RogerBW's Blog

To Firepower, the Royal Artillery Museum. I hadn't been for eight years, and things had changed a bit. Many photos follow; cc-by-sa on everything.

A Soviet 2S3 "Акация" self-propelled howitzer.

WWII QF 25-pounder, in prime condition.

L118 Light Gun.

RPG-7, collected in Iraq.

"Herb Spread" rations. A Marmite substitute? Simple carbohydrate with a bit of taste to it?

It's "Exotic" flavour. Don't you know what Exotic tastes like?

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A variety of WWI guns, including the French 75.

WWII anti-aircraft guns including the 40mm Bofors.

Coastal defence gun.

2-pounder anti-tank gun.

A bottle made especially for Molotov cocktails. (The glass is moulded to fragment easily.) This was intended for the Home Guard in WWII.

QF 18-pounder.

75mm Pack Howitzer M1, air-droppable.

A heavy mortar. (And the practice mule, behind it.)

Another QF 25-pounder.

I am particularly fond of the built-in gun-laying calculator.

Another WWII cannon. (I know, I should have taken more notes.) (Edited: 6-pounder anti-tank gun.)

17-pounder anti-tank gun (late WWII). At this point they're getting a bit big to be towed, and really start to need their own vehicles.

A recoilless experiment.

Inside a Saracen command post van.

Another unidentified gun, quite possibly FH70.

A regimental banner.

Rocket launcher (related to the Z battery and Unrotated Projectile).

I particularly liked the boxy front appearance.

Tracked Rapier.

Thunderbird. I always have trouble telling them from Bloodhound without reference photos.

40mm Bofors on its own truck.

Sexton, Canadian 25-pounder. Built at the Montréal Locomotive Works, and the tracks have that air about them, but my word, that welding!

Abbot SP gun.

Congreve's inclined-plane clock.

Various rockets by Congreve and his successors.

Bomb-ship model.

Indian mortar, probably intended for use as a fort's gun.

Screw-gun, or Ordnance RML 2.5" Mountain Gun.

"You may hide in the caves, they'll be only your graves, but you can't get away from the guns!"

Gatling gun, used for evaluation but not adopted by the Army.

Model of the fairly obscure "Dragon" artillery tractor. Suspension and tracks from a Vickers medium tank; it could carry ten men plus the driver, and tow an 18-pounder gun at 12mph.

Scratch-built gun constructed in the Railway Workshops during the Siege of Mafeking (1899-1900).

Spin vane from a Hale rocket.

Some lovely detailing.

The "Priest" artillery vehicle.

It's the sticker I particularly like: "Contains Shoe Shine Kit". (Presumably you aren't meant to set fire to it.)

The Cold War hall has been shuffled about and largely crammed together. There's a fairly dispirited feeling about the place, as the museum is due to close in its present form by the end of next year. Nobody really knows what's going to happen after that, or where the bulk of the collection will go, though Larkhill was mentioned. Many of the volunteers who seem to make up most of the staff are under-informed. Lots of tyres have gone flat, vehicles are shoved together to make space for other things, and so on.

But Green Mace is still there. I love Green Mace. Lots of gorgeous impractical details.

AS-90.

Chieftain. Edited: Centurion, fitted out as an artillery observation post.

I think this is the failed AS-90 replacement, built on a Leopard chassis.

Phoenix, early artillery-spotting UAV - obsolete by the time it was fielded in the late 1990s.

The ammunition room. Still there for now.

Built for the Crimean War. Only arrived a year late.

Towed Rapier.

Failed to catch this one. Edited: Alvis Stormer HVM.

Lance missile.

FV432, last vehicle designed at Greenwich. (EDIT: Woolwich!)

Russian gun-shield from the Crimean war.

Yes, everything's a bit crammed at the moment.

The Pig's still there.

Strange design. Feels very hasty.

The 88mm Garrington, an experimental gun developed to replace the 25-pounder. The full hood was meant to provide protection from fragmentation and nuclear flash, but it turned out to build up fumes during firing.

Inside the shield.

More guns outside.

This seems a reasonable point to mention the photos from my last trip, in 2007.