Barbette

Shipboard barbettes were primarily used in armoured warships, starting in the 1860s during a period of intense experimentation with other mounting systems for heavy guns at sea.

[2] This gave rise to the phrase en barbette, which referred to a gun placed to fire over a parapet, rather than through an embrasure, an opening in a fortification wall.

For example, the Russian Constantine Battery outside Sevastopol was equipped with 43 heavy guns in its seaward side during the Crimean War in the mid-1850s; of these, 27 were barbette mounted, with the rest in casemates.

[9] Following the introduction of ironclad warships in the early 1860s, naval designers grappled with the problem of mounting heavy guns in the most efficient way possible, beginning with broadside box batteries and quickly moving to rotating gun turrets, since these afforded the ability to fire directly ahead, which was deemed important due to the adoption of ramming tactic after the Battle of Lissa in 1866.

[10][11][12] By the 1870s, designers had shifted to the rotating barbette mount, which eschewed armor protection to reduce weight; this would permit the use of heavy guns in high-freeboard ships.

The gun house was smaller and lighter than the old-style turrets, which still permitted placement higher in the ship and the corresponding benefits to stability and seakeeping.

These ships were the prototype of the so-called pre-dreadnought battleships, which proved to be broadly influential in all major navies over the next fifteen years.

[19] The term "barbette" is also used by some, again primarily British historians, to describe a remotely aimed and operated gun turret emplacement[20] on almost any non-American military aircraft of World War II, but it is not usable in a direct translation for the varying German language terms used on Luftwaffe aircraft of that era for such emplacements.