Gerald Vincent Bull was a Canadian engineer who developed long-range artillery. He moved from project to project in his quest to economically launch a satellite using a huge artillery piece, to which end he designed the Project Babylon "supergun" for Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq.
Project HARP, short for High Altitude Research Project, was a joint venture of the United States Department of Defense and Canada's Department of National Defence created with the goal of studying ballistics of re-entry vehicles and collecting upper atmospheric data for research. Unlike conventional space launching methods that rely on rockets, HARP instead used very large guns to fire projectiles into the atmosphere at extremely high speeds.
A driving band or rotating band is a band of soft metal near the base of an artillery shell, often made of gilding metal, copper, or lead. When the shell is fired, the pressure of the propellant swages the metal into the rifling of the barrel and forms a seal; this seal prevents the gases from blowing past the shell and engages the barrel's rifling to spin-stabilize the shell.
The GC-45 is a 155 mm howitzer designed by Gerald Bull's Space Research Corporation (SRC) in the 1970s. Versions were produced by a number of companies during the 1980s, notably in Austria and South Africa.
The G6, sometimes denoted as the G6 Rhino, is a South African mine-protected self-propelled howitzer. It was developed as a turreted, self-propelled variant of the G5 howitzer series, mating the gun to a six-wheeled armoured chassis. Design work on the G6 began in the late 1970s to replace the obsolescent Sexton being retired from service with the artillery regiments of the South African Army. Serial production commenced between 1988 and 1999.
Project Babylon was a space gun project commissioned by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. It involved building a series of "superguns". The design was based on research from the 1960s Project HARP led by the Canadian artillery expert Gerald Bull. There were most likely four different devices in the program.
The formal definition of large-calibre artillery used by the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms (UNROCA) is "guns, howitzers, artillery pieces, combining the characteristics of a gun, howitzer, mortar, or rocket, capable of engaging surface targets by delivering primarily indirect fire, with a calibre of 76.2 mm (3.00 in) and above". This definition, shared by the Arms Trade Treaty and the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, is updated from an earlier definition in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/36L, which set a threshold of 100 mm (3.9 in). Several grammatical changes were made to that latter in 1992 and the threshold was lowered in 2003 to yield the current definition, as endorsed by UN General Assembly Resolution 58/54.
Al-Fao was a project for a self-propelled artillery system designed for the former Iraqi Army by the Canadian weapons engineer Gerald Bull. It would have been one of the world's most powerful artillery pieces, with a 53-caliber, 210 mm (8.3 in) gun firing 109-kilogram shells over a range of 57 km (35 mi). The Al-Fao system was to weigh 44 tonnes, and its 550 hp engine was to give it a top speed of 90 km/h (56 mph) on roads, and 60–70 km/h (37–43 mph) cross-country. The Al-Fao's autoloader was to provide it with a rate of fire of four rounds a minute.
The Paris Gun 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 airplane nor a gun could be heard. They were the largest pieces of artillery used during the war by barrel length, and qualify under the (later) formal definition of large-calibre artillery. Also called the "Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz", they were often confused with Big Bertha, the German howitzer used against Belgian forts in the Battle of Liège in 1914; indeed, the French called them by this name as well. They were also confused with the smaller "Langer Max" cannon, from which they were derived. Although the famous Krupp-family artillery makers produced all these guns, the resemblance ended there.
The G5 is a South African towed howitzer of 155 mm calibre developed in South Africa by Denel Land Systems. The G5 design was based on the Canadian GC-45 155mm gun which was highly modified to suit southern African conditions.
A space gun, sometimes called a Verne gun because of its appearance in From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, is a method of launching an object into space using a large gun- or cannon-like structure. Space guns could thus potentially provide a method of non-rocket spacelaunch. It has been conjectured that space guns could place satellites into Earth's orbit, and could also launch spacecraft beyond Earth's gravitational pull and into other parts of the Solar System by exceeding Earth's escape velocity of about 11.20 km/s. However, these speeds are too far into the hypersonic range for most practical propulsion systems and also would cause most objects to burn up due to aerodynamic heating or be torn apart by aerodynamic drag. Therefore, a more likely future use of space guns would be to launch objects into Low Earth orbit, at which point attached rockets could be fired or the objects could be "collected" by maneuverable orbiting satellites.
The M777 howitzer is a towed 155 mm artillery piece in the howitzer class. It is used by the ground forces of Australia, Canada, Colombia, India, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and the United States. It was first used in combat during the War in Afghanistan.
Fälthaubits 77 or FH77 is a Swedish 155 mm howitzer, developed and manufactured by Bofors. It is also colloquially known as the Bofors gun in India. There were several versions, the original with a 38 calibre barrel and sliding block mechanism, the export version FH77 B version with a 39 calibre barrel and an interrupted ogival screw breech. For the demonstrator of the Archer Artillery System, some FH77A were modified into FH 77 AD L/45, while the series production were FH77Bs rebuilt into FH77 BW L/52. The carriage was also used for the KARIN, used in the Swedish coastal artillery.
The 130 mm towed field gun M-46 is a manually loaded, towed 130 mm artillery piece, manufactured in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. It was first observed by the West in 1954.
The Nora B-52 is a 155 mm self-propelled howitzer developed by Military Technical Institute and manufactured by Yugoimport SDPR in Velika Plana, Serbia.
The PLZ-45 or Type 88 is a 155 mm self-propelled howitzer designed by Su Zhezi of 674 Factory, and developed by Norinco, 123 Factory, 127 Factory, 674 Factory and the Beijing Institute of Technology in the early 1990s for the export market. It is based on Norinco's Type 89 (PLL-01) 155 mm/45-calibre towed gun-howitzer.
The PLZ-05 or the Type 05 is a 155 mm self-propelled howitzer developed by the People's Liberation Army of China to replace the Type 59-1 130 mm towed gun and Type 83 152 mm self-propelled gun. The PLZ-05 was officially unveiled at the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution to mark the 80th anniversary of the PLA in July 2007, and first entered service with the PLA in 2008.
Doomsday Gun is a 1994 television film produced by HBO, dramatizing the life of Canadian supergun designer Dr. Gerald Bull and his involvement in Project Babylon, Saddam Hussein's plan to build a supergun with a range of over 500 miles (800 km).
The "Supergun" affair was a 1990 political scandal in the United Kingdom that involved two businesses, Sheffield Forgemasters and Walter Somers, Gerald Bull, members of parliament Hal Miller and Nicholas Ridley, the UK's Secret Intelligence Service, a failed prosecution and components of a "supergun" that the businesses were alleged to have been exporting to Iraq that they and others had contacted the government about in 1988. The collapse of the court case preceded the Arms-to-Iraq case, that involved a different company Matrix Churchill, by four months.
The Bharat-52 gun is a 155mm, 52 caliber towed howitzer manufactured by Bharat Forge, a subsidiary of Kalyani Group. Bharat-52 is a long-range gun system that has been completely designed and developed in India. It is designed to operate in all weather conditions and has super maneuverability on all terrains.
