The Russian Baltic Fleet’s journey to the Battle of Tsushima is Today’s Failure

This one’s a good one, there’s nothing like a failure on such a massive and frankly comical degree, that frankly it should not have been possible, incompetence of such a staggering degree, exist today only the last few absolute monarchies, kleptocratic states, Chris Grayling and the Trump Administration.

The journey was impressive in only one regards, that the Imperial Russian Baltic Fleet somehow managed to actually reach the straits of Tsushima, by all accounts, the journey ought to have ended in only sunken ships somewhere around Zanzibar or possible Dover, frankly either would have been favourable outcome for the Tsarist navy than actually reaching their destination.

The glorious and grand Baltic Fleet of 1904 set sail, the flagship proceeded to sail aground, a destroyer lost an anchor chain, then rammed another battleship, all this IN the Baltic Ocean, well done, well done indeed.

Then rumours arose of Japanese torpedo boats station in Denmark, the fuck? I’m an amateur historian and I don’t recall the Great Japan-Danish alliance of 1904 permitting Japanese naval elements in Danish harbours, do you?

Rumours continued, with the Japanese mining and having submarines active, in the North Sea and Kattegat, 30,000 kilometres away from the nearest Japanese naval base. They fired on fishermen bringing in dispatches from the Tsar, the repair ship “Kamchatka” reported that it was under attack by multiple torpedo boats, about eight, from all directions, better get used to the proud hulk “Kamchatka”, they’ll be back, again and again, dumber and dumber.

Now, having survived the depredations of the mighty “Danish” Squadron of the Imperial Navy of Japan, you’d think it’d be smooooth sailing all the way to the pacific theatre? That an imaginary flotilla would be the end of this farcical display of ineptitude? No, not just yet.

The Glorious and Mighty and not at all Imaginary Battle of Dogger Bank against the Japanese menace and definitely not just a bunch of British Trawlers.

Having escape from the Vodka-fuelled adventures of the Danish straits, the fleet entered the North Sea, heading south towards the channel, moving past the Dogger Bank, for those who don’t know, the bank is a massive fishing hot sport, even today the area has trawler prowling around.

This was a Japanese torpedo boat of the era, Hayabusa-class. Hell, these little fuckers actually fought the Russians, near Japan of course, not in Danish waters.
This one’s Danish from the Era. Can you tell the difference?

In 1904, the Russians spotted some British trawlers doing what you’d expect trawlers to do, which would be fishing, for those of you who are clueless glue-sniffers, the glorious Pacific Squadron, formerly Baltic, opened fire on the trawlers.

This is the trawler CORNELIAN, can you tell the difference? The RUSSIANS COULDN’T!

Let’s just take a short break here, Russian warships open fire on British fishing boats, in 1904, when the British Empire was the single most powerful empire on the planet, this story could have had a very different ending, something like “entire Russian fleet obliterated by the British Home fleet and Russia forced into humiliating peace agreement”.

Hmm, I guess the story wouldn’t have ended that differently, oh well, back to the comedy.

And comedy it is, several ships reported being hit by Japanese torpedoes, fired from UNARMED British trawlers, on the Borodino, the crew panicked so much, the either hugged the floor in their lifejackets or believed they were being attack by Jack Sparrow and armed themselves with fucking cutlasses.

You gotta admit, those old warships looked cool as fuck.

And here comes the smallest success ever in human history, the mighty Second Pacific Squadron managed to damage four trawlers and SINK ONE, unfortunately, because this story is ever so silly, they managed to shot their own cruisers, twice, which isn’t that impressive, when SEVEN battleships are firing at you.

A little side note, one of the ships are the cruiser Aurora, note “are”, you can actually go to Saint Petersburg and see the Aurora, it’s activities in the revolution that followed ensure that it was preserved by the Soviets.

Just to punch home how bad whatever lunatics teaching Russian sailors how to shut had fucked up the training, the battleship Oroyol fire five hundred shells, without hitting anything other than Poseidon’s imaginary palace.

Now, the fleet did sail on, which the Russian government was prostrating itself before the mighty British Empire apologizing, Admiral Rozhestvensky was instructed to leave the officers responsible for this whole mess behind as he reached Vigo, Spain, which he proceeded to use to get rid of some Captain he didn’t like.

So Captain Klado did the sensible thing and, wait, no, he didn’t, he was told to gather reinforcements for the squadron, and out of spite, he got his hands on the worst of the worst, old tubs, useless junk and ships that were, I know, worse than what the squadron already had.

Except Repair Ship Kamchatka, nothing could ever be worse than that insanity.

Behold! he might of Imperial Russia.

And now, back to the beginning, welcome to Africa!

Now, the Magnificently inept Russian fleet have finally reached Africa, without shooting anymore British ships, just a certain ship having been out of contact for a while, who happened to have shot some 300 hundred shells at respectively: a Swedish merchantman, a German trawler and a fucking French Schooner, now how a Schooner, a SAILING ship get’s mistaken for a Japanese anything, is a wonder that only the utterly degenerated Captain of the Repair Ship Kamchatka could answer.

That is a schooner by the way, just as example, sure looks dangerous, and the Swedish flag does NOT resemble the Japanese naval jack.

 Let’s just quickly go through the event as the fleet goes from Tangier, whereas they left, one of the Russian ships managed to snag and sever the underwater telegraph line, cutting the city off for four entire days, great start.

Now, these ships are old school coal powered vessels, none of this fancy new-fangled heavy fuel oil here, good old coal, which means they need to refuel at some point, coal doesn’t have the same amount of energy oil does, not even close.

Now, this wasn’t actually fucked up, Russian Naval Command had arranged for German coalers to resupply the fleet of Dakar, Today’s Senegal, however, this is stupid as fuck, so they went with double loads of coal. Which means that EVERYWHERE HAD COAL, everywhere, which means dust, in an ultra humid environment, filled with Russian conscripts from the interior of the country.

Hello lung diseases, how are you? Fucking up Russian sailors? How delightful.

At this point, Kamchatka decides that sailing along the Angolese coast during a storm needs a bit of drama and send “Do you see torpedo boats?” instead of “We are all right now”.

At Cape Town, the Admiral was informed about the reinforcements that the enraged and spiteful Captain Klado had arranged were on the way, I don’t think any fleet in history have ever actively tried to avoid their own reinforcements.

Now, you can imagine that there were certain issues with morale on board at this point, as in their morale were fucking gone. To try and keep themselves amused and moderately happy, the sailors started bringing exotic pets onboard, mostly birds, which is pretty harmless, the crocodile and the poisonous snake, that bit a captain, less so. And then the refiguration systems onboard the “Esperance” broke down, meaning a lot of rotten meat had to be thrown overboard.

Now, sharks can detect a drop of blood in water with a frankly amazing range, how easy do you think it was for them to detect tons of rotting meat being dumped off a supply ship?

So this is the image as the Russian Squadron rounds the Horn of Africa, a sailing Zoo, filled with despondent sailors, the Kamchatka causing mischief every few days and they are followed by a trail of rampaging sharks.

Circus of nightmares at this point.

From the Cape of Good Hope to the inevitable.

The fleet had reached Madagascar, when Admiral Rozhestvensky fell ill for two weeks, his Chief of Staff? Brain haemorrhage and partial paralysation, what does this mean? Nobody’s in fucking command, apparently having a chain of command was to much work for the Russian Imperial Navy, shit, no fucking wonder Lenin won.

Now the crew just go and do R&R on their own, diseases start just killing crew on a daily basis and of course Kamchatka during a funerary salute, fires a LIVE round hitting the Cruiser Aurora, but it’s fine, they were getting used to it at this point.

She’s still around today.

Now, let’s talk about some of the supply ships, the “Malay” was sent back with a whole bunch of revolutionaries, mutineers and general fuck ups, oh yeah, did I mention the fleet had actual revolutionaries on board? Yeah, being in command of Russian ships of this era was basically hard mode, some crazy office had bought cigarettes filled opium, TWO THOUSAND OF THEM.

Then came the supply ship “Irtysh”, it was supposed to bring fresh ammo loads, having spent so many shells in the Glorious Battle of the Dogger Bank, however, in the finest tradition of utter incompetence, it brought twelve thousand fur-lined boots with lovely matching winter coast, perfect for the Indian Ocean.

They meet the Transport Ship “Gortchakoff”, hoping to get that most precious thing for any military service personal, letters from home, instead it carried the letters they had themselves send from Madagascar.

Now, to try and restore some degree of order and morale, the Admiral orders gunner drills, let me recap:

The destroyer couldn’t hit the side of barn even if it hit them in the face.

The Battleships managed to hit the ship towing the target, well, one of them did, fortunately, it was the flagship.

One of the destroyer squadrons, ordered to sail line abreast, scattered instead, someone forgot to get them their new codebooks.

Seven torpedoes were in fact fired, which seems miraculous, one jammed, two where so slow they missed, three just weren’t aimed properly and swung wide and the last one went in a circle causing panic amongst the ships.

The last thing may sound funny, but that happened way to often in the World Wars, torpedoes are actually pretty hard to get to work properly.

Oh yeah, and the Kamchatka signalled that they were sinking, because of course they did, turns out if was just some steam leak in the engine room.

While this mess is happening, the reinforcements, now named “The Third Pacific Squadron” had left Tallinn with some old fossil Admiral Nebogatoff as commander, the Russian Admiralty issued him the following orders: “You are to join up with Rozhestvensky, whose route is unknown to us”, the comedy continues. And Rozhestvensky then read in a newspaper, that when he’d beaten the Japanese and made it to Vladivostok, he’d have to surrender command to someone else arriving by train.

Zinovi Petrovich Rozhestvenski, Vice-Admiral. 1848-1909.

And you know what? The Third Squadron actually managed to join them, one of the signs of divinity I’ve heard of, on the 11th of May 1905, the second and third squadron actually merged and proudly head towards Vladivostok.

The end of this comedy of failures

On the 27th of May, the Russian Imperial Fleet engaged the Japanese Imperial Navy, the Russians lost, badly: 126.792 Tons of shipping versus 450 tons of Torpedo boats.

The Kamchatka did not survive the battle, sinking with her captain and most of her crew.

The Aurora actually did survive, together with three other cruisers they made it to Manilla, at this point in time an American protectorate, and were thus interned for the rest of the war.

“Dmitrii Donskoi” managed to survive an engagement six against one, but was to badly damaged in the engagement.

She fought and died well, at least.

Only ONE lonely ship actually made it to Vladivostok: Almaz, which was barely a cruiser, being more appropriately an armed yacht.

She actually made it.

Russia lost the war, Japan won, Revolution came in Russia a short while later.

Not only is the Aurora a survivor from this battle, that you can see today, the flagship of the Japanese? The Mikasa is moored in Yokosuka as a museum ship too, making the pair the only survivors from the same battle on opposing sides.

The lesson? Don’t let Captains drink Vodka.

Sources:

https://www.hullwebs.co.uk/content/l-20c/disaster/dogger-bank/voyage-of-dammed.htm

https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?148872

https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?149044

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa-class_torpedo_boat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tsushima

Dasani, Coca-Cola’s bottle water brand, is today’s failure.

Now obviously, the first failure is a bottled water product in any country with a functional water infrastructure, so most of the western hemisphere is pretty much included there. I could see the point, silly point but point nonetheless, with water drawn from an actual spring, those sometimes have cool shit in them, sometimes actual shit.

Mineral water and bottled water are just silly nonsense outside of areas with unsafe tap water, so okay in Flint, Michigan and Somalia, not in Denmark or Germany.

Why? WHY? WHY? NO!

But on to the actual failure of Dasani.

Dasani was introduced in 2004 in the UK with a degree of success more common to that of anything Chris Grayling has ever done. A total failure, a shambolic mess, omnishambles, disastrous, delightful fun for outside observes, less for everyone actually involved.

Dasani was advertised with the tagline “Pure”, which is at best misleading and at worst outright bloody fraud, the water was sourced from tap water from Sidcup, a neighborhood of London, which was filtered by mean of reverse osmosis and then RE-MINERALIZED.

They literally took perfectly drinkable water, made it undrinkable and then added a bunch of minerals to it, pure as fucking hell indeed.

Obviously, this was found out and Desani didn’t sell anywhere near as well as expected, which confused Chief Publicity Officer of Dasani Mr. Richard May (No relation), seeing as his position was basically that of an Iraqi Minister of Information, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with half a neuron’s worth of activity upstairs.

It didn’t help when the health authorities found bromate in the fucking thing, turns out the ozone treatment they’d done converted the naturally occurring bromide, into a CARCONOGENIC compound, well done, no wonder it didn’t sell well.

I couldn’t find an example of the 2004 trophy, the fuckers change it every time.

So in 2004, the CocaCola Company won the Ig Noble prize in Chemistry, for doing just this.

They did a re-branding and re-launch in 2012 up to the Olympic Games in London, buying a local company and using Schweppes to hide it.

The lesson? Just drink fucking tap water you arse-clown.  

The Ouya is Today’s Failure

The Ouya is Today’s Failure, because every Wednesday is going to be failed crowdfunding projects, because otherwise we’d never learn anything.

The Ouya was a micro-console, I say was, you can’t get the misbegotten thing anymore, for which all of humanity ought to be immeasurably grateful, it was a silly thing. Annouced in 2012 as a “revolutionary” home video console by Julie Uhrman, described as an industry veteran by many, she wasn’t an industry veteran when we’re talking about a console, she would be one talking pure business development, but that didn’t translate over.

HELLO! MY NAME IS JULIE UHRMAN! I AM VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT THINGS!

They used kickstarter and did get over eight and half million US dollars, not bad for the former Vice President of Digital Distribution of IGN (Note, IGN doesn’t actually do proper digital distribution, IGN is a website for basically paid reviews), at the time the fifth largest sum kickstarted, even on that platform it has been eclipsed, all the way down to nine, including all platforms Ouya isn’t even close to the 200 million US$ and more StarCitizen has raised.

Still, not to shabby, combined it with various venture capital, they actually managed to release the product, that’s right, for my fellow engineers out there, they released a “Minimum Viable Product”.

Fucking hell, this was massively popular? Why?

It was a smartphone in a box, literally, the blasted thing used Andriod and had an Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset to handle the lifting, wont call it heavy, it can run mobile apps, that isn’t heavy lifting even at the worst of times.

And guess what, the design of the ugly little shitbox? YVES BEHAR, the primogenitor of the damned himself returns to sprinkle failure all over the venture, the Ouya had issues with overheating and STANDING UP, mostly due to issues with the case.

The controller? The buttons would get stuck all the time, the touch pad in the center, designed to handle mobile games touch controls, didn’t work properly in the earlier versions and it felt cheap. Then again, what did people expect from a device costing 99 US$.

HATE
Hate.

April 2013 they began delivering the pre-ordered Ouyas, June it was put up for sale, October they announced a redesign in 2014, it went up in the end of January 2014, double the storage and a new controller, hot damn.

Now, as with virtually all consoles released since like 1995, Ouya didn’t make any money on the consoles, nobody does, except Sony on the first PlayStation but they basically made the whole thing in-house from whatever random crap they had around, the money comes from licensing and software sales.

But the Ouya was terminally stupid, you could replace the entire thing with a HDMI cable and a laptop, then add in various casting devices and the Raspberry Pi being better in almost every way.

In 2015, Alibaba for some forsaken reason, throw ten million dollars at the sinking ship, guess what? The whole mess was sold to Razer in July of the same year, frankly, Alibaba probably didn’t even notice the cash was gone.

Razer only purchased the software and developer relations elements, the rest was left to rot in the sun, they used this technical staff to support their own micro-console and what do you know, it was discontinued in 2016.

And how does this sordid tale end? Total shutdown of everything in June this very year, rendering a default Ouya an even more useless hunk of junk.

Julie Uhrman now works as Head of Media, for Playboy.

The lessons learned are that micro-consoles are silly.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya

https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieuhrman/

One Laptop per Child is unfortunately, today’s failure

The concept sounds pretty good right? Give a laptop to every child for educational purposes? Great right? Well, yes, yes it is. Most Western nations do that now, my niece got a bloody awful tablet for “school” work.

And that was it, a dirt cheap laptop for every child, simple and straightforward, and also well over a decade to early, sadly.

Today, the cheapest laptop available is priced at just about 95 US$ at time of writing, the last time the OLPC’s laptops were for sale commercially, they cost 399 US$, the use a bizarre screen that apparently can switch between colour and monochrome, which even for the middle 2000s was bloody odd, apparently something about saving power.

Even at the best of times, they couldn’t actually get to 100US$ point, only reaching a little over 200 US$ and I still fail to understand why on Earth everything had to be custom-made, it’s a cheap laptop aimed towards various poor countries and the US, because apparently Detroit now counts as an African nation or something.

Even for the time we’re talking, around 2010 for the last round of deployment, off-the-shelf stuff would have been vastly more efficient and almost certainly cheaper, just slam together a nice straightforward PC laptop and put in a solid though case, IBM would probably have let them license their old ThinkPad design, those things are fucking indestructible.

But no, Yves Behar showed up and created this monstrosity:

IT HAS FUCKING EARS! You dumb fucking arseweasel!

This isn’t smart or wise, a laptop needs to look like it’s purpose, education, this green bag of stupid doesn’t look educational, it looks like a toy, no they should have been grey, boxy and solidly built, nothing less nothing more.

When this was rolled out in Uruguay, the kids just used the TOY-looking device for entertainment purposes, not for educational work, but what do you expect, with the message sent?

I found an old Targa laptop from 1994, damn thing must have spent twenty years in a closet somewhere, and it still worked, sure the CMOS battery was long dead, but you can replace those, so that’s not a big thing.

This is how the One Laptop Per Child should have looked:

Okay, perhaps an Acorn is a bit toooooo outdated.

The thing is, you could probably do it fairly easily today, using off the shelf components you can easily build cheap laptops today, shove them into a though frame and send them off to Africa, no fuss, no Yves Behar.

There, problem solved, get in though with my One Laptop Per Child, so I can yell at you.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Aid_International

http://one.laptop.org/stories

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now

https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-laptop-deals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad

Blackouts and why they are collectively, Today’s Failure:

Now, for those who don’t know what a blackout is, I wonder what bizarre dream world you happen to live in? Do you burn fearie dust for heat in the winter or something equally deranged? But nevermind the freaks who fail to understand a basic concept of electrical generation, a blackout is a total loss of power, hence the name, BLACKout, the slightly less horrible occurrence is a brownout, meaning a partial loss of power, rather than total.

Blackouts are pretty much always the result of some failure somewhere in the system, like the Northeast blackout of 1965, caused by a safety relay at the Sir Adam Beck Hydroelectric Power Station, the relay had been programmed poorly and triggered when a significant load happened, mostly due to it being October and Ontario and New York, freezing cold and a lot of electricity being consumed.

That single point of failure, ONE relay in ONE powerstation, caused a blackout hitting some thirty million people, all because one relay wasn’t programmed properly, thanks to cascading failures it was just overload and automatic shutdown after another.

And it takes a while for electrical grids getting back up, if you don’t configure everything properly, the damn thing’ll just shutdown again.

Lesson here? Don’t fuck up your programming, it won’t end well.

Yup, somewhere in there the initial failure rests, thanks Wikipedia for the image.

The New York City blackout of 1977 is actually totally different, this one was caused by a series of lightning strikes, causing a number failures to pop up in several separate areas of New York City’s electrical infrastructure, however, this wasn’t the true cause of the blackout, not the true cause of the failure:

Problems with communication, apparently the electrical generation company, Consolidated Edison, used different definitions to the term “Shed Load” when compared to the Power Lines management, a matter of amount of load dropped and how fast.

The whole thing just cascaded into all sorts of delightful failure points, Long Island tried to send way to much power through lines that were being adjusted, nobody told them, probably due to a growing sense of panic.

The end result was a total collapse of the power supply of the entire city of New York, except Queens and for reasons “old generator on site” the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, unlike the previous blackout, which had only five cases of looting, this one? Some two thousands, that’s what an economic recession and heat does to you, nobody goes looting in freaking October weather.

Lessons? Make sure everyone’s using the same terminology at all times or CHAOS REIGNS.

Lars Von Trier is a terrifying human being.

The 2012 India blackouts is just fun, essentially just a massive overload of A QUARTER of India’s population power supply, caused by a couple of states power Load Centre being “to slow” to react to the Regional Centre’s orders to balance to load better.

And let’s be honest “to slow” in India means “fuck the central government, we need MORE POWER”, the whole thing was a massive shitstorm of bureaucratic ineptitude and incompetence.

This happens all the time too, hell, it happen TWICE in the same blackout, the first one just a quarter, the next one? Almost half the population, that’s SIX HUNDRED MILLION people without power, basically more than the total population of Europe lost power for way to long.

This is the primary reason why Private Industries in India now have over thirty GV of off-grid power supplies available and planning to add more.

The lesson? De-Centralization might not be a bad idea here, I mean central planning of power is all well and good, but not for a billion people, that’s just not something that can really be managed, not with an infrastructure were people outright steal power.

Sorry India, sorry, but seriously.

Harald Plum, Today’s Failure

Welcome to the first main feature, a larger more comprehensive tale of woe and miserable failure than you have previous been used to. Unfortunately, LinkedIn has a character limit that I personally find rather, well, limiting. So, this feature here will mainly been a separate website, I know, what hardship I impose you poor highly paid academicians, engineers and various other entities, I apologize most sincerely.

Look at him! LOOK AT HIM!

Back to the story of Harald Plum and this first Feature of Failure, the story of off good old Rise and Fall, massive spending and ridiculous things spewed forth from the pages of history.

Harald Plum was born 1881 in Assens, a small provincial town on the southern part of the island of Fyn, Denmark, and he was a rich kid, the Plum family’s fortunes would survive his own disgrace, other parts of the family would later end up with a company selling various cleaning agents and alcohol hand sanitizers, that kinda stuff.

He was a trained lawyer but a merchant by trade, in Denmark, his ilk were called “Goulash barons” selling canned food to both sides during World War One, seeing as the Germans had a fair few issues with starvation at the end of the war, the whole thing was highly profitable, even if the food wasn’t what you’d call “quality”. Soldiers will eat anything really, we all will, when hungry enough.

Now, H.P., as was his preferred nom de guerre, wasn’t the only one making money on being neutral in World War One, everyone in Denmark was, which meant that the banks in Denmark, ended up with absolutely staggering amounts of cash, combined that with an absentee CEO and a deputy whom rumour has it may have been a little to close to HP, and by to close I mean probably gay lovers, in the early 1900s, points for being progressive I guess.

You can probably guess were this is heading, the bank in question “Landsmandsbanken” (Farmer’s Bank), now known as Danske Bank, went down, why? This:

One of the biggest markets for HPs little bit of war profiteering was Russia, now, this was a bit of a problem, with the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin wasn’t too fond of western war profiteers and tended to either brutally murder them and dump them in ditches, fortunately for Harald, he was in Denmark, so Lenin’s government merely confiscated everything active Russia.

Landmandsbanken had the modern equivalent of billions in outstanding loans to the companies, the bank went down and had to be rescue by the government, sounds familiar doesn’t it? To big to fail is by no means a recent concept.

Harald Plump was fine though, much like Trump’s many bankruptcies, he didn’t suffer any personal hardship and was able to restart his little business empire back up, unfortunately, he didn’t really learn anything at all from almost causing the failure of an entire nation.

His second business empire ended in 1929, massive accounting fraud, fake bonds and all those lovely things corporate scandals are made out off, caused him to commit suicide on  the small island of Thorø, were he had wild plans about turning the island into some bizarre glorification paradise of himself, even build a mausoleum there.

picture of Thorø
Thorø was an island, thanks to movement of sand and shit it’s now a peninsula.

A bit of justice here at the end, he was never placed in the mausoleum, the island of Thorø was bought by the Teacher’s Union of Copenhagen during the bankruptcy auctions and they decided to remove the whole grave site monstrosity. They also sold the giant statue of Thor fighting the ice giants, but did finish some of the buildings, not to his specifications, but just enough so they’d be useful, basically instead of adding more floors, they just slammed a roof on it and called it a day.

The lesson? Don’t be fraudulent, it doesn’t end well.  Even if it means you get the chance to have a cannon salute you when you arrive.

Yup, one Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon, used for salutes.