Total Weight: 2.6 Million lbs
Barrel Diameter: 2.6 ft
Barrel Length: 105 ft
Shell Weight: 15,600 lbs
Max Range: 48 km
The Gustav gun is BIG. So big, in fact, that it took a 500-man crew to fire it and required a 1.5 km long train traveling on two parallel sets of tracks just to move it. Prior to the Second World War, Nazi Germany had a big time inferiority complex and decided to build the biggest of everything, including the worlds biggest gun (even to this day).
What was it like to be on the receiving end of this beast? You could take four minivans, load them up with kittens and shoot them from the Waterloo campus to the Guelph campus and still expect the kitten filled vans to have enough energy to pierce through 40 feet of concrete. For real, there is a reason why this gun could only be fired once every hour.
Seriously though, this thing is powerful. In one battle, the Gustav shot a shell that traveled 25 km, went 100 ft underwater, through 33 feet of concrete and then destroyed an ammunition dump. Not only this, a nearby ship capsized just from the shell hitting the water. ONE shell causing a ship to sink WITHOUT EVEN HITTING IT.
Let’s say that you are as strong as Will and decided to absorb the impact of a shell fired from the Gustav. Assuming the shell stops after hitting me, I would travel around the earth (at the equator) 96 times at a speed of 279,457 km/h. Each revolution around the earth would take 82 seconds and is completed some ten times faster then the space shuttle.
Perhaps the most impressive part of the Gustav gun is that it was engineered in 1941 without the use of any modern computing. Could you imagine busting out the slide rules to try and calculate anything having to do with something so impressive? Imagine how far we could make Windstars fly with the technology we have available today! I challenge the world.
Big things rock!
Photo Captions:
Four of these, at the same time, leaving 30 ft X 30 ft craters of utter destruction. Finally, the Ford Windstar is put to good use.
My shell is bigger than your tank, I win.
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