Well, this one’s about three or four years late. But hey, what the hell.
(And…since it deals primarily with geology/geography and military engineering I’m taking a gamble in putting this one in GQ instead of Cafe Society. It probably won’t last.)
Anyway, awhile back, we’ve had discussions about the practicality of delivering Tolkien’s One Ring to destruction in Mt. Doom via air drop (using giant eagles, specifically).
But I can’t help thinking of the problem from a different angle…artillery. And to be as geeky as possible, real-world artillery.
That is, what’s the minimum level of range and accuracy you’d need to fire a shell containing the ring from a site in the free lands of Middle Earth straight down the throat of Mt. Doom? Could you do it with the Paris Gun?
Or, failing artillery altogether…how about a tactical ballistic missile, like a Scud?
If you are using modern weapons, why not just a stealth fighter and a smart bomb?
As far as artillery, you are trying to hit a fairly small target, the Paris Gun had little accuracy. You could land it within a mile of the opening of Mt Doom, but it would be dumb luck if it went in.
I think any 155mm artillery in the US inventory can fire the Excalibur, a GPS guided shell. That gives you a 50% chance of landing the shell within 10 meters (perhaps less) of the target from a range of 25 km to 40 km. That’s nearly 25 miles for the metric impaired.
Now there is a good question, could “The One Ring” survive a nuclear bomb. I don’t agree, but some people have claimed “The One Ring” is a metaphor for the “Atomic Bomb” just to make this more interesting.
I would think, that not even the magic of the “The One Ring” could survive being in ground zero of an atomic bomb.
As I said though, one stealth fighter and one smart bomb and the package would be delivered with ease. All the Nazgul could do is get their mounts blown out from under them before they knew what was happening.
As I recall, Gulf War I demonstrated the precision of laser-painted guided bombs to go down air shafts. Assuming an artillery piece with sufficient range (and I have no idea whether a 30km range is sufficient): Mount the targeting laser on a giant eagle, have the eagle fly at very high altitude over Mt Doom and illuminate the volcano mouth with the laser, then shoot the projectile over Mt Doom and let the guidance system work its technological magic.
I think today, we probably have many methods and gadgets to do it with. I just don’t think WWI or even WWII artillery was up to the task. Actually, I am sure they were not.
Back to the Nuclear blast, Tolkien rigged it so that the Ring needed to be delivered back to Mount Doom. Apparently, not any volcano would do. So despite the unbelievable destructive power and heat of a nuclear blast, there is probably wiggle room to say that even this would not destroy the ring due to Magic. Magic can supersede physics and commonsense.
That is the problem with threads like this. However, the Op had a specifically factual question about artillery that had a definite answer. Everything after that is “what ifs” and “fun conjecture”.
The actual question was answered. The Mods have left this thread here.
It would have to be quite a trajectory wouldn’t it to actually go down the shaft of Mt. Doom and into the lava, would something that high would be more of a job for a mortar than a plain old gun?
Not with 10,000 men and 100 self-propelled armoured howitzers could you do this…it is folly! okay, maybe with 200 self-propelled armoured howitzers. And we wouldn’t even need to destroy the ring.
This leads back to the next question: required accuracy. I’d say a weapon would have to have a CEP a fair bit smaller than the volcanic crater itself it be worth risking a ballistic ring delivery (BRD™). But how big a target are we aiming at, exactly? Is there any canon information about how wide the crater of Mt. Doom is, or would we have to guesstimate?
