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Does someone know why artillery barrels(tank,ship,fieldguns)have so many more rifling grooves than rifle barrels,or why rifle barrels have so many less? Is it because artillery shells have so much more mass/inertia that they need to get spinning,and the more grooves will get the process happening faster and more effectively ?. Ie,the more contact area you can have through the multi groove system,the quicker you will initiate the spin. Plus having the pressure more evenly distributed to reduce deformation of the projectile and more evenly and efficiently ditribute stresses on the barrel. Sort of like car axles.High performance units usually have more splines than your standard axles given the same diameter. or a bit like sleeping on abed of nails,the more there are and the closer they are,the more bearable it becomes. Please tell us what you may know about this.(barrels that is!) | ||
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Just guesses on my part, there are some differences between rifles and artillery. For one, artillery projectiles use driving bands of a copper or brass alloy. Two, they have enough bore dimension to allow them the luxury of a lot of small grooves rather than a few big ones as measured in degrees of arc. Artillery tubes also tend to have slow twist rates as compared to rifles. Dunno what that has to do with the price of tea in China though. Probably there is the issue of deformation too. Small flaws in small rifling tend to have small influence, and from what I saw a long time ago there are some artillery systems that are more accurate than BR rifles. The 8" SP Howitzer from the Viet Nam era, and the 16" guns the Jersey carried come to mind.  If yuro'e corseseyd and dsyelixc can you siltl raed oaky? | |||
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I cant tell you why they have so many but they definately do. One thing that I find very interesting is that the main gun on the M1A1/A2 series tanks have a 120mm smooth bore that uses a fin stabilized projectile. (I will also add that it uses a combustable casing and all you have left after firing looks like a big ash tray instead of a large casing bouncing around the turret.) It is so accurate it would scare you to death. The original M1 and M60 tanks used a rifled 105mm main gun that while accurate was a shotgun for accuracy compared to the 120mm. Speaking from a lot of experience I will tell you that the rifled 105mm gun is flat pure evil to try and clean with all that rifling. William Berger True courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway. - John Wayne The courageous may not live forever, but the timid do not live at all. | |||
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I love getting to point and laugh at the gun bunnies while they swab the bores of the 105s after a field op while I'm sitting back and relaxing. They get pretty mad when we just pick up our maps, binos and radios and head to the house while they have to stay and clean up. Ahhhh, the life of a fister...  On the actual topic, those guns can be very accurate. Dan is probably pretty right on about the more rifling. That bigger bullet needs more force to make it spin, and the larger tube gives more space for more grooves. FiSTers... Running is useless. | |||
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And thanks to M1 Tanker I have one of those beautiful 120mm “ash tray‘s†sitting on my work bench! | |||
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If you look at the Microgroove rifling used by Marlin, you'll see that it is quite similar to artillery rifling. In the early days, there were quite a few weird rifling patterns, like the oval bore used in some British rifles that looks round until you examine it closely, and see that it is an oval that rotates! Or the Whitworth rifling which is a rotating hex shape, etc., etc. "Bitte, trinks du nicht das Wasser. Dahin haben die Kuhen gesheissen." | |||
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Shilen did an 8 groove to be different. In a rifle it has no known effect on accuracy. I understand some of todays artillary shells have lugs that ride in the grooves. Butch | |||
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This might come into the equasion too. It might also be that making a rifling hook to cut a really wide groove is difficult to make cut smoothly. My intuition says making lots of small grooves would be an easiar machine operation. My intuition says a wide cutter taking a bunch of material would tend to chatter. | |||
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That's very true - I couldn't help but wonder what the accuracy of the New Jersey really was, expressed in minutes of angle? From accounts I've read, I suspect it would make a lot of benchrest shooters hide their heads in shame! | |||
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