page_title: Naval artillery
section_title: Quick-firing artillery
hierarchical_section_title: Naval artillery / Industrial era / Quick-firing artillery
caption_attribution_description: English: View on the forecastle, circa 1897, showing some of her crewmen, her pilothouse, forward 13-inch gun turret and forward port 8- inch gun turret. Halftone photograph, copied from the contemporary publication Uncle Sam's Navy, 1898. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph.
context_page_description: Naval artillery is artillery mounted on a warship, originally used only for naval warfare, later also for shore bombardment and for anti-aircraft use. The term generally refers to tube-launched projectile-firing weapons and excludes self-propelled projectiles like torpedoes, rockets, and missiles and those simply dropped overboard like depth charges and naval mines.
context_section_description: Underwater hull damage possible with torpedoes encouraged development of small, inexpensive torpedo boats capable of sinking the largest warships. By the end of the 19th century, all warships required a defensive battery of quick-firing guns capable of hitting fast, maneuverable torpedo boats.
  The Royal Navy first introduced the quick-firing 4.7-inch gun in HMS Sharpshooter in 1889, and the quick-firing 6-inch MK 1 in HMS Royal Sovereign, launched 1891. Other navies followed suit; the French Navy installed quick-firing weapons on its ships completed in 1894–95.
  Quick-firing guns were a key characteristic of the pre-dreadnought battleship, the dominant design of the 1890s. The quick-firing guns, while unable to penetrate thick armour, were intended to destroy the superstructure of an opposing battleship, start fires, and kill or distract the enemy's gun crews. The development of heavy guns and their increasing rate of fire meant that the quick-firer lost its status as the decisive weapon of naval combat in the early 1900s, though quick-firing guns were vital to defend battleships from attack by torpedo boats and destroyers, and formed the main armament of smaller vessels.
  Most late-19th-century warships mounted naval artillery of more than one caliber because of uncertainty about the relative destruction possible from a few large shells (which might miss) in comparison to the increased hit probability of a larger number of less damaging small-caliber shells fired within the same time period. Quick-firing guns were initially breech-loading weapons firing ammunition small enough to be loaded by hand. Later substitution of brass cartridges for silk powder bags allowed increased rates of fire using sliding wedge breech blocks. Increasing mechanization ultimately enabled similar rates of fire from naval artillery calibers up to 8 inches (20 cm).
caption: USS Indiana, an example of the intermediate battery principle with its forward 13-inch and forward port 8-inch gun turrets
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