Spanish artillery in the age of sail

[OpanaPointer]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... ish_Armada

Scroll down to "Ship types. Beams are in the tables.

[marcelo_malara]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... ish_Armada

Scroll down to "Ship types. Beams are in the tables.

Thanks, but I can only see one beam mentioned of 40-50 ft, that would make it close to Victory size. What I was thinking was that ships of that era were narrower so that two opposed carriages could not be hurled in together, but at 40 ft that would not seem the case. May be 50 ft was just the bigger ships of the fleet, and many of them were smaller.

[OpanaPointer]

Recoil blocks would deal with that. They're wedges that the carriage ride up on and expend their recoil energy in the process. I've seen this done in castles of the period, "somewhere in Europe". (Hey, it was the '70s. )

[OpanaPointer]

If the ship was engaged on both sides they could fire one side then the other.

[marcelo_malara]

Recoil blocks would deal with that. They're wedges that the carriage ride up on and expend their recoil energy in the process. I've seen this done in castles of the period, "somewhere in Europe". (Hey, it was the '70s. )

Yes, I understand this. My idea is that the blocks would not allow the carriage to recoil beyond the ship midline, one or two sides engaged would not mean, nobody would think of modifying the blocks during action. If you have a tube 3 m long, add 1 m for the carriage end, total 4 m, and the ship is 12 m wide, 6 m per side, a fully recoiled gun would still have 2 m in front to work from within the hull. But a ship 8 m wide, would simply had no space for this.

[OpanaPointer]

Sorry, I don't follow you at this point "nobody would think of modifying the blocks during action".

[marcelo_malara]

Sorry, I don't follow you at this point "nobody would think of modifying the blocks during action".

I think the correct term is tackle. I mean, if one side is engaged you can set the tackle to allow the gun to recoil beyond the ship midline and so have enough space in front of the muzzle to reload the gun from inside the hull. That would imply that the corresponding gun on the other side of the ship can not be used, Now, if a ship is engaged on both sides, you would have to shorten the tackles so both guns would not collide in recoil. It would be a bad idea to shorten the tackles during action.

[OpanaPointer]

Ah, I see where we diverged. As I understand it the Armada had a great number of field guns ready to deploy against the English troops when landed. These guns didn't have the ship-friendly carriages, low and without trails where the horses would be hitched. They had ground or field artillery in greater numbers than the cannons Horatio Hornblower would be familiar with. My apologies if I confused any or every one.