Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Originally Posted By: Loobed
I don't know if bigger equates to louder, but if it did than the Schwerer Gustav 800mm railway gun would probably be the loudest.
Holy poo!!
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Schwerer Gustav (English: Heavy Gustaf, or Great Gustaf) and Dora were the names of two German 80 cm K (E) ultra-heavy railway guns. They were developed in the late 1930s by Krupp as siege artillery for the explicit purpose of destroying the main forts of the French Maginot Line, the strongest fortifications then in existence. The twin guns weighed nearly 1,350 tonnes, and could fire shells weighing seven tonnes to a range of 47 kilometers (29 mi). The guns were designed in preparation for the Battle of France, but were not ready for action when the battle began, and in any case the Wehrmacht's Blitzkrieg offensive through Belgium rapidly outflanked and isolated the Maginot Line's World War I-era static defenses, forcing them to surrender uneventfully and making their destruction unnecessary. Gustav was later used in the Soviet Union at the siege of Sevastopol during Operation Barbarossa, with good effect, including destroying a munitions depot buried in the bedrock under a bay. They were moved to Leningrad, and may have been intended to be used in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising like other German heavy siege pieces, but the rebellion was crushed before it could be prepared to fire. Gustav was later captured by US troops and cut up, whilst Dora was destroyed near the end of the war to avoid capture by the Red Army.
It was the largest-calibre rifled weapon ever used in combat, and fired the heaviest shells of any artillery piece.[1] It is only surpassed in calibre by the British Mallet's Mortar (36 inch; 914 mm) and the American Little David mortar (36 inch; 914 mm).
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In 1934 the German Army High Command (OKH) commissioned Krupp of Essen, Germany to design a gun to destroy the forts of the French Maginot Line which were then nearing completion. The gun's shells had to punch through seven meters of reinforced concrete or one full meter of steel armour plate, from beyond the range of French artillery. Krupp engineer Erich Müller calculated that the task would require a weapon with a calibre of around 80 cm, firing a projectile weighing 7 tonnes from a barrel 30 meters long. The weapon would have a weight of over 1000 tonnes. The size and weight meant that to be at all movable it would need to be supported on twin sets of railway tracks. In common with smaller railway guns, the only barrel movement on the mount itself would be elevation, traverse being managed by moving the weapon along a curved section of railway line. Krupp prepared plans for calibres of 70 cm, 80 cm, 85 cm, and 1 m.
Size *does* matter.
