Dumb and Stupid Quotes Thread: Idiotic Source and Context are Key.

[Dachs]

Is that coded or is it literally what it means?

that is literally what it means, except "beggar" refers to the camel, not to a poor person seeking alms

The Dardanelles bombardments weren't always so silly, but the Royal Navy's gunners were instructed to saturate whatever they could see with fire. Virtually any daytime activity at Cape Helles would be met with a rain of shells.

Since the British and French could not crack the layered defenses of mines, mobile artillery batteries, and fortresses inside the Straits itself, their battleships were compelled to remain at long range, poking away pointlessly at anything they could sight. Which apparently included camels.

 

[r16]

a means of transportation hence a legal target .

 

[Flying Pig]

How much does a round from a battleship cost? I'm willing to bet that they're an order of magnitude above the (roughly) £50,000 that you spend firing an anti-tank missile, and firing six of those to destroy an enemy motorcycle would be a bit of an over-investment. That said, I can imagine bored gunners on the battleships trying to hit camels simply for lack of anything else to do.

 

[r16]

that campaign was basically designed to scare Ottomans into surrender , such expenditure would be part and parcel of it . Americans practically changed the landscape of Vietnam and Laos to stop bicycles . That they failed and had to face a highway after convincing Hanoi into the fight is one of the greater ironies of that war .

 

[Cutlass]

How much does a round from a battleship cost? I'm willing to bet that they're an order of magnitude above the (roughly) £50,000 that you spend firing an anti-tank missile, and firing six of those to destroy an enemy motorcycle would be a bit of an over-investment. That said, I can imagine bored gunners on the battleships trying to hit camels simply for lack of anything else to do.

Artillery generally is a lot less expensive than guided rockets. The whole justification for the reactivation of the American battleships in the 1980s was that it was the most cost effective form of fire support. But that only remained true so long as they were mainly using up spare parts and ammunition left over from earlier decades.

If this article is correct (and I would take some grains of salt with it). The each 16" shell costs $500. It's just a milled steel casing with explosive in it and a detonator. But that excludes the propellant cost and the ship cost.

The new Zumwalt destroyers (the stealth destroyer from Civ 4) has 2 155mm guns.

 

[Flying Pig]

How many rounds do you get out of a barrel, though? I mean, if you're firing really high-energy rifle ammunition, you get about 500 rounds out of a barrel that costs £600 (not counting fitting), so you pay something like £2 for the round itself and £1 in the metal that you burn out of the barrel every time you fire it. A tank barrel fires something like 1000-2000 rounds, and that surely works out to at least £10 per round. You're also dealing, with a battleship, in kilos of propellant - I pay about £60 per kilo for the stuff that I put in my rifle rounds, though I'm sure I don't get as good a deal as the Royal Navy.

That said, even working out ancillary costs as roughly equal to the cost of the round itself, that still only means $1000 a pop. Even if we assume that the pro-battleship article has that figure wrong by half, it's still only $2,000, or roughly a twenty-fifth the cost of a Javelin missile. Still, $12,000 seems like rather a lot for a frightened camel.

 

[Dachs]

How much does a round from a battleship cost? I'm willing to bet that they're an order of magnitude above the (roughly) £50,000 that you spend firing an anti-tank missile, and firing six of those to destroy an enemy motorcycle would be a bit of an over-investment. That said, I can imagine bored gunners on the battleships trying to hit camels simply for lack of anything else to do.

I don't know about price, but Scorpion was a destroyer, not a battleship.

I suspect that it's almost an irrelevant question, though. The Royal Navy was not subject to the sorts of massive ammunition spending that the Army was; shell shortage was a land-war problem in the Great War. I vaguely remember reading - sorry for no source - that it took an incredibly long time for the Royal Navy to run through its prewar munitions stockpiles, even for the destroyers, the workhorses of the fleet. Ammunition, for the destroyers of 1915, was virtually a sunk cost. Maintenance was not, but I suspect weapon maintenance wasn't so significant a problem that the Admiralty would've raised an eye over a bit of camel target practice. It's not like the Admiralty was short of funds.

Which leads us to the real point: there wasn't really a budget. Britain, and the other major belligerents, voluntarily gave up control of military expenditures at the outbreak of war, essentially giving procurement carte blanche to purchase whatever it felt necessary to win (and, eventually, "whatever it felt necessary to reduce our casualties"). Virtually any expenditure, regardless of waste, was justified. High casualties came in for massive opprobrium in Parliament and the press, even in actions that were theoretically 'victories' (to say nothing of the defeats). High expenditures for no purpose were virtually ignored in the war; few people criticized the massive Somme artillery preparation on the grounds of financial waste but rather that it had been insufficient to prevent massive casualties on the first day of fighting. Other outrageous expenses, like the hundreds of millions of pounds pumped into the Arab Revolt in bribes for the production of virtually no military value, were similarly justified on tenuous grounds.

When the Americans attempted to force the British government to control its massive spending in late 1916, the Ministry of Munition was confronted by a run on the pound, a massive fall on the City exchanges, and the Damocles' sword of an end to Britain's ability to purchase American goods. Even this apocalypse did not slow spending one iota. Instead, Britain was saved from having to confront the problem by Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which brought America into the war and removed the possibility of a financial disaster before the armistice.

 

[Cutlass]

How many rounds do you get out of a barrel, though? I mean, if you're firing really high-energy rifle ammunition, you get about 500 rounds out of a barrel that costs £600 (not counting fitting), so you pay something like £2 for the round itself and £1 in the metal that you burn out of the barrel every time you fire it. A tank barrel fires something like 1000-2000 rounds, and that surely works out to at least £10 per round. You're also dealing, with a battleship, in kilos of propellant - I pay about £60 per kilo for the stuff that I put in my rifle rounds, though I'm sure I don't get as good a deal as the Royal Navy.

That said, even working out ancillary costs as roughly equal to the cost of the round itself, that still only means $1000 a pop. Even if we assume that the pro-battleship article has that figure wrong by half, it's still only $2,000, or roughly a twenty-fifth the cost of a Javelin missile. Still, $12,000 seems like rather a lot for a frightened camel.

Big gun ships have primary, secondary, and tertiary armament. I would hope that they aren't firing the primary at camels. But yes, the guns do wear out. And reactivating the Iowa's was largely made possible because someone discovered a supply of barrel liners in a warehouse, and so new ones didn't have to be manufactured. Which saved a lot, because the tooling to make them no longer existed.

 

[Michkov]

Big gun ships have primary, secondary, and tertiary armament. I would hope that they aren't firing the primary at camels. But yes, the guns do wear out. And reactivating the Iowa's was largely made possible because someone discovered a supply of barrel liners in a warehouse, and so new ones didn't have to be manufactured. Which saved a lot, because the tooling to make them no longer existed.

What would the wear rate be for BB main guns?

 

[Cutlass]

I've read it somewhere. But I can't recall.

 

[Farm Boy]

http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_16-50_mk7.htm

This site, if it's reliable(I have no idea), says 290-350 rounds with WWII to 1980s technology. They guess about 1500 now. Specifically in regards to the Iowa class main 16" guns. I presume it varied between guns and ships.

 

[r16]

ı have read on a modelling site that at least early 20th century battleship guns can no longer be produced because the needed expertise no longer exists .

 

[Cutlass]

"For seven and a half years, this animal we call president -- because he is an animal, okay? -- has surgically and with thought and very smart, intelligent manner, destroyed this country and dismantled the military..."
—

Carlos Beruff, FL candidate for the U.S. Senate

 

[Cutlass]

ı have read on a modelling site that at least early 20th century battleship guns can no longer be produced because the needed expertise no longer exists .

They could be reverse-engineered. But it would take some time to get the people up to speed on how to do it. And much of the infrastructure would have to be recreated as well. Battleships were immensely expensive in their day. They'd be far worse now.

 

[Antilogic]

Same thing with going back to the moon. Saturn Vs, Apollo capsules, and lunar landers are pretty complicated machines that had very small production runs.

 

[Arakhor]

"For seven and a half years, this animal we call president -- because he is an animal, okay? -- has surgically and with thought and very smart, intelligent manner, destroyed this country and dismantled the military..."

Keeping it classy, it seems. I wonder what happened to always respecting the President, even if you disagree with him?

 

[Hygro]

"For seven and a half years, this animal we call president -- because he is an animal, okay? -- has surgically and with thought and very smart, intelligent manner, destroyed this country and dismantled the military..."
—

Carlos Beruff, FL candidate for the U.S. Senate

So... not an animal?

 

[Ajidica]

I don't know about price, but Scorpion was a destroyer, not a battleship.

I suspect that it's almost an irrelevant question, though. The Royal Navy was not subject to the sorts of massive ammunition spending that the Army was; shell shortage was a land-war problem in the Great War. I vaguely remember reading - sorry for no source - that it took an incredibly long time for the Royal Navy to run through its prewar munitions stockpiles, even for the destroyers, the workhorses of the fleet. Ammunition, for the destroyers of 1915, was virtually a sunk cost. Maintenance was not, but I suspect weapon maintenance wasn't so significant a problem that the Admiralty would've raised an eye over a bit of camel target practice. It's not like the Admiralty was short of funds.

Which leads us to the real point: there wasn't really a budget. Britain, and the other major belligerents, voluntarily gave up control of military expenditures at the outbreak of war, essentially giving procurement carte blanche to purchase whatever it felt necessary to win (and, eventually, "whatever it felt necessary to reduce our casualties"). Virtually any expenditure, regardless of waste, was justified. High casualties came in for massive opprobrium in Parliament and the press, even in actions that were theoretically 'victories' (to say nothing of the defeats). High expenditures for no purpose were virtually ignored in the war; few people criticized the massive Somme artillery preparation on the grounds of financial waste but rather that it had been insufficient to prevent massive casualties on the first day of fighting. Other outrageous expenses, like the hundreds of millions of pounds pumped into the Arab Revolt in bribes for the production of virtually no military value, were similarly justified on tenuous grounds.

When the Americans attempted to force the British government to control its massive spending in late 1916, the Ministry of Munition was confronted by a run on the pound, a massive fall on the City exchanges, and the Damocles' sword of an end to Britain's ability to purchase American goods. Even this apocalypse did not slow spending one iota. Instead, Britain was saved from having to confront the problem by Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which brought America into the war and removed the possibility of a financial disaster before the armistice.

Bit of a technical question, but is there any reason land artillery couldn't dip into the RN naval shell stockpiles when there were shell shortages?

 

[Dachs]

Bit of a technical question, but is there any reason land artillery couldn't dip into the RN naval shell stockpiles when there were shell shortages?

They'd have to be using the same kind of weapon. Naval guns were usually much larger than land artillery.

To take the example of HMS Iron Duke, which is where the commanders of the Grand Fleet had their flag during the war, main armament consisted of several 13.5 inch (343 mm) guns, with 6 inch (152 mm) secondary armament and a couple of even smaller AA guns and 3-pounders for close combat. The British Foot Artillery did not possess 13.5 inch pieces, and if it had possessed them, they would have had to be of a similar design to the naval guns in order to take the specially designed shell.

Naval guns were also designed to take on different targets. Much of the ammunition for the Grand Fleet's battle line was armor-piercing, to deal with the heavy belt of thick steel protecting German surface vessels at the waterline. AP shells were essentially pointless on the Western Front, since the Germans possessed no fortresses in the battle area, and, in fact, no real hard targets at all. Ammunition for ground operations consisted primarily of shrapnel shell with a significant amount of high-explosive shell, although the proportion of HE grew as the war went on and the British slowly realized that shrapnel was ineffective against entrenchments.

 

[Cutlass]

Bit of a technical question, but is there any reason land artillery couldn't dip into the RN naval shell stockpiles when there were shell shortages?

I only know details in the American case. But the big guns aside, which as Dachs said the Army didn't use (the biggest truck or tractor guns I know about are 8" bigger than that, and you need a railroad to transport it. So while that did happen, it wasn't exactly a mobile field artillery piece), the smaller guns were typically sizes that the Army and Navy didn't use in common. So the Navy used 5"(127mm) and 6" (152.4mm) for guns small enough to be truck mobile, the Army used 105mm and 155mm. So could have been done, but someone would have had to force the Army and Navy to play nice with one another. And they spent a lot of energy in not doing that.