Shipbucket

So I just got done watching an older documentary about US naval guns that ended talking about the 8 inch Mark 71 and its development from the 8 inch Mark 16. As I was watching that I had a sudden thought. What if my favorite naval gun, the glorious 16 inch Mark 7, got the same treatment? Admittedly its pretty ridiculous and completely pointless, but if nothing else for shits and giggles and just pure enjoyment I thought it would be fun to brainstorm what a modern 16" would look like. The only restriction I'm giving myself is that it has to use the original 16"/50 caliber gun, aside from that the mount, turret, ammunition handling equipment, fire control, etc can be changed.

Any suggestions, insights, comments, or related technical info would be greatly appreciated.

Well US Navy didn't bother with upgrading Iowa's 16" guns, since they was good enough or as good as you could get them

Its not so much upgrading the Mark 7 off the Iowa's because ya, those suckers are as good as they can be. The idea is more what would a 16" inch gun be like if designed today. Things like crew reduction, removing the turret officers booth, etc. Admittedly I don't expect to see much changes, but I'm bored and off from work for a few days so why not.

No one knows how to make the Mk7s anymore, plus the ordnance factory is long gone.

The Mk7s consisted of (from inside to outside) a liner (with the chromed rifling), the A tube (the actual gun barrel), a jacket, and two reinforcing hoops, all nesting one inside the other.

During WWII and Korea the liners were only good for about 350 rounds before they were too worn out due to the corrosive salts used in the propellant. A barrel with a worn liner had to be pulled from the turret and shipped back to the ordnance factory in New York to have the liner replaced.

For their service in the 1980s, the addition of a special wax to the propellant eliminated the corrosion problem increasing service life to 1500 rounds which is the limit due to metal fatigue.

What do you guys think the feasibility of placing the 16 inch shells in an automated ready magazine in place of the projectile ring? Instead of manually being moved from the ring to the hoist the projectiles are loaded into a revolving magazine that surrounds the central column and rotates to feed the projectiles mechanically into the hoists. I did some very rough measuring and figure you could very easily fit 36 projectiles into groups of three around the central column.

What I'm trying to do is reduce overall costs and crew required rather than increase performance because to be honest you really can't beat what the US Navy as already done in that regards. So rather than a refit or rebuild this is more of if we building a 16" gun from scratch.

just use one of the camera equipped robots we have down at the factory, problem solved.

That would be one way of doing it