Finished: Project IV/20

M65 280mm Motorized Heavy Gun

I've constantly talked, through the duration of this 145-photo and nobody knew how many hours long project, about the cannon as the M65 and the trucks just as trucks, when M65 was the identifier for the combo. Had I been smarter I'd been more factual and consistent, but here we ended up again. Then again, I've tried to keep the tags of 'Mumblings [since moment t in its lifecycle] from getting to fine-grained, so maybe just using one single project-specific tag was acceptable.

Cannon T161 on carriage T72

The nuke gun, atomic cannon, Atomic Annie, a dear child had many names. Not too many of these were built, just 20, of which #9 fired one 15kt W-9 shell  (diameter: 280mm; lenght: 1380mm; mass: 364kg) in the Upshot-Knothol operation's test Grable. I assumed that anyone reading posts like this already knew these things, and had the video clip playing in their mind's eye already.

In the real world the whole M65 weighed 42,5 tons in addition to my own mass, and had a total lenght of 11 meters and was about three meters wide. Unlimbering it took 12 minutes and getting it ready to run away ate fifteen full minutes. Not that those were to be taken anywhere near a danger zone, as the official range was 32km and the unofficial up to 56km.

I tried to find some more facts from an article I had found months ago, to flesh out this post, where the normal shells were also talked about. I just couldn't re-find it anymore.

M249 & M250

Obviously the trucks had different model number, the front one was a M249 4x4 Heavy Gun-Lifting Front Truck and the rear one was also aptly named: M250 4x4 Heavy Gun-Lifting Rear Truck. Simple enough.

They didn't really look like it, but they both weighed 16-17 tons, while their max speed was allegedly about 72km/h, most likely without the cannon slowing them down to reach those numbers. The full mass of the 26-meter-long M65 reached 78 tons, and that wasn't something you'd get up to those speeds too easily.

Final images

The model was so ridiculously long, that I didn't even attempt to play with some A4s - and I still hadn't invested in a light tent (not sure if this had fit in one of those, either), so these pics were taken on top of the dining table.

My one complaint about the instructions was that it was absolutely unclear how to get the cannon's barrel set up for transport, for all the steps only showed the firing mode. So my cannon was stuck into the firing mode and could not be safely unstuck to get it in the proper transport mode. In case someone was going to point this out for me: I know it's wrong ;)

A rocket for scale

At the very last moment I got the idea of taking a pair of photos of the M65 next to the Lego rocket. This was indeed hilariously long, fully assembled. I just thought that for scale a Lego Saturn V would work much better than a banana.