Assume I have a perfectly good cannon with unlimited cannonballs (Civil War model? I don’t know cannons) and decided to start firing it off in the middle of a big city. Would it smash in a car door? Flatten it? Punch through a cinderblock wall, or just crack it and bounce off?
Considering cannons made medievial fortification obsolete and those where significantly more substantial than car doors or cinderblocks I think cannonballs will go through both without slowing down.
‘What car door/cinderblock wall? I didn’t even notice one!’ ~ Cannon Ball
Napoleonic era cannon vs a 4" thick oak wall.
I’ve got a few questions to bound your original one, @Love_Rhombus . . .
- How large of a cannonball, and how much powder are you putting behind it in the barrel (affects kinetic energy)?
- I’m assuming you’re asking about solid, round shot here, but for only one dollar more would you like to upgrade to an explosive or incendiary-filled shell?
Tripler
We haven’t even gotten to chain shot or grapeshot yet. . .
It will go in through one side of the car and out through the other, and it will easily punch holes through a wall.
Civil War Cannon destroys Car
Cannon Vs Wall
A 12 lb “Napoleon” smoothbore cannon fired a 12 lb solid shot at 1485 feet per second.
Put somewhat differently, that’s a 12 lb ball of iron that’s a bit more than 4.5" in diameter sailing along at 1012.5 miles an hour.
That’s likely to go straight through most everyday stuff.
To show an example of what these could do, Fort Pulaski near Savannah, GA was forced to surrender by Union forces firing cannons of the era in a bit less than a day and a half, by blowing a huge hole in part of the fort’s walls from a mile away. This is through 11 foot thick brick walls.
I thought by the Civil War they had exploding shells too. But here’s a picture of the cannonballs from the Crimean War a little earlier.
The internet, font of all knowledge ant totally reliable, informs me:
The Civil War Cannon Model 1841 has a muzzle velocity of 1054 ft/s
With an iron ball several inches in diamter at that speed, it would take some serious protection to stop it. IIRC the problem with canon in late medieval times was not that they went through castle walls, but that bombarment basically pulverized the stone walls until they fell down. The solution was the forts of the 1700’s and later, where the walls were basically flat-ish earthen ramps.
For the classic non-explosive iron cannonball folks have covered the kinetics pretty well.
But I’m going to say that battering a hole in a fort wall is very different from trying to take down an e.g. 15-story office building.
The fort wall is solid, but if you can keep hitting near the same spot, eventually a hole appears. And then the defenders need to prevent an infantry assault through the hole. Which is a difficult prospect since the whole point of fortifications is to use few soldiers to defend the area within the fort and the area encompassed by its field of fire. The folks inside will be outnumbered by the folks outside maybe 10 or 15 to 1.
Conversely, the office building is mostly made of … air. It has a thin cladding of glass or stone, a bunch of rather thin support columns and the interior is otherwise air & furnishings.
The cladding of course offers no material resistance to cannonballs. So so one the lower floor(s) look like a riot or a hurricane came through. But given the craptacular accuracy of plain iron balls and plain iron cannon, the building might absorb thousands of rounds with no material structural damage. Lotta wrecked desks and computers and filing cabinets, maybe a spewing plumbing leak or three, but the building will stand there impassively indefinitely.
A side question, if I may-would those shipboard cannons be bigger or smaller than the ones dragged around by land-based troops?
Ship’s cannons came in all sizes, from firing 3lb shot to 42lb cannonballs.
Thank you!
IIRC ship cannons would also fired a pair of balls (no comment) connected by a chain, This was useful to make a mess of another ship’s rigging.
Chain shot, nasty stuff! Usually one ball, hollow with the halves joined by chain. They would open up and spin upon exiting the barrel of the canon. But I’m sure they came in a variety of designs.
You do have to admit that inbound cannonballs does affect company morale. Even worse than pointy-haired bosses.
It would also make the “shelter in place” option rather ineffective.
Including one infamous land prototype, built by a Georgia dentist-tinkerer name John Gilleland: behold the celebrated Double Barrel Cannon of Athens, Georgia! This was constructed at the Confederate armory in Athens, and was intended to fire two cannonballs attached by a chain. As Wikipedia puts it, “During tests, the Gilleland cannon effectively mowed down trees, tore up a cornfield, knocked down a chimney, and killed a cow. None of the previously mentioned items were anywhere near the gun’s intended target.”
It would also depend on the type of building. One with steel columns would likely last longer, the relatively thin steel columns would be less like to take a direct impact. But relatively think concrete columns would be more likely to be hit, and would be more brittle than steel columns, so more likely to fail. So accuracy (and knowledge of the building layout) would be a big factor.
I’d increase my chances of hitting something structural by shooting on an angle, diagonally both across the horizontal floors, and with some vertical elevation. Basically, aim for the corners.
ETA: look at this photo to see what I mean. On one angle, the framing is mostly “empty space”, so if you miss the first column, the cannonball will likely pass through the whole building with little serious damage. But on another angle, there’s a lot more columns occupying at least some of the cross section, so your odds of hitting one go up significantly.
I had that same thought; thanks for digging up the cite.
The myth busters tested this. Albeit inadvertently, it could definitely do a lot of damage to a modern home, they were lucky not to kill anyone:
Okay, that was unreasonably fun.