Magazine (artillery)

In the case of batteries of towed artillery the temporary magazine would be placed, if possible, in a pit, or natural declivity, or surrounded by sandbags or earthworks.

The path through which the naval artillery's ammunition passed typically has blast-resistant airlocks and other safety devices, including provisions to flood the compartment with seawater in an emergency.

See especially the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates, owned by several different navies around the world, in which one 40-missile magazine carries a mixture of all three types of missiles: surface-to-air, surface-to-surface, and surface-to-underwater.

[4] Battleships were highly armored to protect from external attack, but the strength of the construction aids to constrict and worsen the impact of internal explosions, as the rigid steel does not allow blast waves to dissipate.

During the 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor, the USS Arizona was destroyed when a Japanese armor-piercing bomb punched through her deck and detonated in proximity to the ship's ammunition magazine, which was caught on film.

The magazines of the Japanese battleship Yamato exploded in 1945 after hours of continuous assault by Allied aircraft, utterly destroying the ship and leaving few survivors.

Colonial Williamsburg magazine of the eighteenth century in Virginia
A shell hoist within a fixed gun emplacement at Battery Moltke , used to lift ordnance from a room below
Animated naval gun operations:
  1. Platform deck
  2. Shell room
  3. Lower deck
  4. Magazine
  5. Middle deck
  6. Trunk
  7. Main deck
  8. Barbette
  9. Working chamber
  10. Upper deck
  11. Roller path
  12. Cradle
  13. Gunhouse
Weapons magazine aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2003
A view of the ocean stretching to the horizon with the silhouette of a distant small warship visible to the left. To the right an enormous mushroom cloud rises high into the sky.
The magazines of the Yamato explode