Jules Verne and the "Moon Gun"

Rembrandt

So you think you've got a big gun or two in your collection?

Artillery dominated military ballistics from the earliest use of gunpowder in guns and rockets. It was natural that Jules Verne could only realistically consider a cannon for a moon launch in his prescient 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon.

Check out this site for some pictures of unusual "Big Guns"......

http://www.astronautix.com/lvfam/gunnched.htm



Edited by - Rembrandt on 08/14/2002 21:31:04

offeror

Supposedly Saddam's super gun would have been powerful enough to launch a shell into orbit -- it would then only have been a matter of leaving earth orbit to get to the moon. Trouble is, what living thing could survive launch from a super gun? How big a supergun would be required to launch a shell big enough to hold a human?

Verne's cannon might have been feasible for attaining orbit, but -- unless there was an exceedingly long tube with an increasingly powerful series of explosions along the way for acceleration -- a single explosive discharge capable of launching a vessel into orbit would have squashed humans flat on the way up.

- Life NRA Member
"If cowardly & dishonorable men shoot unarmed men with army guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary...and not by general deprivation of constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

Iconoclast

With 20-20 hindsight, we can see the fallacies in Verne's work, but in many ways, he was an exceptional visionary. Considering the level of science and technology at the time he was writing, he did an extraordinay job (or at least that's my NSHO).