PC/WI V-3 "Millipede" Gun used on UK ports pre OVERLORD

WILDGEESE

WILDGEESE

The V-3 Millipede Gun was a gun capable of firing a round up to 100 miles, destined to be used on the city of London until the complex was destroyed by R.A.F bombing raids.

Each complex featured 5 guns in one emplacement, with five emplacements per complex giving a possible rate of fire of 300 rounds per hour.

What if the development was started around a year earlier and as a consequence, instead of using them against London, the Germans seeing the build up of supplies and men in the run up to D-Day then built a chain of them along the French coast and started targeting the ports of the south coast of Britain such as Portsmouth, Weymouth etc?

How would this effect the plans and build up for D-Day?

Would this cause the operation to be delayed or postponed indefinitely?

What would be the damage inflicted on the ports and shipping, if each complex managed to hit it's 300 round per hour target?
 
Jape

Jape

WILDGEESE said:
What would be the damage inflicted on the ports and shipping, if each complex managed to hit it's 300 round per hour target?
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Well obviously if they *could* do that it would be a big problem but the guns were partly built in response to growing Allied air superiority stopping German bombers getting through. So if the Allies notice all these superguns being built they're going to flatten them ASAP. This would redirect Allied resources but they have a bigger pool to draw from and the timing of D-Day was very precise, so I imagine it still goes ahead roughly on time, just fewer bombers operate in Italy or the Far East for a while. For the Germans however it means valuable materials have been wasted on setting up target practice sites for the RAF and USAAF. Just another wasteful superproject from Mr. Fuhrer.
 

Trevayne

WILDGEESE said:
The V-3 Millipede Gun was a gun capable of firing a round up to 100 miles, destined to be used on the city of London until the complex was destroyed by R.A.F bombing raids.

Each complex featured 5 guns in one emplacement, with five emplacements per complex giving a possible rate of fire of 300 rounds per hour.

What if the development was started around a year earlier and as a consequence, instead of using them against London, the Germans seeing the build up of supplies and men in the run up to D-Day then built a chain of them along the French coast and started targeting the ports of the south coast of Britain such as Portsmouth, Weymouth etc?

How would this effect the plans and build up for D-Day?

Would this cause the operation to be delayed or postponed indefinitely?

What would be the damage inflicted on the ports and shipping, if each complex managed to hit it's 300 round per hour target?
Click to expand...

The damage inflicted depends on the size and explosive content of the shells. 300 one pound 37mm shells per hour could be ignored. 300 100-200 lb 150-200mm shells per hour would probably deny the port for the invasion and wreck a good chunk of it.

If they worked, they would become priority targets for the allied air forces and be destroyed under construction. Tallboys would receive top priority to get rid of any that were built.

It would inconvenience Overlord to run it from ports in the North and West of Britain, but it could still be done. Torch and nearly all of the Pacific invasions were mounted over much greater distances.
 

CalBear

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Problem with the weapon was that it was mounted in a fixed location unlike the V1 & V2 which were mobile, or semi-mobile and as soon as it was fired it would provide a flaming data point. The Gun tube 3/4 the length of a WW I Dreadnought type battleship (430 feet) and both the elevation and transverse were fixed. The range could be varied slightly by altering the charge used in the chambers bit it fired along a straight line.

The bunker sites for the system was so large that the RAF blew the hell out of both of them before they were even half completed, not because they were aware of what the site was to be used for, but because anything that huge had to be something bad.

The weapon was, as is so often the case, not ready for Prime Time, even in late 1944. They managed to produce a partial "proof of concept" model and cycled eight round through it before the ninth round blew up the tube.

Regarding the size of the weapon, it was a 150mm design.
 

MattII

From where they were built they could cover the UK coast from Worthing on the south coast to Southwold (actually Kessingland, but it's not a port) on the east coast. that makes the buildup more difficult, but hardly impossible.
 
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marathag

marathag

Banned
Th Rubber Tanks and Trucks of FUSAG get plastered.

D-Day goes on as planned, less whatever resources the Nazis use to defend the V3
 

pdf27

It should probably be noted here that there's a hell of a long way between the proof-of-concept model they built and the final "combat" model - in reality I'd be very surprised if the final version had actually worked. The most likely outcome is a handful of wildly inaccurate shells scattered over southern England, followed by some sort of ammunition handling accident blowing up the Mimoyecques site. The Allied air forces will probably also give it a major going over (the flaming datum they had is kind of hard to miss), so even if it did work it would be rapidly demolished as per OTL.
 

Just Leo

There were two barrels aimed at Luxembourg, which incidentally survives to this day. Luxembourg, not the cannons. From Dec 30 to Feb 22, 183 rounds fired, 142 hit Luxembourg, 44 hit urban areas, 10 killed, 35 wounded. It's in Wiki. Is this the cannon we're concerned with? The London cannon was 103 miles from London, and the cannon had an optimum range of 100 miles, and the projectiles tumbled, so they could never make the range. They could have used Theodore von Karmann's help, but he was born Jewish. More Germans died playing with their cannons than Luxembourgers. Is this the cannon we're concerned with? A non-mobile structure nailed to a hillside in an area with 100% Allied air supremacy?
 

CalBear

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Just Leo said:
There were two barrels aimed at Luxembourg, which incidentally survives to this day. Luxembourg, not the cannons. From Dec 30 to Feb 22, 183 rounds fired, 142 hit Luxembourg, 44 hit urban areas, 10 killed, 35 wounded. It's in Wiki. Is this the cannon we're concerned with? The London cannon was 103 miles from London, and the cannon had an optimum range of 100 miles, and the projectiles tumbled, so they could never make the range. They could have used Theodore von Karmann's help, but he was born Jewish. More Germans died playing with their cannons than Luxembourgers. Is this the cannon we're concerned with? A non-mobile structure nailed to a hillside in an area with 100% Allied air supremacy?
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That would be the one. The one with no traverse or elevation adjustment and the size of a battleship once the mount and bunker comes into the picture.
 

MattII

Well elevation adjustment is mostly about range adjustment, which can be done here by varying the propellant loads.
 

Minchandre

Driftless said:
The grandfather of Gerald Bull's Project Babylon?
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Yes, in fact; Project Babylon was directly inspired by the V3, and some of the principles borrowed quite liberally from it - in particular, the idea of multiple propellant charges along the length of the cannon...though it's worth noting that it's not like the Nazis invented those or anything, and development in ultralong range cannons had been around since the mid-19th century.

One thing that always confused me about the V3 was - in WWI, the Paris Gun achieved ranges of over 120km with only slightly smaller shells. The distance from, say, Calais to London is under 200km. Schwerer Gustav, though it had somewhat shorter range, fired much heavier projectiles (50-100x as heavy, IIRC). So why did the the Germans go to all the trouble of multiple charges and such complex design when it seems plausible that massive but normal cannons would have worked?

Project Babylon was supposed to reach 1000km or more, but for the 180km needed, it seems more like an evolutionary solution is called for, rather than revolutionary.
 

Cryhavoc101

MattII said:
From where they were built they could cover the UK coast from Worthing on the south coast to Southwold (actually Kessingland, but it's not a port) on the east coast. that makes the buildup more difficult, but hardly impossible.
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Worthing? That Lynch pin of the Allied Plan!!!!! :D

I guess interdicting Shoreham might have an effect but I cannot think of any other port of that size that would be impacted - Portsmouth and Southhampton - being teh main invasion Hubs - are obviously too far to the West
 

Awilla the Hun

To judge from what happened to the V-1s and V-2s, it gets fed dodgy targetting information by allied intel and shells empty countryside.
 

BlueTrousers

Awilla the Hun said:
To judge from what happened to the V-1s and V-2s, it gets fed dodgy targetting information by allied intel and shells empty countryside.
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If they're aiming for the coast, get them to fall short and hit the sea. Bonus points if you can persuade them to do so whilst a major Kriegsmarine operation is going on in the area. :p
 
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