This magazine quotes the cost of a single discharge of 13 inch gun ammunition as 500 US 1904 dollars. No wonder the Navy rarely did target practice! To put some perspective on that, the entire navy had a 1,000,000 dollar training budget for the entirety of the fleet. 177 ships. That was for all calibres and torpedos.
Seacost defense in the 1860s-1910s depended on sea forts protecting harbors, these forts featured "disappearing" guns, large caliber guns on hydrostatic mounts that could elevate them over a parapet for firing, but retracted into armored bays for reloading, giving crews theoretical protection from the enemy fire, like all sea war in the late 1800s the rapidity of technological change caused an evolution in size, weight, power so fast that every aspect of these defenses were usually obsolete before the concrete finished curing.
The great man has written a novel high on my must-read list. Jimmy Carter is the first US President to write a fictional novel, and this one a is well researched historical fiction about the Revolution in the South. A part of US History that is conspicuous by it's absence in our educational curricula, especially as this conflict is basal to all our modern political woes; from gun-addiction, white supremacy, to our national inability to adress climate change head on.
The U.S.S. Vesuvius was a Spanish-American war era cruiser armed with three "dynamite guns". These weapons were giant pneumatic tubes fired by steam driven air compressors. They lobbed a shell that was effectively a can of gun-cotton to create enormous blasts. The main problems were that it was very inaccurate. And a bit prone to mechanical breakdowns, oh, also pressure kablooeys were a hazard...as was a large pile of guncotton cannisters in a ship that might be under fire.
