SCAPA 100
Above : Battleship hulls were covered in thick sheets of armoured steel . Here a sheet has slid down the side of the Markgraf
Right : The armour on the side of the Kronprinz hull has been blasted away , revealing the casemate gun
Below : The last casemate gun on the Kronprinz lies over the 12-inch guns
a concentrated salvo to be coordinated against a clearly defined target and then adjustments in range or bearing to be fed back into the fire control mechanism to make corrections .
The three battleships remaining in Scapa Flow are all König-class ( essentially triplets , children of a common design ) and an armament arranged in a distinctive pattern for good reason . All the guns were set on the midline of the ship , allowing the turrets to traverse to either side and deliver a broadside to both port and starboard beams . In addition , the König-class mounted the forward and rear pairs of turrets in a ‘ super firing ’ configuration . The higher turret could fire overhead from the front , allowing a full arc of fire for all guns , even when firing dead ahead or dead astern .
Each turret had two 30.5cm ( 12.0in ) SK L / 50 guns ( the numbers are only there for the interested to feed in to Wikipedia on a voyage of discovery through the details ). Each gun had 90 shells with rate of fire of between two to three 400kg shells , though surprisingly each barrel had only a shelf life of 200 or so shots . The maximum range was in the region of 20,400m . In crude terms , this is like firing a Classic
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