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WIP of the Reformation War-era Aludran railroad gun Kazit Zoya ("Little Zoya"), mentioned here. This 23-inch supergun is named after the lead designer's daughter, and was the cannon that breached the outer wall of Lons Fortress in Linthe and one of the battery of guns assembled to destroy the outer wall of Janek after the south-facing 12-inch L/70 anti-siege cannon Stiletto was disabled.
It can be argued that Zoya was actually the inventor of the gun: drawn as an 11-inch piece similar to the railroad gun Lady Rochelle (usually just known as Rochelle), Zoya drew a tiny figure and wrote her name on the blueprint when her mother was out of the design room at their home. After shouting for her daughter, the lead designer paused and took out a set of calipers to measure the gun relative to the little crayon kitty; the result was the cannon that Linthan forces came to fear as "The Empress' Right Hand."
Did some scaling based on the barrel to get the ladders the right size, and Zoya is an absolute leviathan of a gun: the gun carriage is 29'9 tall and 204'1 long, which is actually longer than Schwerer Gustav :o
It can be argued that Zoya was actually the inventor of the gun: drawn as an 11-inch piece similar to the railroad gun Lady Rochelle (usually just known as Rochelle), Zoya drew a tiny figure and wrote her name on the blueprint when her mother was out of the design room at their home. After shouting for her daughter, the lead designer paused and took out a set of calipers to measure the gun relative to the little crayon kitty; the result was the cannon that Linthan forces came to fear as "The Empress' Right Hand."
Did some scaling based on the barrel to get the ladders the right size, and Zoya is an absolute leviathan of a gun: the gun carriage is 29'9 tall and 204'1 long, which is actually longer than Schwerer Gustav :o
Category Artwork (Digital) / General Furry Art
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1920 x 359px
File Size 283.3 kB
It's kind of crazy how many 'warlords', for lack of a better term, throughout history have been obsessed with pouring money and resources into creating mega-guns when those resources would have been far more efficiently and effectively spent on things like air power or missiles.
Zoya is WW1-era, so it's from the time when such guns were more or less practical since Aludra couldn't build a guided missile and even a 204-foot railroad gun was a fairly daunting target for aerial bombing by their enemies in Linthe (for perspective, even in WW2 the RAF had problems consistently hitting the stationary 823-foot Tirpitz and in Vietnam it took USAF and USN aircraft seven years and hundreds of attacks to permanently destroy the 540-foot Thanh Hoa Bridge, not succeeding until the invention of laser-guided bombs).
One of the major reasons Aludra made so much use of railroad guns was that their WW1-era was different to ours: tanks already existed at the outbreak of the Reformation War (as did the Alcacian horse-ogres, who can be used in a manner very similar to tanks), they had Air Destroyers, and nobody had invented barbed wire (since there was no American frontier needing to be rapidly divided up for cattle grazing), which meant holding a trench line in open country was far harder even with machine guns. This meant combat was far more focused on lines surrounding fortresses and fortified cities, and breaching fortresses is something railroad guns are actually really good at.
Zoya did have some unique problems; since it was for the most part literally a scaled-up 11-inch gun it only had 16 axles, which meant an axle loading weight of 52 tons for its all-up weight of 830 tons. It had to be fired from specially-laid tracks mounted on steel spreader plates and generally moved with the gun, hydraulics and generator dismounted from the gondola so it didn't destroy the tracks it was running on.
One of the major reasons Aludra made so much use of railroad guns was that their WW1-era was different to ours: tanks already existed at the outbreak of the Reformation War (as did the Alcacian horse-ogres, who can be used in a manner very similar to tanks), they had Air Destroyers, and nobody had invented barbed wire (since there was no American frontier needing to be rapidly divided up for cattle grazing), which meant holding a trench line in open country was far harder even with machine guns. This meant combat was far more focused on lines surrounding fortresses and fortified cities, and breaching fortresses is something railroad guns are actually really good at.
Zoya did have some unique problems; since it was for the most part literally a scaled-up 11-inch gun it only had 16 axles, which meant an axle loading weight of 52 tons for its all-up weight of 830 tons. It had to be fired from specially-laid tracks mounted on steel spreader plates and generally moved with the gun, hydraulics and generator dismounted from the gondola so it didn't destroy the tracks it was running on.
Oh, that was the previous WIP http://www.furaffinity.net/view/17852822/
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