re: How Things Work

quote:

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Battleship loading and firing sequence for the 16" gun. The drawing of the little guy in the suit made for frolicking is for scale. The green thing is the shell, 16" in diameter, weighing about a ton or a ton and a half and filled with high-explosives. The yellow things are 110 lb bags of gunpowder. The gray thing that looks like a big fricking gun is a big fricking gun. All the doors, elevators, transfers and such are to try to isolate everything so that the only place that goes boom is inside the barrel of the gun. If it does go boom somewhere else, it's designed so that the magazines don't go boom. If the magazines go boom, the bottom of the ship gets ripped out and it's a LOOOONG way to the bottom of the ocean.

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