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The Paris Gun ((ドイツ語:Paris-Geschütz)) was the name given to a type of German long-range siege gun, several of which were used to bombard Paris during World War I. They were in service from March to August 1918. When the guns were first employed, Parisians believed they had been bombed by a high-altitude Zeppelin, as the sound of neither an aeroplane nor a gun could be heard. They were the largest pieces of artillery used during the war by barrel length, and are considered to be superguns. The Paris Guns hold an important place in the history of astronautics, as their shells were the first human-made objects to reach the stratosphere. Also called the "''Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz''" ("Emperor William Gun"), they were often confused with Big Bertha, the German howitzer used against the Liège forts in 1914; indeed, the French called them by this name, as well.〔For an instance of war-time naming of this gun as "Big Bertha", see 〕 They were also confused with the smaller "Langer Max" (Long Max) cannon, from which they were derived; although the famous Krupp-family artillery makers produced all these guns, the resemblance ended there. As military weapons, the Paris Guns were not a great success: the payload was small, the barrel required frequent replacement and its accuracy was only good enough for city-sized targets. The German objective was to build a psychological weapon to attack the morale of the Parisians, not to destroy the city itself. ==Description== The Paris Gun was a weapon like no other, but its capabilities are not known with full certainty. This is due to the weapon's apparent total destruction by the Germans in the face of the Allied offensive. Figures stated for the weapon's size, range, and performance varied widely depending on the source — not even the number of shells fired is certain. With the discovery (in the 1980s) and publication (in the Bull and Murphy book) of a long note on the gun written shortly before his death in 1926 by Dr. Fritz Rausenberger, who was in charge of its development at Krupp, the details of its design and capabilities were considerably clarified. The gun was capable of firing a 〔 shell to a range of and a maximum altitude of 〔 — the greatest height reached by a human-made projectile until the first successful V-2 flight test in October 1942. At the start of its 182-second trajectory,〔 each shell from the Paris Gun reached a speed of .〔 Seven barrels were constructed. They used worn–out 38 cm SK L/45 "Max" gun barrels that were fitted with an internal tube that reduced the caliber from to . The tube was long and projected out of the end of the gun, so an extension was bolted to the old gun-muzzle to cover and reinforce the lining tube. A further, 12-meter long smooth–bore extension was attached to the end of this, giving a total barrel length of .〔 This smooth section was intended to improve accuracy and reduce the dispersion of the shells, as it reduced the slight yaw a shell might have immediately after leaving the gun barrel, that is produced by the gun's rifling.〔Miller (1921) pg.737〕 The barrel was braced to counteract barrel droop due to its length and weight, and vibrations while firing; it was mounted on a special rail-transportable carriage and fired from a prepared, concrete emplacement with a turntable. The original breech of the old 38 cm gun did not require modification or reinforcement. Since it was based on a naval weapon, the gun was manned by a crew of 80 Imperial Navy sailors under the command of Vice-Admiral Rogge, chief of the Ordnance branch of the Admiralty.〔 It was surrounded by several batteries of standard army artillery to create a "noise-screen" chorus around the big gun so that it could not be located by French and British spotters. The projectile was the first human-made object to reach the stratosphere. The historian Adam Hochschild put it this way: "It took about three minutes for each giant shell to cover the distance to the city, climbing to an altitude of at the top of its trajectory. This was by far the highest point ever reached by a man-made object, so high that gunners, in calculating where the shells would land, had to take into account the rotation of the Earth. For the first time in warfare, deadly projectiles rained down on civilians from the stratosphere".〔''To End All Wars'' by Adam Hochschild c. 2011 Adam Hochschild(Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company New York; 2011) pp.320 - 321〕 This reduced drag from air resistance, allowing the shell to achieve a range of over . The Paris Gun was the largest gun built at the time, but it was surpassed by the Schwerer Gustav of World War 2. This fired shells up to 70 times heavier, but with only around half the muzzle velocity and less than one third the range. The unfinished V-3 cannon would have been able to fire somewhat larger projectiles to a longer range, and with a substantially higher rate of fire. The unfinished Iraqi super gun would also have been substantially bigger. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Paris Gun」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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