Taken from a lovely youtube video.
In a nutshell, the Yamato's guns were very automated and relied on minimal human physical work!
The only mounts on a battleship to reach this level of mechanisation was the Vanguard, with heavily modified 15 inch guns dating from WW1.
Not only did this speed up reloading, it meant that the load time was consistent, as the crew would not tire out unlike American crews which had to physically lift many large objects to load the gun.
This also improved safety, less mistakes could occur with the fragile powder bags, and the breech would not be open for as long!
A very well done animation, the loading mechanism to me is absolutely ingenious. It is all mechanized, there is human action needed to load the powder bags into the Powder hoist however thats pretty standard.
I always wondered how the Japanese were able to get 2 rounds a minute with these guns, now I know. Compared to the Americans Iowa Class, the guys have to manually get the 2,700lbs shell into the hoist, with Yamato they have a completely mechanized system.
Same goes for putting powder bags into the breach, with 16" Mk. 7 the powder bag hoist has two shelves facilitating the need for the bags from the first selve to be placed in the correct order of one towards the front and two to the back and space in the middle for the other three bags once they have drop from the hoist onto the loading tray.
The bags are hundred pounds apiece, this would cause the men to get tired out. To speed things, the first three bags of powder would be ramed into the breach, then it would retract the ram drop the other three bags and ram them home. However with an unexperienced ram operator doing this practice could cause over ramming, in which the bags are pushed to far into the breach causing one of two things. Either a misfire because the bags are too far away from the back of the breech-block for the primer to ignite them, in the case of both Missouri and Iowa premature smoldering of the powder from the friction and pressure of being ram so hard. Iowa's was unfortunate they couldn't close the breach in time cause the death of 47 men, Missouri got lucky, they were barely able to close the breach in time during the Vietnam war.
During the rest of the tour of Missouri during the Vietnam war the captain band this practice. With Yamato they just simply unload all the bags on the tray and ram them home automatically by the seams of it. I must say the Japanese did know what they were doing when engineering these turrets and guns.
In a nutshell, the Yamato's guns were very automated and relied on minimal human physical work!
The only mounts on a battleship to reach this level of mechanisation was the Vanguard, with heavily modified 15 inch guns dating from WW1.
Not only did this speed up reloading, it meant that the load time was consistent, as the crew would not tire out unlike American crews which had to physically lift many large objects to load the gun.
This also improved safety, less mistakes could occur with the fragile powder bags, and the breech would not be open for as long!