and had a traverse of 0°. It was aimed by going around its circular track. During the Siege of Sevastopol, its only use in combat, it fired a total of 48 rounds, equal to 30,000 tons. Its most notable shot was the destruction of an undersea ammunition magazine in the Severnaya Bay. This bunker was under 100 feet of water, and 32 feet of reinforced concrete. 9 rounds were fired at this target, with one passing directly through a ship in the bay. This resulted in a devastating explosion that levelled part of Sevastopol.

The 80cm K (E) gun was the final product of German superheavy artillery beginning in WWI with the L/12 42-cm Type M-Gerät 14 Kurtze Marine-Kanone, also known as Big Bertha. The closest pre-WWII relative to the K (E) was the Paris Gun, used to shell Paris from 130km. The German Army also employed the Mörser Karl-Gerät, a mobile siege mortar during WWII, at Brest-Litovsk, Sevastopol, Warsaw and Remagen.

I have a model kit of this by dragon, I am also looking for info on the "PARIS" railgun from ww1 if anybody can help.....

reply to post by gambon


The Paris Gun was a 211mm (later upgraded to 238mm) railway gun used to shell Paris between March and August 1918. It was capable of throwing a small 210 pound shell roughly 130km at a muzzle velocity of 1600m/s. The Parisians thought that the shells were bombs from a high-altitude zeppelin, as the gun was so far away its report was inaudible. It was an incredibly inaccurate weapon, requiring a city-sized target to hit effectively.

reply to post by ShadeWolf


thanks for that , I have some text sources , however cannot find any images anywheres ...so if you get lucky .. thanks again