Accelerator guns: from ‘Cannon Perreaux’ to V.3.

Artillery designers are always searching for means of improving a gun’s external and internal ballistic properties and this resulted in both new theories surrounding gun construction based on the properties of materials and new methods of building guns capable of firing heavier projectiles to greater ranges. The concept of the accelerator gun sought to achieve the same result without the need for larger and heavier guns and reducing recoil through the use of multiple propellant charges fired sequentially, thus accelerating the projectile without the need for a single high-pressure discharge. It was a quest initiated in France, pursued in the United States and then adopted by a desperate Germany during the latter years of World War 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]