What's the largest caliber gun you've fired?

[Snargfargle]

I win.

[Wolfswetpaws]

In-game or in real life?

[Snargfargle]

1 hour ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

In-game or in real life?

The Chief of Smoke let me pull the lanyard and fire one of the howitzers from time to time. He sort of liked me after I commandeered the colonel's helicopter to take him to the hospital when I realized that he might stroke out from a severe hypertensive crisis before I could get a dust-off called in. They got him stabilized and got his meds figured out and he was good after that. I was glad to see him promoted to First Sergeant just before he retired.

[Wolfswetpaws]

6 hours ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

Topic = "What's the largest caliber gun you've fired?"

My question for clarification purposes = "In-game or in real life?"

Snargfargle's reply to my question.  \/\/\/\/\/

4 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

The Chief of Smoke let me pull the lanyard and fire one of the howitzers from time to time. He sort of liked me after I commandeered the colonel's helicopter to take him to the hospital when I realized that he might stroke out from a severe hypertensive crisis before I could get a dust-off called in. They got him stabilized and got his meds figured out and he was good after that. I was glad to see him promoted to First Sergeant just before he retired.

Commendable.  🙂 
But, that response does not answer my question.  🙂 

Edited February 21 by Wolfswetpaws

[Snargfargle]

3 hours ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

Snargfargle's reply to my question.  \/\/\/\/\/

Commendable.  🙂 
But, that response does not answer my question.  🙂 

Well, I guess that would be in real life. The largest shoulder-fired weapon I've fired would be a 40 mm grenade from a M203. No, wait, make that a 66 mm rocket from a LAW. You've probably have fired both of those too. I once fired a ten gauge double-barrel shotgun that kicked like a mule. I borrowed it to go duck hunting because at the time I only had a 20 gauge. Right now I'm going out to shoot a ballistic curve from 10 to 100 yards with my target pistol. I'll be back in a couple of hours to compare it to a computer-generated one to see how closely they match. It's 40 degrees but is supposed to warm up. The wind's fairly calm now too.

[Asym]

For, non-Artillery or Tank guns, an 8 bore paradox rifle....  It shoots some absurd hollow base lead bullet and uses Black Powder.  A dear friend collected African Rifles from the British Blackpowder era...  It is shot from a British "Range Tree" which is a Victorian coat rack that has a rifle rest so you shoot standing.  It staggered me back three paces....   The 405 Winchester in a Browning lever action is as brutal as it gets in a Lever Action.  And, the "Jesus Rifle" in 50-140 Sharps is another that makes you Religious shooting it....  Most people whom try the 50-140 first word after they pulled the trigger starts with "Jesus......"  It is a hand full.

The M-256 120mm main gun is "just dangerous" to be anywhere near or use.  Exploded ear drums and sinuses.  Eye capillaries ruptured.  Teeth pain.  Yep, it will hurt you.

Edited February 21 by Asym

[Admiral_Karasu]

7.62x39mm

[clammboy]

I shot a 30 odd 6 my friends family had a farm in Oneonta upstate NY. We set up a shooting range with cans and stuff and while we were just talking a pretty big wood chuck wandered onto the field . My friends were like shoot it we were only like 15 so I shot it. The poor wood chuck literally exploded I felt so bad I never shot another living thing again and never will. It was some gun though with a scope it was fun to shoot.

[HamptonRoads]

Handguns:  .500 SW magnum, (technically tied with .50 Action Express.)

Rifles:  .458 Winchester magnum.

[Efros]

18 pounder field piece, fired matchsticks around my living room when I was a kid.

[Snargfargle]

2 hours ago, Asym said:

For, non-Artillery or Tank guns, an 8 bore paradox rifle...

An 8 bore is one heck of a shoulder-fired weapon. There are a few people YouTube who shoot 4 bores. You wouldn't catch me trying to shoot one though, or probably even an 8 bore.

My battalion fielded 8" howitzers. The most interesting thing was when we direct-fired them at old target tanks. An 8" howitzer makes a pretty good anti-tank gun, as long as the tank isn't moving. When they are direct fired you can watch the shells all the way to the target, pretty much like in WOWS without the tracer effects.

 

 

[Asym]

14 hours ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

In-game or in real life?

IRL.  Here, to let one expand their pain thresholds.........and why, I am hearing disabled as well.....

Do you see a tank commander standing with a pair of binoculars looking for the next target;  like we did with the M68A1 main gun a few years earlier???   Ever wonder why we created a Command Independent Thermal Viewer?  

  That round tube on top of the turret....  That's so the tank commander can stay inside....!

That ^^^^^ is one of the worst experiences if you are walking near that monster and without warning, you hear "ON THE WAY"......screwed, blued and tattooed you be.

I had the opportunity what at Knox to shoot some of the first 120 rounds......we had medics so busy, they didn't know what to do...  That ^^^^ is one of the most dangerous weapons to use...... 

Imagine, if you will, fighting in a city with an Infantry platoon in support....  You had to be extremely careful or have no choice in self defense.  Or, collapsing building on narrow streets or tree branches in forests or........my favorite, concrete when firing under an older bridge....

[Snargfargle]

4 hours ago, Asym said:

IRL.  Here, to let one expand their pain thresholds.........and why, I am hearing disabled as well...

I've shot guns and worked with power tools for over 60 years but I still have reasonably good hearing. I've tried to wear hearing protection as much as possible but rarely use it when bird hunting and I've shot thousands of shotgun shells over the years. The last hearing test I gave myself before my headphones went kaput showed only a mild high-frequency hearing loss though.

They really stressed hearing protection in the Army back during the 70s. In fact, an ear plug case was part of the uniform. We had an audiology booth at the TMC and routinely tested the soldiers' hearing. Of course, this was in training in a controlled environment too.

My cousin's boy wasn't so lucky with his hearing. The guy in front of him on patrol stepped on a land mine and it blew my cousin across the alleyway too. His hearing was pretty much shot after that but after a couple of months recovering at a hospital in Germany he remained on active duty as a weapons instructor. I saw him in uniform at a family wedding once and he was wearing a tan beret so he must have been in the 75th.

Speaking of our audiology booth. Here's the guy who ran it. He was a Marine before he re-upped to the Army. I just discovered that he recently passed away. He wasn't that much older than me. We patched up a wrecked boat once and did a lot of fishing out of it when we were stationed in Louisiana.

Edited February 21 by Snargfargle

[Wolfswetpaws]

12 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

Well, I guess that would be in real life. The largest shoulder-fired weapon I've fired would be a 40 mm grenade from a M203. No, wait, make that a 66 mm rocket from a LAW. You've probably have fired both of those too. I once fired a ten gauge double-barrel shotgun that kicked like a mule. I borrowed it to go duck hunting because at the time I only had a 20 gauge. Right now I'm going out to shoot a ballistic curve from 10 to 100 yards with my target pistol. I'll be back in a couple of hours to compare it to a computer-generated one to see how closely they match. It's 40 degrees but is supposed to warm up. The wind's fairly calm now too.

The "L.A.W." rocket launchers were already phased-out by the time I served in the U.S. Marine Corps.  
Instead, we used the training version of the AT-4 which fired 9mm (tracer) training cartridges which matched the ballistics of the AT-4's normal load.

Among the biggest guns I've fired in-real-life are ....
~M-2 Browning .50 caliber machine-gun (from a ground position using a tripod and from a ring-mount on a 5-ton truck)
~M-203 rifle-mounted 40mm grenade launcher
~12-gauge shotgun (in my personal collection)

Everything else I've fired is smaller or less powerful in comparision.

[Wolfswetpaws]

7 hours ago, Asym said:

IRL.  Here, to let one expand their pain thresholds.........and why, I am hearing disabled as well.....

Do you see a tank commander standing with a pair of binoculars looking for the next target;  like we did with the M68A1 main gun a few years earlier???   Ever wonder why we created a Command Independent Thermal Viewer?  

  That round tube on top of the turret....  That's so the tank commander can stay inside....!

That ^^^^^ is one of the worst experiences if you are walking near that monster and without warning, you hear "ON THE WAY"......screwed, blued and tattooed you be.

I had the opportunity what at Knox to shoot some of the first 120 rounds......we had medics so busy, they didn't know what to do...  That ^^^^ is one of the most dangerous weapons to use...... 

Imagine, if you will, fighting in a city with an Infantry platoon in support....  You had to be extremely careful or have no choice in self defense.  Or, collapsing building on narrow streets or tree branches in forests or........my favorite, concrete when firing under an older bridge....

I was aboard the LST Newport (1179) when she was conducting gunnery training.  To avoid the damage to bystanders' ear-drums, personnel were expected to go to their assigned stations aboard the ship.  As a Marine, my station was my bunk in my unit's assigned berthing compartment.

When the "main guns" were fired, it was a loud "bang" which traveled through the metal of the ship's hull and could be heard quite distinctly several decks below the actual muzzles of the guns.

As for artillery, I had a task which involved driving to an artillery unit's position while they were conducting live-fire training.  I rolled-up the windows of the vehicle I was driving and was no closer than about 50 yards to the nearest gun.  But, yeah, it was loud enough to impress me.

While I heard the sounds of the guns being fired, I cannot claim to have fired them.  🙂 

[Snargfargle]

5 hours ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

it was loud enough to impress me.

I got so used to the howitzers firing that they wouldn't even wake me up on the few occasions that I was actually able to catch some Zs. However, if someone even whispered "medic" I was wide awake. "Gas" was another word that would wake me up. CBR (chemical, biological, and radiological) training was a big thing when I was in and we were sure to be tear-gassed at least a couple of times when we were in the field, which was usually one week out of every month because, like the DIVARTY command sergeant major said, "It's called the "field artillery" for a reason."

I got attached to a recon infantry platoon once because there weren't enough medics to go around and they were headed out for three-months of desert training. One of our tasks was to sneak around and release tear gas from drums to simulate a large-scale gas attack. The motto of the 11th Infantry Regiment is Semper Fidelis. You Marines actually stole that from them as they have used it since 1861 and the Marines didn't start using it until 1883. The city guys hated spending three months in the Mojave Desert but I loved it. In fact, after grad school I went back and spent most of a year touring all of the major deserts of the US.

I've hiked around the complete perimeter of this desert feature. I had to jump a fence and got yelled at but I was by golly going to get full value out of the $8 entrance fee.

 

Edited February 22 by Snargfargle

[Estimated_Prophet]

Just a .50cal at an automatic weapons shoot in Oklahoma.

[Ensign Cthulhu]

Casually blasting clays with some folks who turned up to the range, I was offered the opportunity to use the 10 Gauge magnum shotgun one of them had brought. It kicked like a mule and didn't destroy clays any more completely than the minimum loads I was handloading in my bog-standard 12 gauge. I decided I neither needed nor wanted it, thanked him politely for the loan and went about my business. 

[Snargfargle]

37 minutes ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

Casually blasting clays with some folks who turned up to the range, I was offered the opportunity to use the 10 Gauge magnum shotgun one of them had brought. It kicked like a mule and didn't destroy clays any more completely than the minimum loads I was handloading in my bog-standard 12 gauge. I decided I neither needed nor wanted it, thanked him politely for the loan and went about my business. 

I used to have a Pacific 20 gauge re-loader but sold it at a garage sale, thinking I would get a nicer Mec but I never did. I've got boxes and boxes of shotgun shells though that I inherited from my Dad and Grandpa. Some of them are ones that my grandpa reloaded back in the 60s. I really should buy me a clay-pigeon thrower and shoot them up.

My Remington 870, 12 gauge has a 3 1/2" chamber and if I wanted to I could load it up with what are essentially 10 gauge loads. The problem is that it's lighter than most 10 gauges and would kick like a mule.

I think where 10 gauge shotguns have their utility is with the steel shot that's required to hunt waterfowl now but only if you are hunting long-range geese. The weight of the shotgun is less of an issue if you are just sitting in a boat or a blind.

For the heaviest 3 1/2" loads, you are seeing a 10 foot-pound increase in recoil for a 10 gauge over a 12 gauge; that is, 50 plus foot-pounds to 60 plus foot-pounds. To put that into perspective, a 2 3/4" heavy load in a 12 gauge recoils at about 30 foot-pounds and a 20 gauge heavy load at about 20 foot pounds. A .410 heavy load has a recoil of about 5 foot pounds.

It's unfortunate that the 16 gauge didn't take off as it was a fine gauge that combined the lightness and low recoil of a 20 gauge plus the increased load capability of a 12 gauge. My cousin inherited my grandpa's Sweet 16 Browning Auto-5. I inherited an old worn-out Mossberg .22 that grandpa had picked up for $10 at a yard sale for us kids to shoot when we visited. Grandma, bless her heart, had no idea of the value and utility of guns.

My first shotgun was a .410 single-shot Iver Johnson. I bagged a lot of birds and rabbits little gun before I got a Remington 870, 20 gauge on my 13th birthday. Currently, I still have the old Iver-Johnson .410 and another Iver-Johnson 12 gauge that was also my grandpa's. I don't shoot either of them because they are around a hundred years old and worn out. I have Dad's old Remington Model 11, 12 gauge, that's probably a hundred years old too as it was old when Grandpa bought it used to give to Dad so that he could go hunting with him in the early 50s when he married his daughter. It doesn't get shot either.

My shooters are my Remington 870, 20 gauge Wingmaster, a Remington 870, 12 gauge "express" and the fine, Japanese-made Browning Auto-5, 12 gauge that I inherited from Dad. I bought that shotgun for him to replace his worn-out Remington Model 11 sometime in the 90s and he got to hunt with it for twenty-five years before he passed.

 

 

 

[Ensign Cthulhu]

9 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

I used to have a Pacific 20 gauge re-loader but sold it at a garage sale, thinking I would get a nicer Mec but I never did.

I started with a 12G Lee Load-all plastic fantastic - yes, say what you want, but it let me get into shotshell reloading cheap to see if I really wanted to do it, and it did the job. I bought a Mec later because the Load-all wasn't handling some of the hull types I was using particularly well, and another Mec for my .410 because Lee never made a Load-all in that gauge. 

My shotguns are both O/U; one a 12G and the other a .22LR/.410. The people I've shot trap (casually!) with who have autoloaders and pumps have to go scrabbling for their hulls afterwards; my 12G has extractors without ejectors, so I can pluck them from the breech at leisure and drop them into a box at my feet. 

[Snargfargle]

4 hours ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

My shotguns are both O/U; one a 12G and the other a .22LR/.410.

I forgot that I also have a .22/20 gauge over and under, or at least I did until I gave it to my sister to shoot snakes with. She lives down in the middle of open range in New Mexico and the rattlesnakes come right up to her door. They used to do that here in town too but I now keep my lots mowed short so that the mice tend to get eaten up by the owl that lives in my spruce tree and the fox that lives in my neighbor's shed before they attract too many snakes. Last year I did run over a rattlesnake while mowing my south lot though. It was after the ground squirrels that live there. It's getting warm really early this year and I'm going to have to start watching out for rattlesnakes when I go out shooting. The gophers and ground squirrels are already out making new burrows.

Here's one of my lot squirrels.

[Asym]

16 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

I used to have a Pacific 20 gauge re-loader but sold it at a garage sale, thinking I would get a nicer Mec but I never did. I've got boxes and boxes of shotgun shells though that I inherited from my Dad and Grandpa. Some of them are ones that my grandpa reloaded back in the 60s. I really should buy me a clay-pigeon thrower and shoot them up.

My Remington 870, 12 gauge has a 3 1/2" chamber and if I wanted to I could load it up with what are essentially 10 gauge loads. The problem is that it's lighter than most 10 gauges and would kick like a mule.

I think where 10 gauge shotguns have their utility is with the steel shot that's required to hunt waterfowl now but only if you are hunting long-range geese. The weight of the shotgun is less of an issue if you are just sitting in a boat or a blind.

For the heaviest 3 1/2" loads, you are seeing a 10 foot-pound increase in recoil for a 10 gauge over a 12 gauge; that is, 50 plus foot-pounds to 60 plus foot-pounds. To put that into perspective, a 2 3/4" heavy load in a 12 gauge recoils at about 30 foot-pounds and a 20 gauge heavy load at about 20 foot pounds. A .410 heavy load has a recoil of about 5 foot pounds.

It's unfortunate that the 16 gauge didn't take off as it was a fine gauge that combined the lightness and low recoil of a 20 gauge plus the increased load capability of a 12 gauge. My cousin inherited my grandpa's Sweet 16 Browning Auto-5. I inherited an old worn-out Mossberg .22 that grandpa had picked up for $10 at a yard sale for us kids to shoot when we visited. Grandma, bless her heart, had no idea of the value and utility of guns.

My first shotgun was a .410 single-shot Iver Johnson. I bagged a lot of birds and rabbits little gun before I got a Remington 870, 20 gauge on my 13th birthday. Currently, I still have the old Iver-Johnson .410 and another Iver-Johnson 12 gauge that was also my grandpa's. I don't shoot either of them because they are around a hundred years old and worn out. I have Dad's old Remington Model 11, 12 gauge, that's probably a hundred years old too as it was old when Grandpa bought it used to give to Dad so that he could go hunting with him in the early 50s when he married his daughter. It doesn't get shot either.

My shooters are my Remington 870, 20 gauge Wingmaster, a Remington 870, 12 gauge "express" and the fine, Japanese-made Browning Auto-5, 12 gauge that I inherited from Dad. I bought that shotgun for him to replace his worn-out Remington Model 11 sometime in the 90s and he got to hunt with it for twenty-five years before he passed.

I started with a Steven's 311 in 410 at 8.   Mossberg 500 collection (three barrels) for two decdes.  And, my Benelli M2 currently... ....  I have black powder 12 ga's I have used for Pheasants.

But, that M2 is one of best performing shotguns I have ever owned....

[Ensign Cthulhu]

3 hours ago, Asym said:

I have black powder 12 ga's I have used for Pheasants.

Cartridge-era or muzzle loading?

[Snargfargle]

3 hours ago, Asym said:

I have black powder 12 ga's I have used for Pheasants.

I've thought about getting a black-powder shotgun but I'd be afraid to shoot it around here because we are always under a range fire warning. Just a tiny bit of smoldering wad could really cause a problem. About ten years ago, a fire started by a cigarette on the highway burned for 13 miles before the river sands put it out. In a wet year, and in the late spring, that fire would have created some nice grassland but it hit in the middle of a drought and you can still see the burn scar to this day.

 

[Wolfswetpaws]

Wow.