I always like to imagine that is the endgame for large scale space wars. No more vessels with fancy turrets and special manoeuvring of individuals, just massive walls of guns trying to wipe out the enemy guns like some kind of 18th century infantry square. But the infantry are particle cannon armed battleships.
It doesn’t always make sense, but you do like to see those big guns swinging into battery. Few things in sci-fi so clearly communicate to an audience that significant things are about to happen, it’s the deep space equivalent of racking the slide on a shotgun.
Every shonen anime fan's favorite part of Space Battleship Yamato -- when Space Yamato swings her guns about, she's going to bring the rain. (When the firing cone of her Wave Motion Gun lights up, she's about to bring *MAJOR* pain.) 😂
@@plzletmebefrank oh yeah, that and thumbing back the hammer on a pistol that’s already cycled several rounds, but it’s short hand; everyone in the audience knows exactly what feeling it’s supposed to convey.
On a big ship like a WW2 battleship the stuff surrounding all the rotating mechanism and ammo hoists is called a barbette. Most modern warships don't have this setup any more as their guns barely penetrate the deck in most cases with them having an ammo hoist, power and water feeds and that's about it going into the hull. Barbettes were much much larger and would have had multiple crew in them as well as hoists, flash proof barriers etc etc.
@@nobleghost1177 Aye could be :) Back in the late 1800's to early 1900's there was actually a huge difference between a turret and a barbette. A turret in those times looked like those on the US Monitor, a big upside down biscuit tin that covered the guns and crew in armour. Whereas a Barbette was an armoured mounting that didn't have a roof and the gun and crew were largely exposed to the weather and were only protected from things like shrapnel etc coming in at flat angles. The advantage they had was weight, they were a LOT lighter than the old turret types and thats why they fell out of favour as they started putting 'armoured hoods' IE an armoured roof over the guns and crew and these evolved into the more modern turret types you see on WW1 battleships. As an example of a turret and barbette, have a look on wiki at the Royal Sovereign class of battleship and you'll see they all had open barbettes apart from one the HMS Hood, which had the old style turrets. :) You'll also see that the Hood is a full deck lower than the others of the class due to the weight of the turrets, and this made her a poor sea boat and prone to getting roughed up by weather. whereas the ships with barbettes were better sea boats. But looking at the ISD II's main guns they're really in turrets but barbette sounds better :) So yeah we'd call them turret mounted guns but the Imps called the barbettes :)
With bigger ships such as battleships, the turret proper was too big to be mechanically sealed to its barbette. So it just sat in its barbette like a giant plug. Thus, when mortally wounded dreadnoughts like the Yamato turned turtle, their main gun turrets fell out of their mounts and were strewn across the sea floor.
@@seanbigay1042 While many ships did do it that way, it wasn't because they couldn't secure it to the barbette. There were in fact ships that had turret fasteners installed on the main batteries.
One thing that wasn't mentioned was that a sufficiently large turret rotating will also induce rotation on the attendant vessel, if it is in space. Recoil is not the only effect a gun can have on a spaceship that doesn't need to be considered (as much) on the ground.
Easily fixable by a counter-rotating ring within the construction. Either have it purely counterweight, or additional armor or a hold for more ammo. We kinda solved the counterrotation force issues about the time we invented modern single-prop helicopters. Just gotta upsize it. By a LOT.
@@aleksatanaskovic9172 also used in space power tools it would be neat to see such systems employed as backups to the normal attitude and maneuver systems in an emergency the same way a gun is also a bad but functional rocket, a turret could be a crappy but functional emergency gyro
To add to that. The goalkeeper mount/turret starts and stops so fast it sounds like somebody banging a sledgehammer against the bulkhead. Vibrations as such are a consideration in the systems longevity. If the turret starts and stops it pushes and pulls on the ship (rotationally), they cancels each other out with respect to speed but leave a small predictable miss-alignment in bearing (as the ship did alter its bearing due to rotational speed 'growing and decreasing back to zero' leaves an angle travelled through)
I wish we got to see the insides of the turrets on the Battlestar Galactica and see the crew. They’re like the one group of people we never got to know about.
In a Tech Book was written that there are fully automated Revolver Cannons with 2 feading lines for each turret, one for Frag and one for a Programmable HEAP
@@FranksFilmEcke pretty sure they talked about gun captains and firing at least the main batteries manually. I haven't dived deep into the specs in a while though, feel free to correct me.
Is there any futuristic/space sci-fi where every bullets are smart/missile like bullets? Imagine "railgun" turrets that spam missiles... Why missile bullet you say? To add more speed and have maneuverability. Remember even a hand sized rock can hit like a nuke if it is thrown fast enough.
We called them "Brush blocks" in aviation. They're how you get power into a prop for de-icing/anti-icing. Great system until the day they wear out or get dirty. Then you learn to hate them.
A lot of ww2 era turrets do. The sort of stuff that allows free rotation, doesn't generally work well at large sizes and under the vibration of gun recoil and shell hits. Most fully rotating gun turrets from ww2 instead just have a 720° limit or something similar More than enough to track a target in combat, the turret can just be unwound after
The major parts of a turret are: Spinny bit on top = Gunhouse Part of the turret that hangs down in the hull = turret stalk (the turret stalk is multiple "baskets" deep - each "basket" is called a "pan" on a ship) Part of the ship that the gunhouse rests on = barbette Also, in all nations' navies, a two-gun turret is called a "twin turret," but in the United States Navy (and ONLY the USN), a three-gun turret is either called a "three-gun turret" if each gun can elevate individually or a "triple turret" if all three guns move together. Also, under almost all circumstances, turrets will not fall out of a ship because they install retaining brackets or "clips" to hold the turret on the roller track.
Point of minor correction: only the uppermost level of the turret stalk, directly under the gunhouse and equivalent to a tank's turret basket, is called a "pan". The other levels are called "flats". The distinction between the two is that the pan is open-topped into the gunhouse, whereas the flats are closed cylinders.
Mean while Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Cries in copyrighted corner btw, when you straight up turn your space battleship into a mech and "hold" the main gun, there's no need for a turret XD
Imagine being the guy who has to reapply grease to every joint on every spaceship in a storage depo. They will probably be depressurize for long term storage, meaning inside stuff like doors must be protected as well.
Honestly I always assumed that **if** humanity was dead set on its interstellar warships taking direct inspiration from the massive steel battleships of the 20th century (which I totally would be, because they’re fuckin awesome), i figure they’d be a lot like the seafaring originals except mirrored on the x-axis. That meaning they’d have a “deck” on top and bottom, no keel, and another set of turrets on the “bottom” too. That way they’d have closer to 360 degree field of fire. Maybe those turrets would be a bit like the ones on “Space Battleship Yamato” where they can aim almost straight up.
the problem with such an arrangement is also its advantage, the only targets that you can fire all of your weapons on are those that are directly broadside to you. While this may be desirable in some settings, in others it may be more desirable to concentrate the guns on one side of the ship, with the underside housing things like hangers for vehicles or drones, missile bays, or machinery spaces and magazines. Alternatively, the underside could just be more armored, with a relative minimum of weaponry, to protect the internals of the vessel. In the old steel battleships, the main belt armor extended well below the waterline because the bottom of the vessel was where machinery spaces, magazines and boilers were, equipment the loss of which would either destroy the ship or put it out of action.
@@andrewmayo9400 This only works because the script says so. A space going warship has no bottom, and can't dictate the enemy's approach vector. So a good shape for a gunship is conical (studded with turrets), so most guns can fire forward, with 50% for off axis. I also favor avoiding multi-role ships. CVs with drones and Marine shuttles escorted by Battleships and a gaggle of Anti-Missile/Drone Frigates/Cruisers
@@stephen1r2 That depends if it is only a space ship, or if it is capable of landing on planets as well. Many ships in fiction, including but not limited to Harlock's "Arcadia" and all of the Gundam motherships except the one in 00, are also capable of landing planetside, so they must be oriented such that they are structurally sound in both gravitational and 0 g environments. If my enemy is aproaching from the negative Z direction (below, as traditionally oriented), then the ship can be rotated about its long axis to bring the guns on target, just as if an opponent is approaching from the east a ship can maneuver to bring the guns on target faster by turning either toward or away depending on the current orientation of the guns. A roll maneuver, in terms of delta V and thus fuel, is one of the cheapest maneuvers that a spacecraft can execute, since it can rotate about its velocity vector without changing it. Likewise a ship that can land on the surface of objects needs to have the neccesary equipment to support planetary landing, not just gears, but also shock absorbers, ascent thrusters etc.. This equipment can dictate design in the same way that the need for large heavy boilers and exhaust funnels limited the space available amidships for guns on naval vessels, leading to the classic 2 fore and either 1 or 2 aft turret configuration. The Bismarck for example had 2 forward and 2 aft double 15 inch gun turrets for an 8 gun broadside, whereas the iowa had 3 triple 16 inch guns turrets, 2 foward and 1 aft for a 9 gun broadside (there were suggestions at the time of her design of a 2 fore 2 aft design, but there were concerns about the stability of the ship from so many 16 inch guns so high above the center of mass, rolling from firing the guns broadside could damage the ship or impact accuracy.
@@andrewmayo9400 just make a ship that is a long hexagonal tube with all the fragile bits in the center, with guns and armor on every surface, if you need to get all guns on target you can just spin the ship on its axis and have it shoot volleys whenever a side is on target, hell you can even go halo's covenant and keep the bridge inside the belly of the ship and just use the multitudes of cameras and sensors to stay appraised on everything
@@andrewmayo9400 if i want assault landers i'd go how Star Wars' Clone Wars went and have a design like the Acclamators be the premier planetary assault lander and focus my space fighting ships' designs to actually fighting in space i can compensate by building the military infrastructure around that, having orbital anchorages and dry docks interconnected with a space-station that's tethered to a planet through a space elevator
Guns on warships (and how you use them) can be a very fun concept in any story. Even in my writings, I have a case where a civilian billionaire, rejected from military service, took the turrets from USS Iowa and Missouri and slapped them onto an older 22nd-century spaceship that he called The Rampage. There were a variety of reasons why this was done (Earth has been mostly abandoned), and the warship's entire frame was rebuilt, including utilizing engines to help counter recoil generation. The ship can essentially fly sideways and fire its guns onto a target. However, it's important to note that this is an ad-hoc design as shells are very slow, and space is absolutely huge. The ship is essentially a raider that does saturation bombardment at stationary targets. There can be other ways that gun turrets can be used in stories. This can include Gatling-like turrets where the barrels cycle to help out in heat reduction. Rings can be used to house large gun turrets, where the rings spin to cycle each turret when firing at single targets. It's important to note that space doesn't care what your ship does. You can lightly spin the ship to fire every turret you need to hit a target. Space isn't a 2D field (which writers can fall into when depicting battles). Up, down, left, right, nobody cares.
I have a similar-ish thing in an alt-history sci-fi setting I was working on a while back where easy space travel and FTL became possible in the late '40s/early '50s due to a "new element" discovered as a byproduct of nuclear testing that works as a reality-breaking superfuel. The Soviets in this setting, finding themselves outpaced early on by Western space warships and weapon systems, took the guns off of the recently decommissioned dreadnought battleship October Revolution (originally the Imperial Russian ship Gangut) and slapped them onto what was, at the time, the largest military spaceframe ever built. Ended up being named in honor of the old dreadnought. It was effectively an ill-conceived stopgap measure and outdated before it was even completed due to the development of space missile systems, but by the time of the main story (late 2010s) it had ended up being basically the only functioning capitol ship that the Soviet remnant had left (all the others got blown up or scrapped during/after a conflict with NATO in the '80s). The setting as a whole is a bit weird technologically, which is the entire point. Technological development has been stagnant since the early '80s due to various factors, and the Soviets don't really have any peer/near-peer foes in the systems they operate in, so the rustbucket October Revolution with its 1910s naval guns and unreliable late '50s nuclear reactors is still pretty useful for them (when it's not in spacedock for repairs) despite basically being held together with duct tape and woefully inadequate for dealing with other capitol ships. "Nyet, dreadnought is fine."
In The Expanse they rotated the ship to allow the PDCs to hit targets better. I'm sure a turret would benefit from this as well. I'm actually surprised more ships don't rotate or spin during combat.
Its not just better turret coverage. It would also help with armor. (spreading the hits out over a larger area.) And maybe rate of fire for big guns/missile launchers. (letting the turrets that dont have LOS reload untill they are back at the front again.) On the other hand it would make targetign solutions more complicated. On the other other hand depending on ship design it might just be a very bad idea to rotate it. For example the imperial stardestroyers from starwars. You would almost allways want your front or sides showing towards the enemy since this both optimizes the weapons field of fire while at the same time giving the smallest profile. (with the exeption of the stupid bridge...) If you flew those with the top or bottom of your ISD towards your enemy you would present a massive target and cut line of sight from all weapons on the other side AND the "trench" weapons. (the ones at the side of the ship are recessed between the top and bottom armore plates.)
probably depends on ship size, given inertia is still a thing, meaning bigger ships take more energy to get rotating, and to subsequently stop them doing so. It would also have an effect on shipboard gravity unless you have some kind of artificial gravity in it, which is why in The Expanse they're strapped in during combat on the Roci.
@@vyran7044 You have additional multiple tactical reasons on the Expanse gunship Rocinante why rotate the ship, not only better turret coverage. You are also letting one PDC cool off while other take its place in the firing solution. You rotate randomly on all three axis and make changes to acceleration/deceleration anyway to make it harder to enemy targeting software. "it would make targeting solutions more complicated" - not much more than already existing targeting on ship close defense turrets.. you must already account for movement both target and ship you are on. On the sea it is more unpredictable than in space anyway and working just fine.
@@luisnunes3863 That's quite specific... author really wanted to somehow portrait basically old "ship of the line" battles (at least in the first books, later it is more about the carrier operations switch) , it is named "Hornblower in space" for a reason. So there is in-setting reason to rotate the ship - top and bottom are impenetrable shields. This does not happen in Expanse, there are no shielding tech. This does not happen in any other sci-fi even with shielding tech, it is expected that the shield cover the entire sphere and weakens with hits, not that the top and the bottom are impenetrable from the propulsion system itself.
Taiidan Heavy Cruiser in Homeworld 1 for the coolest big gun layout in scifi. Decent coverage in most angles but all capable of baring forward - most scifi designs have horrible huge blind spots - not just behind but (generally) below. Donnager class in Expanse gets it similarly nice.
I can’t believe I had to scroll down this far to see a Homeworld mention lol. I love Cataclysm’s designs personally, although some are…odd. Like the Somtaaw Destroyer having heavy turrets that seem to free-float on rails???
The latest iteration of the Arcadia is IMHO absolutely insane. All her broadside turrets sit on rings that let them rotate round the hull for 360° coverage in the X and Y planes. How crazy cool is that? (But the inside of that hull must look like an infernal machine from Mordor ...) 😂
Neat that you showed the Gatlantis dome turrets from SBY! That particular design is pretty neat. A relatively weak turret that has a full hemisphere of coverage and can fire in any direction with minimal movement, plus the rate of fire is very high.
I think it is more of a gattling gun principle, may be those eariler ships had heat management problems on gun barrels. Unless they also can divert the beam through all the barrels at the same time for wide screen defense or multitarget lock?
On warships, the armored housing around a turret is called the "barbette". Inside it, there is the turret foundation, which the "turret part" of the turret sits on with rollers in between. The rest of the compartments all have their own names. Also, the turret basket is mainly there as a floor for the crew. Without a turret basket, you would essentially stand on top of ammo boxes and physically turn yourself as the turret traversed. With the basket, the crew is automatically connected to the turret so they turn with it. Not all modern tanks have turret baskets. Mainly the russian tanks instead have a rotating plate on the hull floor, and only their seats are actually connected to the turret. The turret in a tank just sits on the turret ring, and the basket does very little to keep it in place. Look up "leopard 2 turret fell off" and you will see a quite funny photo of just that.
In space warfare turreted guns tend to be the secondary armaments that support the truly absorb spinal mounted F.U. dispenser. Also a rather common misconception is that a ships armaments aren't guns in the same way we think of WW2 Battleships. But merely a way to transfer the Ship's Power Output into damage, be it kinetic, termal or otherwise. So adding more Gun Turrets to a ship than you can fire at once, is a perfectly valid tactic to solve blind spots.
Indeed. The game Eve Online is nice example of this. Each turret comes with two actual fitted turrets. One mounted on each side of the ship. And they work in tandem to cover each others blind spots. Very nice to see up close when you are shooting
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 Nah. If your ship is manoeuvrable enough, or the target is slow enough then it gives you amazing weapon stability for firing BIG rounds at an enemy.
@@vi6ddarkking no its not, distance is the massive enemy of a fixed forward facing weapon. there is a reason they even went away on tanks, and the only reason aircraft retain them is turrets are real bad for aerodynamics. It is incredibly difficult to engineer an RCS system that is both powerful enough to maneuver an entire ship at a reasonable amount while also being precise enough for fine aiming. It is also far more energy inefficient than turreted weapon, as you would have to expend considerable amounts of fuel and energy just to aim the one big gun. And you better hope the enemy isn't shooting at you and landing hits because hits from even light projectiles will still impart momentum on your ship and throw its aim off. And this is on top of the fact that the one big gun can only fire in one direction at a time at a single target. which means if you get attacked form multiple directions, your one big gun is pretty helpless, and building a ship around one big gun makes it pretty helpless against swarm attacks from smaller cheaper ships. where as ships armed with multiple turreted gun batteries can much more easily deal with swarm attacks from multiple directions, especially if equipped with cluster munitions designed to deal with such threats. And this is on top of the fact that one big gun is also a single point of failure where one malfunction now makes your ship helpless. A single massive gun ship is only ever going to be any good at fighting other big gun capital ships at close range, where as a turreted capital ship can much more easily fight off both other big capital ships as well as kill smaller warships and depending on ammunition load, even deal with fighters very well, as well as being much more tolerant of weapon malfunctions since one malfunction is unlikely to deprive you of your main battery. and dont start with that but turrets are heavy and complex nonsense, turrets are an over 100 year old technology that is pretty well mastered now, and compared to the other technology a spaceship would have a turret would be positively caveman technology by comparison. And building one massive oversized gun is going to be far more expensive than investing in numerous smaller caliber guns.
My favorite SF vehicle with a turret were mounted on “Bolo” tanks in the "Bolo" universe. Reading about one of these self-aware tracked behemoths being inserted from orbit to planet surface was the start of a great tail! Nothing like a Hellbore plasma cannon to ruin the day of an opponent on the surface or in low orbit.
@@lovipoekimo176 it's a universe thing, though some weapons in B5 are better at killing fighters, missiles, and most energy weapons than others. The one of undisputed champions of PD weapons is the human reverse-engineered Interceptor. Basic rule of thumb for if an Interceptor can intercept your shots: is the incoming shot a) First One BS, b) light-speed beams, or c) neither? If A or B, then it won't work against them (though the E-Web could help a bit), if C then it's a yes.
I like the detail that in The Expanse the PDCs have an RCS thruster on the back to compensate for recoil. And also imagine if the Normandy SR2 from Mass Effect 2 and 3 could also turn it's twin Thanix Cannon to also fire on Targets not directly in front of them. (Or imagine them actually using it more often then just the one time against the Collector-Ship at the end of Mass Effect 2.)
I think that's actually the gun providing its own compensation. The ammo is caseless IIRC, so it wouldn't be that hard to have recoilless/RAVEN guns that just balance their own recoil.
@@MandolinMagisure...but aren't they also rocket-bullets? Like how did the Pella shoot down the Roci's torpedos when both ships are *accelerating* in the same direction?
@@Ebalosus Don't think they're rocket bullet/Gyrojets, this isn't 40K. Doesn't matter if both ships are accelerating the same way, the bullets can do tens of thousands of Gs acceleration while the ships are doing low double digits.
@@MandolinMagi sure...but they stop accelerating the second they leave the barrel. If anything, they should have at least a shorter range when firing forward under acceleration. Is there at least a video to help visualise your point of view? I'd honestly like to see how it would work, because I have trouble visualising it.
The point about lasers being able to be reflected from a single generator to multiple turrets reminded me of a really interesting weapon concept used in the series Wolf's Rain. What some craft in that setting seem to do is fire a laser and then holographically reflect it *outside* the ship, bouncing it around to attack the target from crazy unpredictable angles. It's a fun way to weaponize the remote light redirection capability of hologram technology. The point about robotic arms actually also brings up a rather silly idea used in the series Monkey Wrench. A lot of sci-fi gives mechs and little maintenance pods humanoid arms that match the movements of their operator to allow for intuitive high-dexterity tasks. Monkey Wrench takes this idea and slaps it on most of the ships in the setting, leading to the existence of spaceship-sized handheld guns and even melee weapons. It's goofy and I love it.
The thing about turrets in SF combat is there's a certain satisfaction in actually seeing that whole process where the turret pivots, the barrels align, there's a moment of quiet, and then *boom*. It's one of the things I found I preferred during the Kelvin v. Narada battle at the beginning of Star Trek '09, seeing the phasers as physical turrets poking out of the Kelvin's hull just made them feel more real.
Generally on a ship, the whole assembly is the turret. The armored bit with barrels sticking out is the gun house. The armored part around the lower turret is the barbette. Additional magazine space for both shells and powder may be outside the barbette proper, but still behind armor. There will be pass-throughs for moving shells or powder into the turret proper; in US lexicon they're usually called scuttles.
@@sumukhvmrsat6347 Indeed. Thought he might say something though about turrets that are internet and hidden like the Mon Cala ships have. It’s like the opposite of the title lol
One cool note I want to bring up on turret placement is the idea of broadsides vs forward firepower. For the most part broadsides arent much of a thing in space, because even by naval standards its just a crutch due to typical ship designs having main gun turrets both fore and aft (and sometimes even in the center) leaving only the broadsides as zones where the whole main battery can engage a target, while also giving 360° coverage when pointing at least one turret on target. And even then this layout is mostly necessary because naval ships are long and narrow, and you can go only so high with super-firing turrets before your ship becomes topheavy. But there are alternate designs like the Dunkerque, where all four main gun turrets are forward of the superstructure, which allows a fully frontal engagement, which can for instance be useful when actively chasing a ship, cant chase them sideways after all, and you give a narrow profile for the enemy to shoot back. Soviets had that idea as well, slightly after WWII, and got started on "Project 24", though it was more of a battlecruiser, a kind of tank destroyer for battleships. It had one forward turret for 3 16 inch guns and a rear turret for 4 7.1 inch guns, idea being that they can, at the right engagement range, fire over the superstructure at high angles. In space there is little reason for ships to be long and narrow, so ship designs can work out the compromise of concentrating fire and maximizing coverage in much more interesting ways. I think at that point the most realistic design would be an Imperial II Star Destroyer that has one or two turrets respectively on the top and bottom, super-firing if its two, so front and sides at zero elevation you can fully concentrate firepower, and roll the ship as needed to get the guns on target. But thats just my opinion.
Recoil as a problem is always overstated when people talk about space guns. If your ship is more than minimally maneuverable, it can correct for any unintended motion (which won't be much compared to the velocities needed just to get around in space) with thrust. There's no need for a dedicated thruster on the back of the gun when the ship already has loads of thrusters. Elevation might not be all that valuable either. A spaceship can do something a wet ship can't: roll. If you're in a space battleship and the target is "above" you, you can roll the ship 90 degrees to port and now the target is on the starboard side.
Speaking of which, one of the things that makes Star Trek unique is that their ships don't use turret, unless you count the torpedo launchers. They have an array of energy emitters instead, which can disperse or concentrate the weapons energy. This design eliminates the need for stabilizing the weapon. I have yet to see other franchises do this on screen but there might be books that have ship weapons similar to this.
As we've found on tanks, armor only goes so far and armoring an entire ship on 6 sides would be basically impossible. Any material we come up with that makes armor better would likely be accompanied by materials that make weapons better. The thing with space is that it is big with massive distances, so it is easy to miss. This means that the weapons most likely to be used are self-guided missiles with large engines to mass (versus a ship with much smaller engines to mass) so they can adjust to hit, energy weapons that can go at the speed of light, or rapid fire shot that can be spread over a large area. We currently do not have energy weapons that would be useful at distance, and likely we won't for a long time. Missiles are the most likely though I'd be worried that ships can make small course corrections to dodge as the faster a missile is going the harder it'll be to alter trajectory plus if it misses it may not have the reaction mass to change course to come back around as you are looking at a 200% increase in mass (100% to slow to a stop, 100% to go back at the same speed) plus you are likely going to have to use even more as the target you just missed is speeding away. Grape shot fired rapidly is doable against a stationary or slow moving target especially if the ship it is fired from is moving fast, thus all the kinetic energy from the ship is added to the shot. The issue would be if both ships are moving fast in the same direction, we lack "usable" railguns that would work reliably plus it would be difficult to eliminate the heat in space. Thus we need to use gunpowder or similar explosives to propel it but the issue there is both that the ship is moved back in the opposite direction and that we can only propel it so fast whereas an engine that is on may in the time period it takes for the grapeshot to travel the distance between ships add enough speed such that the target is travelling away faster than the shot. I'm imagining space combat using lots of small weapons to increase probability to hit over a few large turrets unless we invent something like shields. As for engines, I am imagining nuclear pulse or something else that can sustainably add speed for long periods of time without using up significant mass. Current engines in space only burn for short periods to save fuel, which isn't practical in a combat situation over the vast distances of space. Similar to why the nuclear sub was a massive leap forward over the diesel.
Travers Speed isn't usually a problem for the REALLY big, Massey (Heavy) guns since they're designed to kill other Capitol Ships, NOT the small, fast moving Fighters and Missiles...those are dealt with by the smaller, MUCH lighter and faster moving Point Defense Turrets... The WW2 Battleships didn't use their 16 inch gun Turrets to kill airplanes, they used them to kill other Battleships (or buildings in the Bombardment role)...the small 5 inch guns would be used for small, fast targets...
Bigger guns, bigger minute of arc. For a 50 caliber gun, a few inches can change the end target quite a lot. Isaac Newton is a the meanest dude in space.
The Japanese actually had anti-aircraft rounds for the big guns on their battleships, including the Yamato. They just tended to be horribly ineffective at taking out attacking bombers with them. I think that I remember some of the rounds even turning the big 18-inch guns into giant shotguns!
Tell that to the Yamato that struck both the USS Johnston (And sinking her) and the USS Samuel B Roberts (crippling her) with her 18inch guns while both ships were maneuvering hard. I didn't mention White Plains or Gambier Bay because Casablanca class escort carriers are not fast.
Idk how this channel always hits my nostalgic kid's sense of wonder over every detail in a sci-fi IP. I use to love drawing ships and space ships and spending time on the turrents. I use to draw WW2 style spec sheets of ships and everything. I love turrents so much
As for a recoil felt throughout the ship, that's the assumption that the ships have zero inertia. In fact, they have extreme amounts of inertia and even though big guns do have recoil, one would hope the static inertia of the vehicle would not be massively affected by big gun recoil. Steve
I like how star trek phaser arrays just side steps all these problems. Exactly like a future solution should. Also, would like to see more discussion on recoil. It seems overstated. It's not as if the ship is firing even 1% of it's mass, so it should have very little effect.
Recoil doesn't matter much for one gun firing once, but at the ranges in space (without some kind of actively guided munitions) sequential firings will be affected by recoil enough to miss.
The barbette is the fixed armored structure in the hull in which the turret mounts. It isn't part of the rotating turret mechanism. I don't think there is a word to for the structures of the turret below the gun house. Turret is the entire moving structure. Gun house is the part visible outside the ship. You can have hoist, powder rooms, shell platforms, etc. depending on the design. But those are all separate parts. None are the term for the part of the turret below the gun house that moves with it.
@@maxstr on us warships the only part of the ship that is not armored is the bow and the stern everything between turret 2 and turret 3 is what is considered the armored citadel
2:50 I imagine in Zero G the mass of the turret being offset would indeed be of lesser concern, but something that would definitely need more thought would be the recoil. You are in a no-gravity zone... anything shot in one direction, requires an equal amount of force going in the other direction, meaning recoil could throw off the trajectory of the entire ship, or mess with the aiming of the entire weapon system unless each canon also applies a force to oppose each shot
On a ship, the turret basket is a barbette (at least the well it sits in). Barbettes are armored to prevent ammo detonation during operation. Special passages can allow passage of ammo ang powder charges in air tight rolling compartments to prevent flash fire. HMS Hood exploded likely due to the mis use of such airlocks which allowed powder fumes to transmit a flash fire to the ammo rack (more precisely to the gun powder magasine, ammo doesn't detonate like that until detonators are triggered, photos on the HMS Hood wreck discovered a few years ago clearly show that despite the detonation, the shells are still intact ! ) On the WWII Yamato, the entire main gun turret was weighting ahout 1500 tons.
Of course heavy guns can reload while turning . the ring shown during that part is how its done. an inner platform containing the loading hoists rotates with the turret, a large ring around this platform can be locked stationary to the magazine and ammunition moved to it, then it rotates to line up and lock into the inner platform to move the ammunition to it and the hoists. Modern automatic turrets, like the Mk-45 have a station below the turret. in it is the ready-service magazine that directly feeds up to the turret. Around that is a ring that spins around it and transfers rounds to the ready-service magazine. outside of that is a loading hatch which allows the gun crew to slid rounds into it, and it transfers them to the transfer ring as it spins around to take it.
Generally, for ships, the Turret is the Armored box with the weapon. It sits on a turret ring attached to the barbette. The barbette is armored cylinder below the spiny box. It contains ammo handling rooms, complex machinery to turn the turret, firefighting equipment, and more.
I have to say, I am MUCH more convinced that turrets are a good idea for space ships as opposed to large, fixed spinal weapons. You can't both fire and maneuver at the same time using a spinal railgun, but with turrets that's not an issue
On a ship the "turret basket" is two things, directly under the "turret", actually the gun house (the part that sticks above the deck), is the working chamber where ammunition is removed from the hoists and sent up to the gun house to be loaded in the guns (some turret designs bypass this and sent the rounds directly to the trays for the rammers to load). Below that is the trunk where things like shell/powder hoists are located to feed the gun from the magazines.
Anyone else watching the footage of the mobile suits sniping off those battle ships in much of the used footage and lamenting on the lack of close in point defense?
In Traveller turrets are the basic weapon emplacements and can carry up to three weapons. Fifty or a hundred times larger than turrets are Weapon bays, but most major warships in Traveller have a spinal weapon as their main gun.
Power, transfer becomes a major consideration, for railguns / coilguns. Since they can draw huge amounts of power for a very brief moment. Likely making it necessary to locate the firing capacitors in the turret as well. Another issue are passing through coolant lines to the turret, since in space you have to rely on radiators (or internal heat sinks for short periods of time ) to keep cool.
The Battleship New Jersey channel recently put out a nice video going through the steps involved in bringing propellant and projectiles into and up through the turrets for the 16" guns. Good stuff. Highly recommend.
0:39 on a ship we called this area the Mount (IE the forward battery being Mount 51, or Mount 501 for the forward most STBD Machine Gun) or Loader Drum Room when interior. 2:13 while the 13" battery on an Iowa Class Battleship was only 1-2 deg per second, in the modern era guns like the Mk54/Mod2 can traverse at speeds upwards of 30 deg/sec, and can engage and destroy incoming air targets. -Former US Navy Gunner's Mate (ret)
For your zenith crossing target, keep in mind that you may have issues with azimuth even coming close to that axis... it's kinda like gimbal lock and can be solved the same way, with a third axis of motion, but it definitely makes for a WEIRD turret.
The area below the 'Turret' on large warships such as battleships are called Barbettes In fact what you see on battleships liker USS Iowa are technically called Hooded Barbettes and later Turret Barbettes: (This was later shortened into Turret). Also most battleship & cruiser turrets of Twentieth Century had the abilkity to be loaded at any Angle of Train; (and some had the ability to be loaded at any Angle of Elevation simultaneously). Coincidentally, tanks get their naming conventions from warships and not the other way around.
Something worth consideration: in any setting where the spacecraft needs to be firing its thrusters during combat, turrets allow it to point its thrusters and guns in two (or more) different directions. Fixed-mount weapons would require you to turn the whole vehicle, making firing while on the move difficult if not impossible.
I've been designing my own version of the Constitution class from Star Trek, and I designed it where the phasers have heavy particle accelerators and cyclotron under the hull, and the turret redirects the particle beam to the enemy ship. I also have both SIF generators and IDF generators dedicated to the phasers due to the 120kT discharge from each turret where, without them, the recoil alone would destroy the Enterprise.
And all those considerations are why any truly powerful "gun" type weapon on a spacecraft would be spinal mounted. The whole ship would serve as the turret, attitudinal thrusters would be the traverse mechanism, and recoil would be managed by being fixed opposing the primary thrusters.
Lasers would only need to turn the emitter as mentioned in the video, so something like a plasma weapon would be able to channel through a hose and magnetic containment coil that can flex, so the main mechanism doesn't have to move.
This is one of the reasons I really like "Legend of the Galactic Heroes". The majority of their Battleships all have their main guns pointed forward, this not only concetrates firepower but defense of the ship is also enhanced due to a smaller surface area to be hit in a battle and the stacking armor and shields in one area. This is also why tactics plays a significant role in that ahow cuz once a fleet is flanked they will basically be routed rather quickly.
One interesting aspect of David Drake's RCN saga is that 8-inch is the biggest-caliber gun any warship can carry, even a dreadnought. This is because unlike a seaborne warship that can use the sea itself to absorb the recoil from its guns, in space the only thing that can take the recoil is the ship itself, and the recoil from an 8-inch gun is right at the upper limit of what any hull can take without being turned inside out.
@@Aristaios But seriously, folks, Drake's take feels more real because he was one sci-fi author who'd actually seen the elephant, having served two years as an interrogator attached to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam, and thus knew what he was talking about.
One of the things I like about Eve Online is the massive caliber of Minmatar ships guns. To quote Captain John Rourke (of the good ship Clear Skies), "Stationary ships don't react well to Fourteen Hundreds."
I think for a ship it is a munitions handling deck. In case of a battleship it is made up of powder hoists back blast doors and powered ring decks. Ring decks allow powder and shot to pass into the turret. Magazines on things bigger than tanks are stationary. Also to run all ring decks shell hoists powder doors. It takes like 90 people per gun in an Iowa class battleship.
I used to think phaser strips were turrets on rails, but learning about phase array radars and applying that to a laser beam, is dang scary! The ability to swing the beam to the extremes in milliseconds is superior to any turret.
Chance of a video on the REALLY big guns? Like the static warship guns. For example, the MAC cannons from Halo, or Nova cannons from Warhammer, where they just point in one direction, but whatever is near that spot is gonna have a really bad day.
The best earth warships are from Space Battleship Yamato. Barrels on the guns aren't necessary unless they are rail guns or mass drivers. Directed energy weapons are fine with just apertures on the turret housing.
what is the film or video with the clip of the sticking arm turret? cool video, i am into spaceship design, and you pretty much have a very right approach, f.e. with the turret arc coverage
@@martinjrgensen8234 Not just the last book, the last three had a jump of approximately 30 years, and a whole lot of things happened very differently and/or for very different reasons.
@@CMTechnica 30 years is hardly a massive jump, and the core cast remains Holden, Naomi, Amos and Alex. The entire saga is about the four of them, and the massive changes that they lived through and influenced, from the start of book 1 where they are not especially close crew-members of the Canterbury, to the very end of book 9.
BTW, on larger turrets such as battleship guns, the part of the turret inside the ship (rotating part) sits inside the Barbette (the non rotating part).
0:30 I believe it's called a Battery Column. Battery (a grouping of guns) because each barrel is considered a separately maintained gun despite being physically bound to the same direction. Column because you're right, a massive rotating undercarriage that extends 3 decks deep into the ship can't rightly be called a basket, and that word fits the design choice best. Edit: They are apparently called barbettes, which also makes sense for a cluster of hostile protrusions. It also just depends on how you want to name your own fictional universe's terminology.
"On a ship they are called..." The barbette, the bit that contains the rotating gear and connects to the magazine and its feeds is called the barbette while the upper visible portion is called the gunhouse. Strictly speaking turrets, e.g. the Coles and Ericsson types were single pieces things that did the work of both gun house and barbette and were really heavy. Hence it was found to be smarter to make it in more pieces and only rotate the top portion.
All of the inner workings of a turret within a ship is considered the Citadel. It’s the most heavily armored section of the ship (hence why it’s usually in the center of a ship) and that’s to keep the Magazines of the ship from detonating. The Citadel can extend to two thirds of a ship’s length on conventional sea faring ships. In space, this can get more complicated.
My sci-fi setting employs turrets primarily as a secondary battery, whereas the main guns are normally in broadside. This is because battles tend to happen either on converging vectors or 'en passant', and the problems with turrets make it impractical or impossible to put big guns in them.
Moving faster than a turret can track is how I stayed alive in many fights during my time in Eve Online, my Crusader wasn't the best Interceptor but she was my favorite.
One of the biggest emerging markets for navies with small to medium ships (say up to frigate class) with smaller budgets is the self contained bolt-on guns, especially smaller auto-cannons. They are currently working on a bolt on CIWS and even Bolt-on SHORAD and VSHORAD missiles. This is now possible because of the now relatively affordable ultra high resolution Uncooled thermal cameras to allow for rapid and accurate target acquisition and engagement (because it can see thermal signatures much more precisely at much further ranges, giving more time to swivel the gun/missiles to engage as soon as they are in range) There is also work being done for bolt on RWS’s for ground vehicles in the HMMVVE size class for 20mm and they are upping it to possibly 35mm for MRAP sized vehicles. This will give small vehicles a great hard kill drone defense.
Given the recoil problem I would think that in space combat, it would be best to only have extremely large ballistic guns pointed toward the bow of the ship, which could only pivot relatively slightly for minor course corrections, while the ship itself handles the larger movement. For 360 coverage you would just use lasers and various self-propelled munitions, which could have less recoil.
Kinda surprised that the ship from Spacepirate Harlock didn't get a special mention in the coverage problem segment, considering it has a rather effective mechanism to facilitate exactly that with its turrets on rotating tracks that can circle the turrets around the ships. Also the floating gun platforms on the Iserlohn Fortress in 'Legend of the Galactic Hereos' which could be shifted within the liquid metal layer to wherever they are needed (albeit that one is a massive space station and not a warship, so I understand how that may not have made the cut for a video on warships specifically).
Another alternative you might want to consider is multiple turrets on a rail on your ship hull. Especially in an environment where your foes can appear at any angle, instead of having dozens turret on all side of your ship’s hull to cover all angle, having a few that can be moved from place to place would be sustainable. Less energy requirement. Less mass (more deltaV). And would make sense if your ship is one that has landing capability. Having mech with multiple armaments patrol on your ship’s hull and let them act as a walking turret would also make sense
I love the showcase of Harlock: Space Pirate in this. When I watched that movie, I was amazed at how they got around keeping a limited main battery in space, but still having full weapon coverage. Would love to see a breakdown of the ship itself.
That big cylindrical part of the turret can simply be called a barbette/trunk. (originally a "turret" was what you saw on things like USS Monitor. Later the design of barbettes superseded those original turret designs. Leading to what we generally call a turret today.)
I don't remember the movie or show, but I saw once dual turrets mounted on annular ring rails on circumference of a ship... it seemed awesome since these turrets counterbalance each other in weight and when firing... one set can be set at 12-6 o'clock, while an other set at 9-3 o'clock... as they also give a full 360 degrees coverage. You can have all your guns pointing at one target, better than having to rotate a ship when turrets are mounted only on one side or blocking each other's aiming.
Remember kids, if your big gun turret is big enough, eventually it's the warship that's on the turret and not the turret that's on the warship.
Soooo...basically the Civil War Monitor?
Every sci-fi fleet should have at least one “gun with ship-like parts attached”
As someone that still plays children of dead Earth I can state with certainty you don't even need ships with your turrets😅
@@scepta101unsc be like all my gun will be ship like
I always like to imagine that is the endgame for large scale space wars. No more vessels with fancy turrets and special manoeuvring of individuals, just massive walls of guns trying to wipe out the enemy guns like some kind of 18th century infantry square.
But the infantry are particle cannon armed battleships.
It doesn’t always make sense, but you do like to see those big guns swinging into battery. Few things in sci-fi so clearly communicate to an audience that significant things are about to happen, it’s the deep space equivalent of racking the slide on a shotgun.
Gunports, in Bab 5
Which pumping a shotgun when it's got an unspent shell loaded annoys me... But it constantly happens in film and TV.
Every shonen anime fan's favorite part of Space Battleship Yamato -- when Space Yamato swings her guns about, she's going to bring the rain. (When the firing cone of her Wave Motion Gun lights up, she's about to bring *MAJOR* pain.) 😂
@@plzletmebefrank oh yeah, that and thumbing back the hammer on a pistol that’s already cycled several rounds, but it’s short hand; everyone in the audience knows exactly what feeling it’s supposed to convey.
@@seanbigay1042I don't even like anime, but as a huge naval history buff, I had to watch that show. And the turret sequences were always awesome!
On a big ship like a WW2 battleship the stuff surrounding all the rotating mechanism and ammo hoists is called a barbette. Most modern warships don't have this setup any more as their guns barely penetrate the deck in most cases with them having an ammo hoist, power and water feeds and that's about it going into the hull. Barbettes were much much larger and would have had multiple crew in them as well as hoists, flash proof barriers etc etc.
Ah, so that's what they meant when they said the Imperial-2 Star Destroyers had Octuple Barbette Turbolasters
@@nobleghost1177 Aye could be :) Back in the late 1800's to early 1900's there was actually a huge difference between a turret and a barbette. A turret in those times looked like those on the US Monitor, a big upside down biscuit tin that covered the guns and crew in armour. Whereas a Barbette was an armoured mounting that didn't have a roof and the gun and crew were largely exposed to the weather and were only protected from things like shrapnel etc coming in at flat angles.
The advantage they had was weight, they were a LOT lighter than the old turret types and thats why they fell out of favour as they started putting 'armoured hoods' IE an armoured roof over the guns and crew and these evolved into the more modern turret types you see on WW1 battleships. As an example of a turret and barbette, have a look on wiki at the Royal Sovereign class of battleship and you'll see they all had open barbettes apart from one the HMS Hood, which had the old style turrets. :) You'll also see that the Hood is a full deck lower than the others of the class due to the weight of the turrets, and this made her a poor sea boat and prone to getting roughed up by weather. whereas the ships with barbettes were better sea boats.
But looking at the ISD II's main guns they're really in turrets but barbette sounds better :) So yeah we'd call them turret mounted guns but the Imps called the barbettes :)
With bigger ships such as battleships, the turret proper was too big to be mechanically sealed to its barbette. So it just sat in its barbette like a giant plug. Thus, when mortally wounded dreadnoughts like the Yamato turned turtle, their main gun turrets fell out of their mounts and were strewn across the sea floor.
This is not completely correct -- the barbette refers specifically to the armored cylinder which the bottom part of the turret is placed inside.
@@seanbigay1042 While many ships did do it that way, it wasn't because they couldn't secure it to the barbette. There were in fact ships that had turret fasteners installed on the main batteries.
One thing that wasn't mentioned was that a sufficiently large turret rotating will also induce rotation on the attendant vessel, if it is in space. Recoil is not the only effect a gun can have on a spaceship that doesn't need to be considered (as much) on the ground.
Easily fixable by a counter-rotating ring within the construction. Either have it purely counterweight, or additional armor or a hold for more ammo.
We kinda solved the counterrotation force issues about the time we invented modern single-prop helicopters. Just gotta upsize it. By a LOT.
@@aleksatanaskovic9172 also used in space power tools
it would be neat to see such systems employed as backups to the normal attitude and maneuver systems in an emergency
the same way a gun is also a bad but functional rocket, a turret could be a crappy but functional emergency gyro
You just need a big enough flywheel to counter any rotation from turrets.
You guys are talking about Precession? Like how a propeller or rotor throws out a degree of torque that wants to rotate the hull it's attached to
To add to that. The goalkeeper mount/turret starts and stops so fast it sounds like somebody banging a sledgehammer against the bulkhead. Vibrations as such are a consideration in the systems longevity.
If the turret starts and stops it pushes and pulls on the ship (rotationally), they cancels each other out with respect to speed but leave a small predictable miss-alignment in bearing (as the ship did alter its bearing due to rotational speed 'growing and decreasing back to zero' leaves an angle travelled through)
I wish we got to see the insides of the turrets on the Battlestar Galactica and see the crew. They’re like the one group of people we never got to know about.
In a Tech Book was written that there are fully automated Revolver Cannons with 2 feading lines for each turret, one for Frag and one for a Programmable HEAP
@@FranksFilmEcke pretty sure they talked about gun captains and firing at least the main batteries manually. I haven't dived deep into the specs in a while though, feel free to correct me.
@@FranksFilmEckefairly certain the Pegasus batteries are automated while galacticas are fully manual
@@jfernandez7098 I believe in the original mini series you can juuuust get a glimpse of a little CGI man in a spotting dome on one of the turrets.
@@srboboron same goes for the finale, I could’ve sworn I saw someone running from one side to the other on one of the close ups of the guns
No matter the universe, having powerful armament on an armored traverse mechanism will never be uncool.
*“TEMPER TEMPER”*
That was in response to a US battleship retuning fire on a land combatant that couldn't even hurt them, right?
@@igncom1very much so. And let’s just say the hillside bunker that shot at them was no longer a bunker nor a hillside.
"No matter the universe" very much includes our universe XD
@@igncom1 it did injure 3 crew members, but oh boy that hill is just terraformed into moon craters.
100 percent
I'm a simple man. I see a video about big guns on spaceships, I watch. Simple as.
"Hard alarbord, Helm. Guns, train them to port and fire as she bears.
Amen.
Is there any futuristic/space sci-fi where every bullets are smart/missile like bullets?
Imagine "railgun" turrets that spam missiles...
Why missile bullet you say? To add more speed and have maneuverability. Remember even a hand sized rock can hit like a nuke if it is thrown fast enough.
spacedock : "only the gun elevates"
Stridsvagn 103: "am i a joke to you?"
Yes, you’re a joke to everyone calling yourself a tank. You’re a tank destroyer and we all know it.
Given that STV is basically "Gun turret with tracks" it still applies.
@@maxpower3990 no!!! tank destroyers aren't a thing anymore in modern doctrine don't you know?!?!11//1!?!
@@Dia.dromes stv 103 was a main battletank
@@Dukenukem okay i can roll with that xD
You dont need cables to unwind in a turret. Afaik you usually have power rails and carbon pickup brushes to transmit the power.
We called them "Brush blocks" in aviation. They're how you get power into a prop for de-icing/anti-icing. Great system until the day they wear out or get dirty. Then you learn to hate them.
Tom Scott did a great video about those and a guy who invented the plumbing version of that.
@@silentdrew7636 I think I remember the house with the rotating interior.
@@silentdrew7636 Oh yeah that was pretty wild.
A lot of ww2 era turrets do.
The sort of stuff that allows free rotation, doesn't generally work well at large sizes and under the vibration of gun recoil and shell hits.
Most fully rotating gun turrets from ww2 instead just have a 720° limit or something similar
More than enough to track a target in combat, the turret can just be unwound after
The major parts of a turret are:
Spinny bit on top = Gunhouse
Part of the turret that hangs down in the hull = turret stalk (the turret stalk is multiple "baskets" deep - each "basket" is called a "pan" on a ship)
Part of the ship that the gunhouse rests on = barbette
Also, in all nations' navies, a two-gun turret is called a "twin turret," but in the United States Navy (and ONLY the USN), a three-gun turret is either called a "three-gun turret" if each gun can elevate individually or a "triple turret" if all three guns move together.
Also, under almost all circumstances, turrets will not fall out of a ship because they install retaining brackets or "clips" to hold the turret on the roller track.
Point of minor correction: only the uppermost level of the turret stalk, directly under the gunhouse and equivalent to a tank's turret basket, is called a "pan". The other levels are called "flats". The distinction between the two is that the pan is open-topped into the gunhouse, whereas the flats are closed cylinders.
SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO MENTIONED MORE! YIPPPPEEE
UNSC ships- we are the gun
Starfleet ships- check out our phaser strips
I was going to be very angry if there wasn't at least 1 Yamato clip in this!
Mean while Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Cries in copyrighted corner
btw, when you straight up turn your space battleship into a mech and "hold" the main gun, there's no need for a turret XD
@@Tallacusuncf ships are also the guns since the Wave Motion Gun also runs through the ship and is way stronger than any MAC Cannon will ever be
What great about it having a watershape hull can be useful on planet with water
You forgot the risk of cold welding.
In a vacuum, metals can attach themselves through friction.
Huh. That’s seen in that trailer for that new RTS game, right? Falling Frontier?
Imagine being the guy who has to reapply grease to every joint on every spaceship in a storage depo.
They will probably be depressurize for long term storage, meaning inside stuff like doors must be protected as well.
Technically it's vacuum welding when just barrier free pressure differentials .. cold welding doesn't need a vacuum
use lube, or materials that cant cold weld
Use more lube.
Honestly I always assumed that **if** humanity was dead set on its interstellar warships taking direct inspiration from the massive steel battleships of the 20th century (which I totally would be, because they’re fuckin awesome), i figure they’d be a lot like the seafaring originals except mirrored on the x-axis. That meaning they’d have a “deck” on top and bottom, no keel, and another set of turrets on the “bottom” too. That way they’d have closer to 360 degree field of fire. Maybe those turrets would be a bit like the ones on “Space Battleship Yamato” where they can aim almost straight up.
the problem with such an arrangement is also its advantage, the only targets that you can fire all of your weapons on are those that are directly broadside to you. While this may be desirable in some settings, in others it may be more desirable to concentrate the guns on one side of the ship, with the underside housing things like hangers for vehicles or drones, missile bays, or machinery spaces and magazines. Alternatively, the underside could just be more armored, with a relative minimum of weaponry, to protect the internals of the vessel. In the old steel battleships, the main belt armor extended well below the waterline because the bottom of the vessel was where machinery spaces, magazines and boilers were, equipment the loss of which would either destroy the ship or put it out of action.
@@andrewmayo9400 This only works because the script says so. A space going warship has no bottom, and can't dictate the enemy's approach vector.
So a good shape for a gunship is conical (studded with turrets), so most guns can fire forward, with 50% for off axis.
I also favor avoiding multi-role ships. CVs with drones and Marine shuttles escorted by Battleships and a gaggle of Anti-Missile/Drone Frigates/Cruisers
@@stephen1r2 That depends if it is only a space ship, or if it is capable of landing on planets as well. Many ships in fiction, including but not limited to Harlock's "Arcadia" and all of the Gundam motherships except the one in 00, are also capable of landing planetside, so they must be oriented such that they are structurally sound in both gravitational and 0 g environments. If my enemy is aproaching from the negative Z direction (below, as traditionally oriented), then the ship can be rotated about its long axis to bring the guns on target, just as if an opponent is approaching from the east a ship can maneuver to bring the guns on target faster by turning either toward or away depending on the current orientation of the guns. A roll maneuver, in terms of delta V and thus fuel, is one of the cheapest maneuvers that a spacecraft can execute, since it can rotate about its velocity vector without changing it. Likewise a ship that can land on the surface of objects needs to have the neccesary equipment to support planetary landing, not just gears, but also shock absorbers, ascent thrusters etc.. This equipment can dictate design in the same way that the need for large heavy boilers and exhaust funnels limited the space available amidships for guns on naval vessels, leading to the classic 2 fore and either 1 or 2 aft turret configuration. The Bismarck for example had 2 forward and 2 aft double 15 inch gun turrets for an 8 gun broadside, whereas the iowa had 3 triple 16 inch guns turrets, 2 foward and 1 aft for a 9 gun broadside (there were suggestions at the time of her design of a 2 fore 2 aft design, but there were concerns about the stability of the ship from so many 16 inch guns so high above the center of mass, rolling from firing the guns broadside could damage the ship or impact accuracy.
@@andrewmayo9400 just make a ship that is a long hexagonal tube with all the fragile bits in the center, with guns and armor on every surface, if you need to get all guns on target you can just spin the ship on its axis and have it shoot volleys whenever a side is on target,
hell you can even go halo's covenant and keep the bridge inside the belly of the ship and just use the multitudes of cameras and sensors to stay appraised on everything
@@andrewmayo9400 if i want assault landers i'd go how Star Wars' Clone Wars went and have a design like the Acclamators be the premier planetary assault lander and focus my space fighting ships' designs to actually fighting in space
i can compensate by building the military infrastructure around that, having orbital anchorages and dry docks interconnected with a space-station that's tethered to a planet through a space elevator
Guns on warships (and how you use them) can be a very fun concept in any story. Even in my writings, I have a case where a civilian billionaire, rejected from military service, took the turrets from USS Iowa and Missouri and slapped them onto an older 22nd-century spaceship that he called The Rampage. There were a variety of reasons why this was done (Earth has been mostly abandoned), and the warship's entire frame was rebuilt, including utilizing engines to help counter recoil generation. The ship can essentially fly sideways and fire its guns onto a target. However, it's important to note that this is an ad-hoc design as shells are very slow, and space is absolutely huge. The ship is essentially a raider that does saturation bombardment at stationary targets.
There can be other ways that gun turrets can be used in stories. This can include Gatling-like turrets where the barrels cycle to help out in heat reduction. Rings can be used to house large gun turrets, where the rings spin to cycle each turret when firing at single targets. It's important to note that space doesn't care what your ship does. You can lightly spin the ship to fire every turret you need to hit a target. Space isn't a 2D field (which writers can fall into when depicting battles). Up, down, left, right, nobody cares.
I have a similar-ish thing in an alt-history sci-fi setting I was working on a while back where easy space travel and FTL became possible in the late '40s/early '50s due to a "new element" discovered as a byproduct of nuclear testing that works as a reality-breaking superfuel. The Soviets in this setting, finding themselves outpaced early on by Western space warships and weapon systems, took the guns off of the recently decommissioned dreadnought battleship October Revolution (originally the Imperial Russian ship Gangut) and slapped them onto what was, at the time, the largest military spaceframe ever built. Ended up being named in honor of the old dreadnought. It was effectively an ill-conceived stopgap measure and outdated before it was even completed due to the development of space missile systems, but by the time of the main story (late 2010s) it had ended up being basically the only functioning capitol ship that the Soviet remnant had left (all the others got blown up or scrapped during/after a conflict with NATO in the '80s).
The setting as a whole is a bit weird technologically, which is the entire point. Technological development has been stagnant since the early '80s due to various factors, and the Soviets don't really have any peer/near-peer foes in the systems they operate in, so the rustbucket October Revolution with its 1910s naval guns and unreliable late '50s nuclear reactors is still pretty useful for them (when it's not in spacedock for repairs) despite basically being held together with duct tape and woefully inadequate for dealing with other capitol ships. "Nyet, dreadnought is fine."
In The Expanse they rotated the ship to allow the PDCs to hit targets better. I'm sure a turret would benefit from this as well. I'm actually surprised more ships don't rotate or spin during combat.
Its not just better turret coverage.
It would also help with armor. (spreading the hits out over a larger area.)
And maybe rate of fire for big guns/missile launchers. (letting the turrets that dont have LOS reload untill they are back at the front again.)
On the other hand it would make targetign solutions more complicated.
On the other other hand depending on ship design it might just be a very bad idea to rotate it.
For example the imperial stardestroyers from starwars. You would almost allways want your front or sides showing towards the enemy since this both optimizes the weapons field of fire while at the same time giving the smallest profile. (with the exeption of the stupid bridge...)
If you flew those with the top or bottom of your ISD towards your enemy you would present a massive target and cut line of sight from all weapons on the other side AND the "trench" weapons. (the ones at the side of the ship are recessed between the top and bottom armore plates.)
See the Honor Harrington novels for ships rotating.
probably depends on ship size, given inertia is still a thing, meaning bigger ships take more energy to get rotating, and to subsequently stop them doing so. It would also have an effect on shipboard gravity unless you have some kind of artificial gravity in it, which is why in The Expanse they're strapped in during combat on the Roci.
@@vyran7044 You have additional multiple tactical reasons on the Expanse gunship Rocinante why rotate the ship, not only better turret coverage. You are also letting one PDC cool off while other take its place in the firing solution. You rotate randomly on all three axis and make changes to acceleration/deceleration anyway to make it harder to enemy targeting software.
"it would make targeting solutions more complicated" - not much more than already existing targeting on ship close defense turrets.. you must already account for movement both target and ship you are on. On the sea it is more unpredictable than in space anyway and working just fine.
@@luisnunes3863 That's quite specific... author really wanted to somehow portrait basically old "ship of the line" battles (at least in the first books, later it is more about the carrier operations switch) , it is named "Hornblower in space" for a reason. So there is in-setting reason to rotate the ship - top and bottom are impenetrable shields. This does not happen in Expanse, there are no shielding tech. This does not happen in any other sci-fi even with shielding tech, it is expected that the shield cover the entire sphere and weakens with hits, not that the top and the bottom are impenetrable from the propulsion system itself.
1:17 Gotta love the DS9 references especially to that particular scene 😂
1:15 the gundam reference was awesome
Taiidan Heavy Cruiser in Homeworld 1 for the coolest big gun layout in scifi. Decent coverage in most angles but all capable of baring forward - most scifi designs have horrible huge blind spots - not just behind but (generally) below. Donnager class in Expanse gets it similarly nice.
YES
I can’t believe I had to scroll down this far to see a Homeworld mention lol. I love Cataclysm’s designs personally, although some are…odd. Like the Somtaaw Destroyer having heavy turrets that seem to free-float on rails???
@@VDiddy5000 I read that the HW1 multi-gun corvette uses the same tech to reduce friction for faster traverse and tracking capabilities.
And its lil cousin the Taiidan Assault Frigate🤩
Yay! Arcadia turrets get a highlight! My favorite of all big space gun examples.
The latest iteration of the Arcadia is IMHO absolutely insane. All her broadside turrets sit on rings that let them rotate round the hull for 360° coverage in the X and Y planes. How crazy cool is that? (But the inside of that hull must look like an infernal machine from Mordor ...) 😂
Neat that you showed the Gatlantis dome turrets from SBY! That particular design is pretty neat. A relatively weak turret that has a full hemisphere of coverage and can fire in any direction with minimal movement, plus the rate of fire is very high.
I think it is more of a gattling gun principle, may be those eariler ships had heat management problems on gun barrels.
Unless they also can divert the beam through all the barrels at the same time for wide screen defense or multitarget lock?
On warships, the armored housing around a turret is called the "barbette". Inside it, there is the turret foundation, which the "turret part" of the turret sits on with rollers in between. The rest of the compartments all have their own names.
Also, the turret basket is mainly there as a floor for the crew. Without a turret basket, you would essentially stand on top of ammo boxes and physically turn yourself as the turret traversed. With the basket, the crew is automatically connected to the turret so they turn with it. Not all modern tanks have turret baskets. Mainly the russian tanks instead have a rotating plate on the hull floor, and only their seats are actually connected to the turret. The turret in a tank just sits on the turret ring, and the basket does very little to keep it in place. Look up "leopard 2 turret fell off" and you will see a quite funny photo of just that.
I've seen the "basket" of a battleship turret called the "turret pan."
@@stcredzero personally never seen that designation, but it makes sense.
*MORE DAKKA*
Waaaagh
*THERE IZ NO SUTCH THIN' AZ ENOUGH DAKKA*
MOAR!
@@colinscutt5104 lol Google is prompting me to translate all of these into English.
@@theworkshopwhisperer.5902 Well i mean yeah Cockne... ähh i mean propper orkish doesnt count as english/low gothik. ^^
Space under the turret on ships sometimes called a Barbette
The fixed armored tube the gunhouse sits on is the Barbette. The Turret Stalk is the rotating portion that is inside the Barbette.
The turret baskets on ships are called Barbettes
Turrets sit within barbettes, but barbettes are not one with the turret itself
I offer barbaskets
That is ... wrong! A barbette is armoured housing for a gun with a limited firing arc but easier to create/build because its not a turret.
Show me your Barbettes 😎
Actually, no. The EXTERNAL MOUNT where you put the turret (and the "basket") in, is the barbette.
In space warfare turreted guns tend to be the secondary armaments that support the truly absorb spinal mounted F.U. dispenser.
Also a rather common misconception is that a ships armaments aren't guns in the same way we think of WW2 Battleships.
But merely a way to transfer the Ship's Power Output into damage, be it kinetic, termal or otherwise.
So adding more Gun Turrets to a ship than you can fire at once, is a perfectly valid tactic to solve blind spots.
Indeed. The game Eve Online is nice example of this. Each turret comes with two actual fitted turrets. One mounted on each side of the ship. And they work in tandem to cover each others blind spots. Very nice to see up close when you are shooting
and fixed forward facing spinal mount weapons are a bad idea in 99% of cases.
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 Given the distances involved in space battles that statement is false.
@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 Nah. If your ship is manoeuvrable enough, or the target is slow enough then it gives you amazing weapon stability for firing BIG rounds at an enemy.
@@vi6ddarkking no its not, distance is the massive enemy of a fixed forward facing weapon. there is a reason they even went away on tanks, and the only reason aircraft retain them is turrets are real bad for aerodynamics.
It is incredibly difficult to engineer an RCS system that is both powerful enough to maneuver an entire ship at a reasonable amount while also being precise enough for fine aiming. It is also far more energy inefficient than turreted weapon, as you would have to expend considerable amounts of fuel and energy just to aim the one big gun. And you better hope the enemy isn't shooting at you and landing hits because hits from even light projectiles will still impart momentum on your ship and throw its aim off.
And this is on top of the fact that the one big gun can only fire in one direction at a time at a single target. which means if you get attacked form multiple directions, your one big gun is pretty helpless, and building a ship around one big gun makes it pretty helpless against swarm attacks from smaller cheaper ships.
where as ships armed with multiple turreted gun batteries can much more easily deal with swarm attacks from multiple directions, especially if equipped with cluster munitions designed to deal with such threats.
And this is on top of the fact that one big gun is also a single point of failure where one malfunction now makes your ship helpless.
A single massive gun ship is only ever going to be any good at fighting other big gun capital ships at close range, where as a turreted capital ship can much more easily fight off both other big capital ships as well as kill smaller warships and depending on ammunition load, even deal with fighters very well, as well as being much more tolerant of weapon malfunctions since one malfunction is unlikely to deprive you of your main battery.
and dont start with that but turrets are heavy and complex nonsense, turrets are an over 100 year old technology that is pretty well mastered now, and compared to the other technology a spaceship would have a turret would be positively caveman technology by comparison. And building one massive oversized gun is going to be far more expensive than investing in numerous smaller caliber guns.
On ships you can call them barbette it fit in most cases.
Just finished watching a Drachinifel video and was gonna post that.
My favorite SF vehicle with a turret were mounted on “Bolo” tanks in the "Bolo" universe. Reading about one of these self-aware tracked behemoths being inserted from orbit to planet surface was the start of a great tail! Nothing like a Hellbore plasma cannon to ruin the day of an opponent on the surface or in low orbit.
Turrets on spaceship = Nova dreadnought from Babilon 5 in my mind😅😂
Or the turrets on an Omega class that case swivel to target enemy fighters and ships
@@lovipoekimo176 it's a universe thing, though some weapons in B5 are better at killing fighters, missiles, and most energy weapons than others.
The one of undisputed champions of PD weapons is the human reverse-engineered Interceptor. Basic rule of thumb for if an Interceptor can intercept your shots: is the incoming shot a) First One BS, b) light-speed beams, or c) neither? If A or B, then it won't work against them (though the E-Web could help a bit), if C then it's a yes.
I like the detail that in The Expanse the PDCs have an RCS thruster on the back to compensate for recoil.
And also imagine if the Normandy SR2 from Mass Effect 2 and 3 could also turn it's twin Thanix Cannon to also fire on Targets not directly in front of them. (Or imagine them actually using it more often then just the one time against the Collector-Ship at the end of Mass Effect 2.)
If you get the upgrade in 2 you can see it firing during the final battle for Earth! If you pay *really* close attention that is.
I think that's actually the gun providing its own compensation. The ammo is caseless IIRC, so it wouldn't be that hard to have recoilless/RAVEN guns that just balance their own recoil.
@@MandolinMagisure...but aren't they also rocket-bullets? Like how did the Pella shoot down the Roci's torpedos when both ships are *accelerating* in the same direction?
@@Ebalosus Don't think they're rocket bullet/Gyrojets, this isn't 40K.
Doesn't matter if both ships are accelerating the same way, the bullets can do tens of thousands of Gs acceleration while the ships are doing low double digits.
@@MandolinMagi sure...but they stop accelerating the second they leave the barrel. If anything, they should have at least a shorter range when firing forward under acceleration.
Is there at least a video to help visualise your point of view? I'd honestly like to see how it would work, because I have trouble visualising it.
The point about lasers being able to be reflected from a single generator to multiple turrets reminded me of a really interesting weapon concept used in the series Wolf's Rain. What some craft in that setting seem to do is fire a laser and then holographically reflect it *outside* the ship, bouncing it around to attack the target from crazy unpredictable angles. It's a fun way to weaponize the remote light redirection capability of hologram technology.
The point about robotic arms actually also brings up a rather silly idea used in the series Monkey Wrench. A lot of sci-fi gives mechs and little maintenance pods humanoid arms that match the movements of their operator to allow for intuitive high-dexterity tasks.
Monkey Wrench takes this idea and slaps it on most of the ships in the setting, leading to the existence of spaceship-sized handheld guns and even melee weapons. It's goofy and I love it.
The thing about turrets in SF combat is there's a certain satisfaction in actually seeing that whole process where the turret pivots, the barrels align, there's a moment of quiet, and then *boom*. It's one of the things I found I preferred during the Kelvin v. Narada battle at the beginning of Star Trek '09, seeing the phasers as physical turrets poking out of the Kelvin's hull just made them feel more real.
Generally on a ship, the whole assembly is the turret. The armored bit with barrels sticking out is the gun house. The armored part around the lower turret is the barbette. Additional magazine space for both shells and powder may be outside the barbette proper, but still behind armor. There will be pass-throughs for moving shells or powder into the turret proper; in US lexicon they're usually called scuttles.
Impressive that the first (and only) Star Wars footage was at 8:00 in!
Yeah , most of the guns on the ships in star wars that are visible to us are the Octaple turbolaser barbettes on the sides of ISD
@@sumukhvmrsat6347 Indeed. Thought he might say something though about turrets that are internet and hidden like the Mon Cala ships have. It’s like the opposite of the title lol
One cool note I want to bring up on turret placement is the idea of broadsides vs forward firepower.
For the most part broadsides arent much of a thing in space, because even by naval standards its just a crutch due to typical ship designs having main gun turrets both fore and aft (and sometimes even in the center) leaving only the broadsides as zones where the whole main battery can engage a target, while also giving 360° coverage when pointing at least one turret on target. And even then this layout is mostly necessary because naval ships are long and narrow, and you can go only so high with super-firing turrets before your ship becomes topheavy.
But there are alternate designs like the Dunkerque, where all four main gun turrets are forward of the superstructure, which allows a fully frontal engagement, which can for instance be useful when actively chasing a ship, cant chase them sideways after all, and you give a narrow profile for the enemy to shoot back. Soviets had that idea as well, slightly after WWII, and got started on "Project 24", though it was more of a battlecruiser, a kind of tank destroyer for battleships. It had one forward turret for 3 16 inch guns and a rear turret for 4 7.1 inch guns, idea being that they can, at the right engagement range, fire over the superstructure at high angles.
In space there is little reason for ships to be long and narrow, so ship designs can work out the compromise of concentrating fire and maximizing coverage in much more interesting ways. I think at that point the most realistic design would be an Imperial II Star Destroyer that has one or two turrets respectively on the top and bottom, super-firing if its two, so front and sides at zero elevation you can fully concentrate firepower, and roll the ship as needed to get the guns on target. But thats just my opinion.
Recoil as a problem is always overstated when people talk about space guns. If your ship is more than minimally maneuverable, it can correct for any unintended motion (which won't be much compared to the velocities needed just to get around in space) with thrust. There's no need for a dedicated thruster on the back of the gun when the ship already has loads of thrusters.
Elevation might not be all that valuable either. A spaceship can do something a wet ship can't: roll. If you're in a space battleship and the target is "above" you, you can roll the ship 90 degrees to port and now the target is on the starboard side.
Speaking of which, one of the things that makes Star Trek unique is that their ships don't use turret, unless you count the torpedo launchers. They have an array of energy emitters instead, which can disperse or concentrate the weapons energy. This design eliminates the need for stabilizing the weapon. I have yet to see other franchises do this on screen but there might be books that have ship weapons similar to this.
As we've found on tanks, armor only goes so far and armoring an entire ship on 6 sides would be basically impossible. Any material we come up with that makes armor better would likely be accompanied by materials that make weapons better.
The thing with space is that it is big with massive distances, so it is easy to miss. This means that the weapons most likely to be used are self-guided missiles with large engines to mass (versus a ship with much smaller engines to mass) so they can adjust to hit, energy weapons that can go at the speed of light, or rapid fire shot that can be spread over a large area. We currently do not have energy weapons that would be useful at distance, and likely we won't for a long time. Missiles are the most likely though I'd be worried that ships can make small course corrections to dodge as the faster a missile is going the harder it'll be to alter trajectory plus if it misses it may not have the reaction mass to change course to come back around as you are looking at a 200% increase in mass (100% to slow to a stop, 100% to go back at the same speed) plus you are likely going to have to use even more as the target you just missed is speeding away.
Grape shot fired rapidly is doable against a stationary or slow moving target especially if the ship it is fired from is moving fast, thus all the kinetic energy from the ship is added to the shot. The issue would be if both ships are moving fast in the same direction, we lack "usable" railguns that would work reliably plus it would be difficult to eliminate the heat in space. Thus we need to use gunpowder or similar explosives to propel it but the issue there is both that the ship is moved back in the opposite direction and that we can only propel it so fast whereas an engine that is on may in the time period it takes for the grapeshot to travel the distance between ships add enough speed such that the target is travelling away faster than the shot.
I'm imagining space combat using lots of small weapons to increase probability to hit over a few large turrets unless we invent something like shields. As for engines, I am imagining nuclear pulse or something else that can sustainably add speed for long periods of time without using up significant mass. Current engines in space only burn for short periods to save fuel, which isn't practical in a combat situation over the vast distances of space. Similar to why the nuclear sub was a massive leap forward over the diesel.
Travers Speed isn't usually a problem for the REALLY big, Massey (Heavy) guns since they're designed to kill other Capitol Ships, NOT the small, fast moving Fighters and Missiles...those are dealt with by the smaller, MUCH lighter and faster moving Point Defense Turrets...
The WW2 Battleships didn't use their 16 inch gun Turrets to kill airplanes, they used them to kill other Battleships (or buildings in the Bombardment role)...the small 5 inch guns would be used for small, fast targets...
Bigger guns, bigger minute of arc. For a 50 caliber gun, a few inches can change the end target quite a lot. Isaac Newton is a the meanest dude in space.
The Japanese actually had anti-aircraft rounds for the big guns on their battleships, including the Yamato. They just tended to be horribly ineffective at taking out attacking bombers with them. I think that I remember some of the rounds even turning the big 18-inch guns into giant shotguns!
@@randlebrowne2048 The pilots who those shells were used against said they were pretty.
Tell that to the Yamato that struck both the USS Johnston (And sinking her) and the USS Samuel B Roberts (crippling her) with her 18inch guns while both ships were maneuvering hard. I didn't mention White Plains or Gambier Bay because Casablanca class escort carriers are not fast.
@@HunterSteel29 She didn't sink any of the destroyers with her main guns. All 18 inch shells hit the superstructure.
Idk how this channel always hits my nostalgic kid's sense of wonder over every detail in a sci-fi IP. I use to love drawing ships and space ships and spending time on the turrents. I use to draw WW2 style spec sheets of ships and everything. I love turrents so much
As for a recoil felt throughout the ship, that's the assumption that the ships have zero inertia. In fact, they have extreme amounts of inertia and even though big guns do have recoil, one would hope the static inertia of the vehicle would not be massively affected by big gun recoil. Steve
I like how star trek phaser arrays just side steps all these problems. Exactly like a future solution should.
Also, would like to see more discussion on recoil. It seems overstated. It's not as if the ship is firing even 1% of it's mass, so it should have very little effect.
It's also the speed you're flinging away that mass that matters.
Recoil doesn't matter much for one gun firing once, but at the ranges in space (without some kind of actively guided munitions) sequential firings will be affected by recoil enough to miss.
0:52 On a ship it's called the barbet
Beat me to it .👍
The barbette is the fixed armored structure in the hull in which the turret mounts. It isn't part of the rotating turret mechanism. I don't think there is a word to for the structures of the turret below the gun house. Turret is the entire moving structure. Gun house is the part visible outside the ship. You can have hoist, powder rooms, shell platforms, etc. depending on the design. But those are all separate parts. None are the term for the part of the turret below the gun house that moves with it.
I though it was the citadel... It certainly looks like one
@@maxstr citadel is the armor system surrounding the magazines, engines, boilers, guns, etc that the ship needs to fight.
@@maxstr on us warships the only part of the ship that is not armored is the bow and the stern everything between turret 2 and turret 3 is what is considered the armored citadel
More of Space Battleship Yamato 🎉 ,space dock is unlocking a new level now
2:50 I imagine in Zero G the mass of the turret being offset would indeed be of lesser concern, but something that would definitely need more thought would be the recoil. You are in a no-gravity zone... anything shot in one direction, requires an equal amount of force going in the other direction, meaning recoil could throw off the trajectory of the entire ship, or mess with the aiming of the entire weapon system unless each canon also applies a force to oppose each shot
On a ship, the turret basket is a barbette (at least the well it sits in). Barbettes are armored to prevent ammo detonation during operation. Special passages can allow passage of ammo ang powder charges in air tight rolling compartments to prevent flash fire. HMS Hood exploded likely due to the mis use of such airlocks which allowed powder fumes to transmit a flash fire to the ammo rack (more precisely to the gun powder magasine, ammo doesn't detonate like that until detonators are triggered, photos on the HMS Hood wreck discovered a few years ago clearly show that despite the detonation, the shells are still intact ! )
On the WWII Yamato, the entire main gun turret was weighting ahout 1500 tons.
Of course heavy guns can reload while turning . the ring shown during that part is how its done. an inner platform containing the loading hoists rotates with the turret, a large ring around this platform can be locked stationary to the magazine and ammunition moved to it, then it rotates to line up and lock into the inner platform to move the ammunition to it and the hoists. Modern automatic turrets, like the Mk-45 have a station below the turret. in it is the ready-service magazine that directly feeds up to the turret. Around that is a ring that spins around it and transfers rounds to the ready-service magazine. outside of that is a loading hatch which allows the gun crew to slid rounds into it, and it transfers them to the transfer ring as it spins around to take it.
Just do like Legend of the Galactic Heroes and turn the Ships into Turrets!!
Generally, for ships, the Turret is the Armored box with the weapon. It sits on a turret ring attached to the barbette. The barbette is armored cylinder below the spiny box. It contains ammo handling rooms, complex machinery to turn the turret, firefighting equipment, and more.
I have to say, I am MUCH more convinced that turrets are a good idea for space ships as opposed to large, fixed spinal weapons. You can't both fire and maneuver at the same time using a spinal railgun, but with turrets that's not an issue
On a ship the "turret basket" is two things, directly under the "turret", actually the gun house (the part that sticks above the deck), is the working chamber where ammunition is removed from the hoists and sent up to the gun house to be loaded in the guns (some turret designs bypass this and sent the rounds directly to the trays for the rammers to load). Below that is the trunk where things like shell/powder hoists are located to feed the gun from the magazines.
The Turret Trunk on a ship is called the Barbette, it also contains the ammunition hoists to bring ammo to the gun.
The Yamato is smiling.
Anyone else watching the footage of the mobile suits sniping off those battle ships in much of the used footage and lamenting on the lack of close in point defense?
In Traveller turrets are the basic weapon emplacements and can carry up to three weapons. Fifty or a hundred times larger than turrets are Weapon bays, but most major warships in Traveller have a spinal weapon as their main gun.
Power, transfer becomes a major consideration, for railguns / coilguns. Since they can draw huge amounts of power for a very brief moment. Likely making it necessary to locate the firing capacitors in the turret as well.
Another issue are passing through coolant lines to the turret, since in space you have to rely on radiators (or internal heat sinks for short periods of time ) to keep cool.
The Battleship New Jersey channel recently put out a nice video going through the steps involved in bringing propellant and projectiles into and up through the turrets for the 16" guns. Good stuff. Highly recommend.
0:39 on a ship we called this area the Mount (IE the forward battery being Mount 51, or Mount 501 for the forward most STBD Machine Gun) or Loader Drum Room when interior.
2:13 while the 13" battery on an Iowa Class Battleship was only 1-2 deg per second, in the modern era guns like the Mk54/Mod2 can traverse at speeds upwards of 30 deg/sec, and can engage and destroy incoming air targets.
-Former US Navy Gunner's Mate (ret)
Keep these videos coming if you can; they're helping some of us write some FIRE ass stories! 😎
A turret basket on a warship is called a barbette if it penetrates the deck of the ship or a mount if it is attached directly two the deck.
I love big turrets and I cannot lie.
Am I biased? Hell yeah, my game is full of turrets and they are large and in charge.
Love this channel
For your zenith crossing target, keep in mind that you may have issues with azimuth even coming close to that axis... it's kinda like gimbal lock and can be solved the same way, with a third axis of motion, but it definitely makes for a WEIRD turret.
The area below the 'Turret' on large warships such as battleships are called Barbettes In fact what you see on battleships liker USS Iowa are technically called Hooded Barbettes and later Turret Barbettes: (This was later shortened into Turret). Also most battleship & cruiser turrets of Twentieth Century had the abilkity to be loaded at any Angle of Train; (and some had the ability to be loaded at any Angle of Elevation simultaneously).
Coincidentally, tanks get their naming conventions from warships and not the other way around.
0:38 On a ship the turret basket is referred to as the barbette.
Something worth consideration: in any setting where the spacecraft needs to be firing its thrusters during combat, turrets allow it to point its thrusters and guns in two (or more) different directions. Fixed-mount weapons would require you to turn the whole vehicle, making firing while on the move difficult if not impossible.
I've been designing my own version of the Constitution class from Star Trek, and I designed it where the phasers have heavy particle accelerators and cyclotron under the hull, and the turret redirects the particle beam to the enemy ship.
I also have both SIF generators and IDF generators dedicated to the phasers due to the 120kT discharge from each turret where, without them, the recoil alone would destroy the Enterprise.
on warships the section beneath the turret (including both rotating and non-rotating bits) is called a barbette.
And all those considerations are why any truly powerful "gun" type weapon on a spacecraft would be spinal mounted. The whole ship would serve as the turret, attitudinal thrusters would be the traverse mechanism, and recoil would be managed by being fixed opposing the primary thrusters.
Another great video please let's have more of them
the turret basket of a ships turret is usually referred to as a barbette, at least if it is sticking up above the deck.
Lasers would only need to turn the emitter as mentioned in the video, so something like a plasma weapon would be able to channel through a hose and magnetic containment coil that can flex, so the main mechanism doesn't have to move.
This is one of the reasons I really like "Legend of the Galactic Heroes". The majority of their Battleships all have their main guns pointed forward, this not only concetrates firepower but defense of the ship is also enhanced due to a smaller surface area to be hit in a battle and the stacking armor and shields in one area. This is also why tactics plays a significant role in that ahow cuz once a fleet is flanked they will basically be routed rather quickly.
Swinging turrets is my favorite. My dad served on a few of the old Iowas battleships. He loved it.
One interesting aspect of David Drake's RCN saga is that 8-inch is the biggest-caliber gun any warship can carry, even a dreadnought. This is because unlike a seaborne warship that can use the sea itself to absorb the recoil from its guns, in space the only thing that can take the recoil is the ship itself, and the recoil from an 8-inch gun is right at the upper limit of what any hull can take without being turned inside out.
*laughs in Warhammer 40k*
@@Aristaios But seriously, folks, Drake's take feels more real because he was one sci-fi author who'd actually seen the elephant, having served two years as an interrogator attached to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam, and thus knew what he was talking about.
One of the things I like about Eve Online is the massive caliber of Minmatar ships guns. To quote Captain John Rourke (of the good ship Clear Skies), "Stationary ships don't react well to Fourteen Hundreds."
I think for a ship it is a munitions handling deck. In case of a battleship it is made up of powder hoists back blast doors and powered ring decks. Ring decks allow powder and shot to pass into the turret. Magazines on things bigger than tanks are stationary. Also to run all ring decks shell hoists powder doors. It takes like 90 people per gun in an Iowa class battleship.
I used to think phaser strips were turrets on rails, but learning about phase array radars and applying that to a laser beam, is dang scary! The ability to swing the beam to the extremes in milliseconds is superior to any turret.
Some of the footage labelled "Space Battleship Yamato 2199" is from "2202".
on a warship, a turret basket is referred to as a "Barbette"
For high power lasers, you don't need some complex mirror arrangement to move it around, just a really chunky fibre optic cable.
"You see, most gun turrets max at size 10.
But our gun turrets go to size eleven..."
Chance of a video on the REALLY big guns? Like the static warship guns. For example, the MAC cannons from Halo, or Nova cannons from Warhammer, where they just point in one direction, but whatever is near that spot is gonna have a really bad day.
The best earth warships are from Space Battleship Yamato. Barrels on the guns aren't necessary unless they are rail guns or mass drivers. Directed energy weapons are fine with just apertures on the turret housing.
what is the film or video with the clip of the sticking arm turret?
cool video, i am into spaceship design, and you pretty much have a very right approach, f.e. with the turret arc coverage
We need a proper finale for The Expanse!
^^this, even if it ends up being animated!
We are waiting for the actors to get older. There is a significant time gap to the last book
@@martinjrgensen8234 Not just the last book, the last three had a jump of approximately 30 years, and a whole lot of things happened very differently and/or for very different reasons.
As much as I love the show, I’m fine where it ends. The books continue with a massive time jump and a different cast of characters
@@CMTechnica 30 years is hardly a massive jump, and the core cast remains Holden, Naomi, Amos and Alex. The entire saga is about the four of them, and the massive changes that they lived through and influenced, from the start of book 1 where they are not especially close crew-members of the Canterbury, to the very end of book 9.
Peacekeeper Command Carrier - my favourite big gun ship! The main guns are on turrets but also on massive tracks around the hull.
BTW, on larger turrets such as battleship guns, the part of the turret inside the ship (rotating part) sits inside the Barbette (the non rotating part).
0:30 I believe it's called a Battery Column. Battery (a grouping of guns) because each barrel is considered a separately maintained gun despite being physically bound to the same direction. Column because you're right, a massive rotating undercarriage that extends 3 decks deep into the ship can't rightly be called a basket, and that word fits the design choice best.
Edit: They are apparently called barbettes, which also makes sense for a cluster of hostile protrusions. It also just depends on how you want to name your own fictional universe's terminology.
Need moor Dakka. Can never have enuff.
"On a ship they are called..." The barbette, the bit that contains the rotating gear and connects to the magazine and its feeds is called the barbette while the upper visible portion is called the gunhouse. Strictly speaking turrets, e.g. the Coles and Ericsson types were single pieces things that did the work of both gun house and barbette and were really heavy. Hence it was found to be smarter to make it in more pieces and only rotate the top portion.
All of the inner workings of a turret within a ship is considered the Citadel. It’s the most heavily armored section of the ship (hence why it’s usually in the center of a ship) and that’s to keep the Magazines of the ship from detonating. The Citadel can extend to two thirds of a ship’s length on conventional sea faring ships. In space, this can get more complicated.
My sci-fi setting employs turrets primarily as a secondary battery, whereas the main guns are normally in broadside. This is because battles tend to happen either on converging vectors or 'en passant', and the problems with turrets make it impractical or impossible to put big guns in them.
Moving faster than a turret can track is how I stayed alive in many fights during my time in Eve Online, my Crusader wasn't the best Interceptor but she was my favorite.
One of the biggest emerging markets for navies with small to medium ships (say up to frigate class) with smaller budgets is the self contained bolt-on guns, especially smaller auto-cannons. They are currently working on a bolt on CIWS and even Bolt-on SHORAD and VSHORAD missiles. This is now possible because of the now relatively affordable ultra high resolution Uncooled thermal cameras to allow for rapid and accurate target acquisition and engagement (because it can see thermal signatures much more precisely at much further ranges, giving more time to swivel the gun/missiles to engage as soon as they are in range)
There is also work being done for bolt on RWS’s for ground vehicles in the HMMVVE size class for 20mm and they are upping it to possibly 35mm for MRAP sized vehicles. This will give small vehicles a great hard kill drone defense.
Given the recoil problem I would think that in space combat, it would be best to only have extremely large ballistic guns pointed toward the bow of the ship, which could only pivot relatively slightly for minor course corrections, while the ship itself handles the larger movement. For 360 coverage you would just use lasers and various self-propelled munitions, which could have less recoil.
Kinda surprised that the ship from Spacepirate Harlock didn't get a special mention in the coverage problem segment, considering it has a rather effective mechanism to facilitate exactly that with its turrets on rotating tracks that can circle the turrets around the ships.
Also the floating gun platforms on the Iserlohn Fortress in 'Legend of the Galactic Hereos' which could be shifted within the liquid metal layer to wherever they are needed (albeit that one is a massive space station and not a warship, so I understand how that may not have made the cut for a video on warships specifically).
Another alternative you might want to consider is multiple turrets on a rail on your ship hull. Especially in an environment where your foes can appear at any angle, instead of having dozens turret on all side of your ship’s hull to cover all angle, having a few that can be moved from place to place would be sustainable. Less energy requirement. Less mass (more deltaV). And would make sense if your ship is one that has landing capability.
Having mech with multiple armaments patrol on your ship’s hull and let them act as a walking turret would also make sense
You forgot the #1 rule of having a turret: it has to look really really cool
I love the showcase of Harlock: Space Pirate in this. When I watched that movie, I was amazed at how they got around keeping a limited main battery in space, but still having full weapon coverage. Would love to see a breakdown of the ship itself.
That big cylindrical part of the turret can simply be called a barbette/trunk.
(originally a "turret" was what you saw on things like USS Monitor. Later the design of barbettes superseded those original turret designs. Leading to what we generally call a turret today.)
Sisko "I lied" hahahaha, Perfect reference. Pretty sure you can live with it.
I don't remember the movie or show, but I saw once dual turrets mounted on annular ring rails on circumference of a ship... it seemed awesome since these turrets counterbalance each other in weight and when firing... one set can be set at 12-6 o'clock, while an other set at 9-3 o'clock... as they also give a full 360 degrees coverage. You can have all your guns pointing at one target, better than having to rotate a ship when turrets are mounted only on one side or blocking each other's aiming.