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We visited the Muesum of Naval Firepower with our friend Tim, not far from Portsmouth, nicknamed "Explosion!". This is the missiles room, the no-longer-explosive-bombs of relatively modern warfare, dating from around the 60s to the 80s. It's hard to tell just how large these things actually are by looking at the photo! The big mama in the middle of the photo was about 8-10 feet long.
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Given that these are pointing up, we think they are probably anit-aircraft. This makes a good don't-mess-with-me desktop pic for PC!!
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Rod riding a Nuke, momentarily of course.
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This display is in the Torpedo room and shows the innards of a WW2 torpedo so you could see how they worked. Chekc out the next picture for the battery power requirements! And you thought they were that big just so they look more scary, huh?!
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Shares in a battery company, anyone? There really was a staggering amount of batteries in each one!
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In this photo you can see partly how long the torpedoes were. It was impossible to get it all in one shot! The green mini submarine thing at the back was a manned torpedo that hopefully got abandoned by the driver just before impact...
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More torpedoes pre WW2 and quite a bit smaller although you still wouldn't want to drop one on your foot.
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Next to the torpedo room was this depth-charge thrower, presumably it was mounted on the deck of a Navy ship.
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The next few photos are in the Gun room, they had some fascinating exhibits and lots of interesting stats etc you could read about each one.
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Some of the guns were quite old. This one even had a padded shoulder rest, though we imagine the recoil length probably made padding irrelevant.
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This was one of the more modern guns, not sure what era.
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This photo shows quit a modern shielded gun thing that would have sat on the deck of a ship. You could get quite close for a good look
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This photo shows the outside of the gun in the previous photo...
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This was one of the most impressive pieces of firepower engineering we saw at the museum. Diametre was about 3 feet and when fired it had a recoil of about 40 inches.
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Other monster-sized gun barrels in the gun room...
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Another room was dedicated to water-borne explosives such as this limpet mine.
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The innards of a mine...
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Rod traversing a 'mine-field', not the explosive sort thank goodness!
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