Smoothbore

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search

Part of a series on

Cannon

History

 Artillery in the Song dynasty

 Artillery in the Middle Ages
 Naval artillery in the Age of Sail
 Field artillery in the US Civil War
 Siege artillery in the US Civil War

Operation

 Breech-loading
 List of cannon projectiles
 Muzzleloading

By country

 English cannon
 Indonesian and Malaysian cannon
 Japanese cannon
 Korean cannon
 Mughal cannon
 Philippine cannon
 By type

 Anti-tank gun
 Artillery
 Autocannon
 Basilisk
 Bombard
 Breech-loading swivel gun
 Carronade
 Coastal artillery
 Coilgun
 Culverin
 Demi-cannon
 Demi-culverin
 Double-barreled cannon
 Falconet
 Field gun
 Gun-howitzer
 Gun-mortar
 Hand cannon
 Hand mortar
 Howitzer
 Infantry support gun
 Large-calibre artillery
 Minion
 Mortar
 Mountain gun
 Naval artillery
 Railgun
 Railway gun
 Recoilless rifle
 Rifled gun
 Saker
 Self-propelled gun
 Siege cannon
 Smoothbore
 Swivel gun
 Tank gun
  v
 t
 e

A smoothbore weapon is one that has a barrel without rifling. Smoothbores range from
handheld firearms to powerful tank guns and large artillery mortars.

Contents

 1History
 2Current use
o 2.1Small arms
o 2.2Artillery
 3See also
 4References

History[edit]

A 81mm L16 smoothbore mortar

Further information: external ballistics

For pre-20th-century smoothbore artillery, see Cannon.

Early firearms had smooth barrels that fired projectiles without significant spin.[1] To
minimize inaccuracy-inducing tumbling during flight their projectiles required stable
shape, such as a sphere. However, the Magnus effect causes even spheres rotating
randomly during flight to curve when spinning on any axis not parallel to the direction of
travel.[2]
Rifling a barrel with spiral grooves or polygonal rifling imparts a
stabilizing gyroscopic spin to a projectile that prevents tumbling in flight. Not only does
this more than counter Magnus-induced drift, but it allows a longer, heavier round to be
fired from the same caliber barrel, increasing both range and power.
In the eighteenth century, the standard infantry arm was the smoothbore musket;
although rifled muskets were introduced in the early 18th century and had more power
and range, they did not become the norm until the middle of the 19th century, when
the Minié ball increased their rate of fire to match that of smoothbores.[3]
Artillery weapons were smoothbore until the middle 19th century, and smoothbores
continued in limited use until the 1890s. Early rifled artillery pieces were patented
by Joseph Whitworth and William Armstrong in the United Kingdom in 1855. In the
United States, rifled small arms and artillery were gradually adopted during
the American Civil War. However, heavy coast defense Rodman smoothbores persisted
in the US until circa 1900 due to the tendency of the Civil War's heavy Parrott rifles to
burst and lack of funding for replacement weapons.

Current use[edit]

Replica of "Twin Sisters" smoothbores used in the Battle of San Jacinto (1836)

Some smoothbore firearms are still used.

Small arms[edit]

A smooth-bore, cast-iron ship's cannon, from the Grand Turk, a replica of a mid-18th century three-masted
frigate

A shotgun fires multiple, round shot; firing out of a rifled barrel would impart centrifugal
forces that result a doughnut-shaped pattern of shot (with a high projectile density on
the periphery, and a low projectile density in the interior). While this may be acceptable
at close ranges (some spreader chokes are rifled to produce wide patterns at close
range) this is not desirable at longer ranges, where a tight, consistent pattern is required
to improve accuracy.[4]
Another smoothbore weapon in use today is the 37-mm riot gun, which fires non-
lethal munitions like rubber bullets and teargas at short range at crowds, where a high
degree of accuracy is not required.[5]
The Steyr IWS 2000 anti-tank rifle is smoothbore. This can help accelerate projectiles
and increase ballistic effectiveness. The projectile is a 15.2 mm fin-stabilized discarding-
sabot type with armor-piercing capability which the IWS 2000 was specifically designed
to fire. It contains a dart-shaped penetrator of either tungsten carbide or depleted
uranium, capable of piercing 40 mm of rolled homogeneous armor at a range of 1,000
m, and causing secondary fragmentation.
Artillery[edit]

USS Monitor (1862) with the muzzle of one of its two 11-inch smoothbore Dahlgren guns showing

The cannon made the transition from smoothbore firing cannonballs to rifled
firing shells in the 19th century. However, to reliably penetrate the thick armor of
modern armored vehicles many modern tank guns have moved back to smoothbore.
These fire a very long, thin kinetic-energy projectile, too long in relation to its diameter to
develop the necessary spin rate through rifling. Instead, kinetic energy rounds are
produced as fin-stabilized darts. Not only does this reduce the time and expense of
producing rifling barrels, it also reduces the need for replacement due to barrel wear.
The first tank with a smoothbore gun was the Soviet T-62, introduced into service in
1961. Today all main battle tanks field them except the British Challenger 2 and
Indian Arjun MBT. While the 73 mm gun of the early Soviet infantry fighting
vehicles BMP-1 and BMD-1 was a smoothbore, their more recent successors BMP-
3 and BMD-4 use a rifled 100 mm gun. The Russian navy conducted experiments with
large-caliber smoothbore naval guns, which were halted by budget cuts.
The armour-piercing gun evolution has also shown up in small arms, particularly the
now abandoned U.S. Advanced Combat Rifle (ACR) program. The ACR "rifles" used
smoothbore barrels to fire single or multiple flechettes (tiny darts), rather than bullets,
per pull of the trigger, to provide long range, flat trajectory, and armor-piercing abilities.
Just like kinetic-energy tank rounds, flechettes are too long and thin to be stabilized by
rifling and perform best from a smoothbore barrel. The ACR program was abandoned
due to reliability problems and poor terminal ballistics.
Mortar barrels are typically muzzle-loading smoothbores. Since mortars fire bombs that
are dropped down the barrel and must not be a tight fit, a smooth barrel is essential.
The bombs are fin-stabilized.