"Strider" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 23 Apr 2005 13:02:48 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Tom Miller" wrote in message
...
70 caliber! What the hell is that? That's nearly 18 mm. It would kick
you
into the middle of next week to fire it. That's just a cannon with a
stock!

The French made a .70-cal (roughly; it was metric) anti-tank,
shoulder-fired
rifle during WWI. I suspect most shooters didn't actually put it up
against
their shoulders, however. g

When I was a kid living in Maryland I used to love to go down to a couple
of
museums on the Eastern Shore, where they had about a half-dozen of those
"punt guns" that were used to shoot an entire flock of ducks with one
shot.
The bore varied but I remember several of them around 2" (.200 caliber)
or
more, with barrels maybe 12 feet long and a regular, very fat shoulder
stock.

That would be a 2 gauge shotgun, not a .200 caliber rifle. ;-)

Yeah, firstly, I had the decimal in the wrong place. Secondly, a 2-inch bore
would be about 0.6 gauge. (Shotgun gauge being a measure of how many round
lead balls, each of which just fits in the bore, weigh one pound. A 2-in.
bore is about 1.7 lb/ball.)

Unless you're into .410 gauge shotgun terminology, in which case this one
would be a 2.000 gauge.

I think they actually measured them by how many pounds of nails they could
fire in one shot. g

Did you ever see one of those suckers? They gave them names, and passed them
down through generations. The history of each named punt gun was famous all
over the Eastern Shore.

--
Ed Huntress