A couple piece of cannon news for you today, from fellow bloggers…
Nic at The Rogue Adventurer has an interesting post on a Romanian AA cannon found being used in Libya. While it looks like a typical ZU-23, it’s actually a revolving design that uses three revolving chambers for each barrel. Neat! All sorts of interesting stuff comes to the surface in situations like the Libyan revolution.
While we’re on the topic of automatic cannon, you may have heard a blurb on the news about the US Coast Guard sinking a Japanese trawler a few days ago. It had been slated to be scrapped when the tsunami last year washed it out to sea, where it’s been meandering about unmanned for months. Apparently it was too tempting an exercise a potential shipping hazard, so the cutter Anacapa sank her. After a couple tries, anyway. Apparently a 25mm cannon (same as the Bushmaster used in the M2 Bradley APC) is not a one-shot-stop on a trawler. It ended up taking a several hits from a Mk19 40mm grenade launcher to take her down. You can read the whole story with commentary over at Weaponsman.
Sort of like the Dardick revolving breach design?.
This is an interesting artillery piece! Revolving breach…. doesn’t the GAU-8 have a revolving breach?