Paris gun question

[Kunkmiester]

Wiki says max range of the later guns was about 128 km, Bull's book says they were designing a slight larger gun that could hit 170 km(30.5cm with a 300 kg shell). Calais to London is about 180km(driving directions from Google, so a little less really

Here's the crazy idea: overall work on the Paris guns was less than two years. I proposition a vengeance weapon 2.5 that would have been a 200 km range with a 30-40cm or gun Germany would have had in stock that could have hit London from a decent bit of France, and could have been available sooner than any of the other weapons after it was obvious the Battle of Britain was lost.

Side one: more explosives on Britain sooner and over the length of the war. It also probably could have been on a more mobile mount and thus safer from air attack, probably keeping in operation a while.

Side two: it would still be in range of even shorter ranges planes from Britain, and aside from perhaps pulling fewer resources from other projects probably wouldn't have had a significant impact on the course of the war.

Serious question, when deciding to use alternate means to bombard Britain, why didn't the Nazis draw more on the long range experience from the Paris and Langer Max guns?

[MKSheppard]

You're forgetting that most of the heavy ultralong range gun design expertise was "lost" after WW1. There's a reason the V-2 program was started -- as a way to sidestep treaty limits on a new paris gun, before it took on a life of it's own.

[Nik_SpeakerToCats]

Um, the snag with 'Really Big Guns™' that cannot hide is they will so get bombed...

IIRC, the railway guns on French coast and in Italy were in and out of their tunnels and block-houses like ferrets down a warren. They could trundle out, fire a couple of rounds and be gone before an air-strike arrived.

Beyond that size, too big to be nimble, you have the buried V3. Whose silo complex collapsed to a war-grave when the RAF came knocking...

The V2 had an 'erector-launcher' system that could set up in a street, launch and be gone. IIRC, took about two (2) hours, although parts of convoy would only be on site long enough to deliver the liquid fuel...

[kdahm]

And the final two points are that the Paris Gun was only a harassing weapon and the resources spent on it were enormous. 106kg per shell, with a total of 320 and 367 shells fired in total. During that period, there were two at least two barrel changes, indicating a 120 round or so barrel life. A total of 250 civilians killed (91 by a single shell in a church) and 620 injured. Compared to 23,000 civilians killed in the Battle of Britain and 2,754 killed in London by 1,358 V-2 rockets.

If there had been a desire to, it would have been natural to use modifications to the Krupp K5, such as faster development of the historical rocket assisted projectile or start on a subcaliber projectile.

Or possibly just fly HE-111 bombers. 2000 kg internally, can take off from anywhere. The HE-111 R is a high altitude variant.

[Craiglxviii]

The V3 was meant to do this already… and 617 Sqn dealt with it at Mimoyecques with Tallboys.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon

[Kunkmiester]

Apparently this actually was a thing. I looking for info on where engineers and designers went after MKSheppard's post and found this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_cm_K_12_(E)

Basically just an improved Paris gun on a proper rail mount. Same caliber, probably same dispersion. Not much to be done about dispersion but to improve shell capacity(the Paris gun shells had extremely small fillings as I understand) and firing rate.

K5 sounds like it would have been a good base, larger shell and already a 50 mile range? The "mk 2" Germany was working on at the end of WWI was about 33cm with a 300 kg shell. While it sounds like politics with the rockets and other programs would interfere it doesn't seem like technical issues could have stopped it.