Shortround6
Major General
It would help a lot if you didn't paint things with a broad brush, heck you are using a floor roller at times. Have I discredited that source or claimed that it wasn't accurate? I merely said that how the Russians classified a lead lease bomber may be subject to question. Especially considering that the "light" B-25 went about 26% heavier than the IL-4 twin engine bomber which most people consider a "medium". Now perhaps the Russians also considered it a "light bomber" or perhaps they considered anything less than an a PE-8 a light bomber. Although the Russians assigned B-25s to several Regiments equipped with the 4 engine PE-8s to help bring up the numbers in 1944.
Can we stop with the flights of fancy or "timmy the power gamer" crap? the BEST Russian 20mm shell carried 6.7 grams of HE. It would be extremely lucky to blow the wheel of a MK I let alone a heavy tank. For a reality check the British No 36 hand grenade had about 70 grams of explosives. Please note that German tank hunters wrapped 6 extra grenade bodies around one for 7 charges total of between 42-49 oz (1.2-1.39KG) of TNT and that had to be used in certain places on the tank. Russians used a thrown shaped charge Grenade the RPG-43
against tanks. 420 grams of HE.
Pardon me if I doubt the effectiveness of 6-7 grams of HE blowing wheels off heavy tanks. Apparently the Flyboys knew something the ground troops did not.
Ah yes, the old nose gun accuracy claim. It may work better against ground targets than in the air. Of course in a strafing attack you get a few seconds to aim/lineup and fire and then you have to pull out, so being able to deliver large amounts of projectiles to the target area in a few seconds time is an advantage.
Now the fact that the British 20mm cannon had higher muzzle velocity and a heavier/better shaped projectile that retained velocity better gets trumped by the "nose gun".
On the bolded part, the only way that eight rockets form one plane are going to hit one tank is if the plane crashes onto the tank with the rockets still attached.
From Wiki......" Early testing demonstrated that, when fired from 500 m (1,640 ft), a mere 1.1% of 186 fired RS-82 hit a single tank and 3.7% hit a column of tanks. RS-132 accuracy was even worse, with no hits scored in 134 firings during one test. Combat accuracy was even worse, since the rockets were typically fired from even greater distances." To get eight hits you need to fire 727 rockets or about 90 planes worth. Somehow I am not impressed. Putting bigger warheads on the same motor gets you a bigger bang on target (or in the target area) but a bigger warhead means a slower terminal speed and more arched trajectory making it even harder to hit point targets at long ranges.
target effect, should they actually hit a tank, was poor in the case of the RS-82.
Actually the metric is how many ground targets they could destroyed/neutralized in how many attempts/sorties. Needing to fly more missions to get the same results is poor performance and just counting the total number of targets destroyed/neutralized without knowing missions/sorties flown and ordnace expending actually tells us nothing.
Speed is a bit less important when doing ground attack, there should be accompanying fighters in clean condition to engage enemy fighters while the planes tasked with ground attack do their work.
The 20mm showing up in Russian fighters long before Anglo-American fighters is a bit of stretch. While technically true the planes it showed up in were I-16s.
Limited run batches. The Prototype Yak flew in March of 1940 and about 400 were built by June 22nd 1941, but only 50 had been issued to service squadrons.
While several hundred Lagg-s had been built few were in the hands of service squadrons as numerous defects were being corrected after production and before issue. Spitfire Vs with cannon were flying in the late spring of 1941 although with drum feeds. Somewhere over the winter of 1940/41 170 Spitfire IIbs had been built with a drum feed cannon in each wing. The Hurricane IIc showed up in the fall of 1941 with cannon and by Sept of 1941 the Spit Vc with belt fed cannon was in production.
Yes Russian aircraft destroyed a lot of stuff but you are not coming up with anything that says what it took to do it. Blenheims, Battles and Lysanders managed to destroy stuff in France in 1940, they just took unsustainable losses doing it and accuracy ws not good, doesn't mean they didn't hit something at times.
Source is "Soviet Combat Aircraft of the Second World War" by Yefim Gordon and Dmitri Khazano. Chart on page 169. The prototype PE-2 in 1940 was rated at 335.5 mph but no PE-2 in the next 5 columns goes over 329.3mph and some examples were as slow as 303.2mph. The PE-2B of 1943 is rated at 331mph but the 2B used a wing with a modified airfoil, the wing was larger in area and there were other differences, I don't know if it was a one of prototype or if there was a small number built. There were some very fast versions built in 1944 and 1945 but they used VK-107A engines and those were about as reliable as a nickel rocket.
and speaking of rockets again. the rails for ten RS-132s cost a speed reduction of 15-19mph, with rockets fitted the speed reduction was 22-28mph.
Comment in the book says the weight of fire of the ten rockets was equal to a salvo fired by a light cruiser which is typical of the ridiculous claims made for WW II aircraft rockets. The British being just as guilty. The total weight of 10 rockets is 230kg and even a 6 gun cruiser with the wimpiest 6in guns in the world can beat that. Even a 5 gun British left over from WW I comes close at 227kg.
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