On Napoleonic era, the size was 3 or 4 £ for small caliber guns at the battalion level, 6£ and 8£ for the standard artillery and 12£ for the heavy artillery.
On ships, guns were more of 24, 36 or 42£, the 12£ being seen as a small gun. A single ship of the line had more gun than an entire land army.
As of the French 12£, it was heavy (1,5 tonne for the gun and 250 kg for the stand), the tube was 2,5 m long and the diameter of the ball was 120 mm.
I gotta wonder what happens when a ball finally hits one of those load-bearing columns. You don’t need to break/cut the column, you just need to bend/damage it enough so that it becomes vulnerable to buckling failure.
Googling gets a mix of results: some columns are a steel jacket filled with concrete, while some are just gigantic I-beams 2-3 feet on a side with flange thicknesses approaching 1 inch. Sounds pretty sturdy, but a 12-pound ball coming in at well over Mach 1 carries a lot of energy. No doubt there’s plenty of safety factor and redundancy of load paths in a well-designed tower, so you’d probably need to compromise several adjacent columns before the whole building is at risk for a major collapse.
IANA civil engineer, but that’s my take. We see plenty of controlled demolitions gone awry on YouTube. In many case they take big divots out of many of the support columns and the building just sits there.
Assuming starting from an intact reasonably modern building any one column is certainly redundant. A few here and there may well be too. A batch in a cluster, not so much.
Clearly there is an upper limit to how much non-explosive cannon fire any given building can take. But it’s a big number of rounds.
Heck, even the current pictures from Ukraine or Gaza show plenty of buildings attacked by modern explosive artillery or aerial bombs that are mostly wrecked as to functional habitation, but are still almost entirely standing. So evidently structurally sound enough to support their own weight.
The effect is exaggerated but minor bump=collapse always reminds me of warehouse rack accidents.
I am ashamed to say, I have never seen that short before. But my sister and her husband are accountants so thank you, I will pass it on.
I can’t be the only one assuming you were concerned about throwing out your back while leaping from a diving board.
mmm
Yeah - but we are talking about considerably more than a single cannonball.
This site seems to say somewhere between 36-40 guns, and a bombardment lasting some 36 hrs.
Leaving aside the question of why any individual skyscraper would merit such an onslaught, I doubt many skyscrapers of any construction would be able to withstand that level of bombardment. A COUPLE of those balls are eventually gonna carom around and take out enough adjoining pillars.
Also forts built in the era of gunpowder were specifically designed with very thick earthen walls, to absorb cannonballs (the cost of building them was one of the things that caused the rise of the modern nation state and its tax structure in the early modern period). Fortifications from before the gunpowder era did not hold up to bombardment very well, I imagine modern buildings (not being to design to siege of any kind) would fare even worse.
I’ve watched a bunch of vids, but that is by far the most extensive failure from the smallest impetus that I’ve ever seen.
Thanks for a great cite!
I don’t think I’d seen this one before today, either. The set up is great with the careful drive straight for about 1000 yards, the slightest of brushes on the rack, then 20 seconds of comical chaos. I’m half expecting Austin Powers and Michael Scott to come crawling out from under the wreckage, wearing each others’ clothes or something.
I’m not so sure it’s comical. I’m not convinced that the guy at the bottom right made it out alive.
A modern office building is mostly a big glass box. I suspect that the poured reinforced concrete or steel that comprises the actual structure s a lot stronger than old stone and mortar castle walls. It usually takes either prepared demolition charges or modern high explosive munitions to bring something like that down. But an office building certainly wouldn’t provide much cover for the people inside it.
What size? Most replies deal with field and naval pieces, but siege and coastal artillery pieces could get considerably larger. Very considerably larger. For example, the Parrott gun was a mainstay of both sides of the US Civil War, field pieces would run 10, 20 or 30 lbs. Heavier naval Parrott guns would run up to 60 and 100lbs. As for siege guns, the Union brought 9-100lb, 6-200lb and a single 300lb Parrott gun in the attempt to retake Fort Sumter.
I think the question is how much damage can a cannon ball do to the steel I-beams larger building are usually supported by. Civil War era cannons don’t have a good record against just plain iron, let alone modern steel. In the Civil War, two iron clad ships fired solid round shot into each other for hours leaving both still afloat at the end of the day.
Wonderful documentary, but note that CPAC didn’t face inbound cannonballs.
Their filecannons did seem to create problems with morale in the other companies.
We can’t be sure, but I think it’s him wiggling out from under that pallet and walking away at the very end of the video.
This armour didn’t help when the wearer was struck by a cannonball. Napoleonic era but the American Civil War was only 50 years later and artillery was still pretty similar.
somewhat related:
As a witness to the 2010 earthquake (8.3 Richter) in Santiago, I can confirm that there is a LOT of structural redundancy in high rise buildings …
This was the 5th strongest quake ever registered on the planet (it made Chile 4 meters wider - and made the earth-axis wobble) …
And there are 1000s of high rise buildings and there was ONE of which toppled over…
most of the deaths came from the tsunami.
So muy (mildly educated) guess is that a few cannonballs to a highrise building would do little to bring it down.
As LSL mentioned, especially those skycrapers of today are mostly bird-cages lined with windows. And when taking a shotgun to a bird-cage there is just too much negative space …
Or that could be the guy on the left. Definitely hard to tell. Hopefully they were both okay. That’s some scary shit. I’ve seen something similar, although on a smaller scale, in person. Took weeks to clean up.