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Originally posted by m21sniper
Tallboy was the successor to the Grand Slam wasn't it?
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The opposite. The Tall Boy was a small, 10,000 pound version of Barnes Wallis "earthquake" bomb technology. Wallis was an aeronautical engineer who came up with the bouncing bombs used by the famous "Dambusters" successfully. The
Grand Slam was a 22,000 pound bomb that was built as a result of the successes of the Tall Boy. You should click on my link above, the story is interesting, there's a list of the targets hit by both types of bombs.
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I think they used the Grandslams to take out the Sharnhorst IIRC.
BTW, a single salvo from an Iowa throws 24,000+ lbs of iron at the target with an initial muzzle velocity of almost Mach 3.
A Mk8 16" AP projectile weighs more than a lot of porsches do...2700lbs. 
On 11 Apr 1945, USS Missouri was struck dead on the superstructure by a Kamikaze attack. Not a single US crewman was killed. The armor on an Iowa class battleship's armored superstructure is as much as 19" thick. If you're ever at Pearl you can still see the scars where the plane hit.
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