The Gun on Mars

[Spleen]

Hi All!

Has there been a thread covering the Martian Gun on Mars?

Was sitting in the garden reading the book this afternoon and got myself thinking about the Martian Gun used to send the cylinders to Earth and Venus. How big is it? What does it look like? If the gun had the ability to cover a huge expanse of Mars in a gas cloud after just ten shots we must be talking something big.

[mctoddridesagain]

spleen said:

If the gun had the ability to cover a huge expanse of Mars in a gas cloud after just ten shots we must be talking something big.

It'd have to be, it was firing damn big shells! Thirty yards calibre, it would have to be immensely long so as to give a bearable acceleration and not turn the cylinders' occupants into jam.

[malfunkshun]

there has been discussion on this before and a lot of interesting ideas thrown about. such as liquid suspension of the martians to decrease accelleration shock. search for the thread, it is pretty interesting. in fact i'm gonna search for it, i'd like to read it again

[Spleen]

Would like to read that too. Can you let me know if you find it. Am working overseas at the moment and I'm short on time, that and the computer I'm using has a painfully slow internet connection.

Thanks in advance.

[malfunkshun]

lots of discussion here, mainly about whether or not the martians used a gun or launched the cylinders from the surface using rocket technology. also concerns on impact survivability and whether or not they decelerated using retro rockets before impacting the earth.

robk.proboards13.com/index.cgi?board=book&action=display&thread=1109368376&page=1

[the Donal]

Do you think it was a Marshine gun?

[Lensman]

I think my numbers were off, tho, on the stopping distance required I gave late in that thread. I assumed a linear stopping distance vs. speed, but it's a geometric progression.

[Commandingtripod]

Does any one here think that there may have been more than just one gun?

I think Wells simply mentions one, but surely the Martians would have more guns should something happen to their first?
back up guns one might say.

[mctoddridesagain]

Good question. However, if they had more than one, why did the shots cease after only 10? Part of the reason Wells had only one gun was so that he could then have his Narrator speculate that it developed a defect which prevented it from firing more, otherwise the reader would be scratching his head thinking, 'Why only ten shots?' And if there was more than one gun, why fire only one cylinder at a time? Surely it would make more sense from a military point of view to fire as many cylinders simultaneously as possible - the fact that only one at a time was launched suggests only the one gun.

[Commandingtripod]

Agreed McTodd.

But that also asks another question.
Being a super smart race, surely it wouldn't have taken the Martians that long to locate and fix the error?
What was the time period between the first cylinder launching and it arriving?
I think one web site puts it at roughly two years.
And the Martians didn't repair it within that time span and launch more?
Not going to have a go or anything, but it must have delveloped a pretty big defect - like destroying itself or something when the last one was launched?
This could get intresting.

[Thunder Child]

I think the means and resources of the Martians were very limited. The Invasion was their last resort.

It could also be that in the time they repaired their gun, they heard about the death of their colonists and change their plans, shooting the remaining cilinders to Venus.

Johan

[mctoddridesagain]

commandingtripod said:

...that also asks another question.
Being a super smart race, surely it wouldn't have taken the Martians that long to locate and fix the error?
What was the time period between the first cylinder launching and it arriving?
I think one web site puts it at roughly two years.
And the Martians didn't repair it within that time span and launch more?
Not going to have a go or anything, but it must have delveloped a pretty big defect - like destroying itself or something when the last one was launched?

Again, good questions Commandingtripod - and I don't regard them as 'having a go', they're perfectly sensible!

We can only speculate, because Wells wisely (IMHO) made the novel a mock-memoir, so there's no Omniscient Narrator who can describe directly what's happening on Mars (I say Wells was wise to do this as it makes the novel far more realistic, and also more interesting as it allows room for doubt and other interpretations - hence this debate!).

I agree, one would expect the Martians, being highly advanced, to have either built more than one gun, or to have been able to repair the one that went wrong (if this is what happened). But I think the point Thunder Child makes is the most straightforward interpretation - we know Mars was dying, thus short of resources, and so surely the Martian effort to invade was more or less the last chance they had (of course, as there is reason to suspect in the Epilogue that they migrated to Venus, it wasn't quite their last chance). So it may be that they had really stretched their resources to build the space gun as well as all the other equipment they had.

Maybe they also built hundreds or even thousands of Cylinders, Fighting Machines and Handling Machines etc. for a truly huge invasion force, gambling that they only needed to build one gun? And yes, given the time it took to get to Earth (though I think it was months, not years - there's another thread on this board which went into massive detail on this very subject, and the consensus of opinion is that the journey time was a matter of months, not years) then perhaps the gun was really badly damaged after the tenth shot, seeing as they made no further attempt at launches before the invasion failed?

Of course, the subject being open to speculation, there are other possibilities. Christopher Priest exploited the Mystery of Only Ten Shots, as we might think of it, in his enjoyable 'The Space Machine'. There, he supposes that after the tenth shot, the humanoids the Martians had enslaved rose up in revolt, thus chucking a spanner in the tentacled horrors' works! The humanoids, incidentally, were the creatures Wells mentions the Martians as having brought a few of to Earth as food.

In the collection 'The War of the Worlds: Fresh Perspectives', Lawrence Watt-Evans' essay 'Just Who Were Those Martians, Anyway', argues convincingly, not a little tongue-in-cheek, that it wasn't even actually an invasion! In a tighly-argued piece, he posits that the Martian race is a peaceful one, and that these few dozens must have been the losers of some internecine dispute (not a war, however; if the Martian race was warlike, these losers would simply have been executed as war criminals). They were sent to Earth in one-way craft, with enough weapons to defend themselves against alien wildlife, but no real chance of thriving or even surviving. Indeed, he speculates further that the Martians that went to Venus were the leaders of the plot, the clever ones, and that the Martian leadership sent them there knowing full well that they would fry as soon as they arrived; the ones who came to Earth were their footsoldiers, the street thugs, hence their stupid actions on this planet.

[Max]

How about they only fired 10 shots because they thought that'd be adequete to do the job?

[malfunkshun]

thats what i always thought, that 10 cylinders was all they needed to start out with. then once they're entrenched, they have that digging machine and that aluminum machine to manufacture everything else they need, right here on earth

[Topaz]

max said:

How about they only fired 10 shots because they thought that'd be adequete to do the job?

I'm partial to that idea myself. Launch ten invasion craft in a 'special forces' attack to cripple the major superpower conveniently centered on a relatively small island, then wait until that beach head is established before you launch the supporting main force.

When the strike force is mysteriously vanquished without adequate explanation, hold of on the main force until you know what the heck happened.

Political chaos ensues, and after much pointless debate, the main force strikes off for lush, jungle-covered Venus instead.

[Leatherhead]

HAs anyone actually given any thougth to the lenght of the projectile? I always imagined them to have the same length to width ratio of a soda can.

[Topaz]

If memory serves, most high-velocity bullets/artillery shells are about three to five times their caliber in length. That'd put the cylinder at 90 to 150 yards in length.

A Coke can falls in the lower end of that proportional range, more or less.

[Commandingtripod]

Didn't Wells him self write how large the cylinder was?
I thought he put it at 30 yards?

[mctoddridesagain]

That was its diameter (and hence the calibre of the gun), he said nothing about the length.

[Commandingtripod]

Oh yeah - diameter - he he of course.
Thanks for pointing that out. ;D
I always did wonder how the Martians managed to pack all their stuff into a 30 yard object.