The quoted British 18-inch Mark II gun weight is about 161.5 tons. The 1920 ammunition figures include a 3,320-pound armour-piercing shell and a high-explosive proposal of up to 4,000 pounds. For the 1921 designs, the armour-piercing shell is put at roughly 1.2 to 1.3 tons and the high-explosive shell at 1.3 tons. These figures refer to different ammunition proposals, so they should not be combined into a single shell specification.
Notable Point · 1:01:37-1:03:01
The scale of Britain's 18-inch gun programme
Quoted gun and shell weights show the physical scale behind British 18-inch capital-ship proposals.