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It fascinates me that battleship guns are so enormous, much larger than they appear from an ourward appearance.  A large Army artillery piece is 155 mm, we had some 8" pieces in WW 2 that threw a 200 pound shell.  BB rounds are 10X that weight.

Kinda like an A-10, the ship is built around the gun, with magazines and hoists and whatnot five decks deep.

I think it is deceiving because I think our minds tend to think of a 16" gun as being twice the size of an 8" gun because obviously 16 is twice 8.  Thus, you would think that if an 8" shell is 200 pounds then a 16" shell should be 400 pounds.  Mathematically this is VERY wrong.  The engineers on here can check my math but the area of a circle is Pi*R^2 so:

• Area of an 8" circle is Pi*4^2 = 3.14*16 = 50.24 square inches.  
• Area of a 16" circle is Pi*8^2 = 3.14*64 = 200.96 square inches or roughly 4x more than an 8".  

Dummy math:
I've done some HVAC in my past and this equation matters for balancing heat/cool runs and returns.  However, in the residential HVAC that I've done it doesn't have to be exact (and it can't anyway, explanation below).  When working exclusively with round pipes we ignored Pi entirely and just compared the ratio of the square of the radius.  Ie, if you need to feed two 6" pipes how big does the feeder pipe need to be?  Well, the two 6" pipes are 9 each so you need a pipe with a square root of 18.  The square root of 18 is 4.24 so you need an 8.48" pipe to feed two 6" pipes.  That is all well and good in theory and it certainly matters in more advanced applications but if you are installing HVAC lines and you go to Home Depot looking for an 8.48" pipe they are going to look at you like you just landed a space ship in their parking lot and probably laugh at you after you leave.  They don't make/sell 8.48" HVAC pipes but they do make 8" and that is close enough for this application so you can feed two 6" pipes off of one 8" pipe and everything works.  

All we needed to know was that 3*3 = 9 and 9+9 = 18 and 4*4 = 16 which is pretty close to 18.  Similarly, a 10" will feed three 6" because 9+9+9 = 27 and 5*5 = 25 and 25 is pretty close to 27.  A 12" will feed four 6" because 9*4 = 36 and 6*6 = 36 (that one is actually exact).  


We did occasionally have to use Pi because sometimes we were converting from round pipes into the rectangular ones that fit in the wall.  There is a shorthand for that though.  At the bottom where you hook that into a round pipe there is a piece that is rectangular one one end, curves 90 degrees and is circular on the other end and the designers of that piece were smart enough to design it with the appropriately sized round pipe so you just use whatever that is.  

The pressures inside a 16" gun when fired must be ... high.

476 German ruler Flavius Odoacer captures Pavia

476 Orestes, father of Emperor Romulus Augustulus is captured and executed by Odoacer and his followers, now seen as the end of the Roman Empire in the West

1207 King John of England grants small town of Liverpool a charter (right to elect a mayor and aldermen)

1830 The first American-built locomotive, "Tom Thumb," races a horse-drawn car from the Stockton and Stokes stagecoach company from Baltimore to Ellicott Mills; due to mechanical problems, the horse wins!

1833 Britain's Slavery Abolition Act gains royal assent

1837 Pharmacists John Lea and William Perrins manufacture Worcestershire sauce

1859 A geomagnetic storm causes the Aurora Borealis to shine so brightly that it is seen clearly over parts of the USA, Europe, and even as far afield as Japan

1884 First known photograph of a tornado is taken near Howard, South Dakota

1898 Caleb Bradham renames his carbonated soft drink "Pepsi-Cola"

1918 MLB Cleveland Indians outfielder Tris Speaker is suspended for the season due to an assault on umpire Tom Connolly

1957 Strom Thurmond, a Democratic senator from South Carolina, begins the longest filibuster of 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act

1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom civil rights march at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

1970 Phillies' Larry Bowa steals home for the second time in 1970

1973 Bobby "Boris" Pickett's song "Monster Mash" goes gold

1973 Motown Records releases "Let's Get It On," the 13th studio album by Marvin Gaye

1977 NY Yankee Ron Guidry faces just 28 batters in 1-0 win over Texas Rangers

1978 Robert Shaw, British actor (The Sting; Jaws; The Deep), dies of a heart attack at 51

1978 Donald Vesco rides a 21-foot-long Kawasaki motorcycle at 318.598 mph

1983 Greg Luzinski becomes the first player to hit three home runs onto the roof at Comiskey Park, Chicago

1983 Joseph Kreckman sets a record of 2,215 clay pigeons shot in an hour

2022 A 1952 Mickey Mantle baseball card sells for $12.6 million at auction, becoming the world's most expensive piece of sports memorabilia

2024 The US completes its largest dam removal project on the Klamath River at the California-Oregon border, advocated for by tribal nations to restore the salmon population