page_title: Gun turret
section_title: Land fortifications
hierarchical_section_title: Gun turret / Land fortifications
caption_attribution_description: English: A Swedish naval artillery called 12 cm tornautomatpjäs m/70 (ERSTA) at a museum in Fårösund, Gotland, Sweden. Svenska: 12 cm tornautomatpjäs m/70 (ERSTA) vid Förbandsmuséet i Fårösund på Gotland.
context_page_description: A gun turret is a platform from which weapons can be fired that affords protection, visibility and some cone of fire. A modern gun turret is generally a rotatable weapon mount that houses the crew or mechanism of a projectile-firing weapon and at the same time lets the weapon be aimed and fired in some degree of azimuth and elevation.
context_section_description: In 1859, the Royal Commission on the Defence of the United Kingdom were in the process of recommending a huge programme of fortifications to protect Britain's naval bases. They interviewed Captain Coles, who had bombarded Russian fortifications during the Crimean War, however Coles repeatedly lost his temper during the discussion and the commissioners failed to ask him about the gun turret that he had patented earlier in that year, with the result that none of the Palmerston Forts mounted turrets.  Eventually, the Admiralty Pier Turret at Dover was commissioned in 1877 and completed in 1882.
  In continental Europe, the invention of high explosive shells in 1885 threatened to make all existing fortifications obsolete; a partial solution was the protection of fortress guns in armoured turrets. Pioneering designs were produced by Commandant Henri-Louis-Philippe Mougin in France and Captain Maximilian Schumann in Germany. Mougin's designs were incorporated in a new generation of polygonal forts constructed by Raymond Adolphe Séré de Rivières in France and Henri Alexis Brialmont in Belgium. Developed versions of Schumann's turrets were employed after his death in the fortifications of Metz. In 1914, the Brialmont forts in the Battle of Liège proved unequal to the German "Big Bertha" 42 cm siege howitzers, which were able to penetrate the turret armour and smash turret mountings.
  Elsewhere, armoured turrets, sometimes described a cupolas, were incorporated into coastal artillery defences. An extreme example was Fort Drum, the "concrete battleship", near Corregidor, Philippines; this mounted four huge 14-inch guns in two naval pattern turrets and was the only permanent turreted fort ever constructed by the United States. Between the wars, improved turrets formed the offensive armament of the Maginot Line forts in France. During the Second World War, some of the artillery pieces in the Atlantic Wall fortifications, such as the Cross-Channel guns, were large naval guns housed in turrets. 
  Some nations, from Albania to Switzerland and Austria, have embedded the turrets of obsolete tanks in concrete bunkers, while others have constructed or updated fortifications with modern artillery systems, such as the 1970s era Swedish coastal artillery battery on Landsort Island.
caption: 12 cm automatic turret gun model 1970 also known as ERSTA (Ersättning Tungt Artilleri or Replacement Heavy Artillery) developed to defend vital points like seaports from enemy landing ships, as well as area denial and fire support, even on a nuclear battlefield.
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