Favorite gun armament of WWII aircraft

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well first it is a futer thing and my favriot gun one a plane of ww2 is the 50.cal

yea the day the hornets took of the carrier was amazing it must take gutes to fly a B-25 OFF of a carrier to japan and to know they would not mak it back

that is the most wierd plane i have ever in my 14 years of life

that is a wierd plane

espicely if its a b-29s guns
 
As the person who started this thread :D , my favorite weapon would be four 20mm guns against fighters (Hispano or MG 151/20) and 30 mm guns against bombers. Why using rifle or heavy calibre guns if you could have something with much more punch? If your enemy is a Japanese aircraft simply load your 20 mm with HE shells instead of AP, otherwise your rounds would probably just make holes only.

To answer HoHun's question: The maximum effective range of aircraft weapons is the range at which you still have a reasonable chance of hitting the enemy and the round does some damage. This depends on the ballistic of the round, the fire rate, gun sight, the type of target, the altitude and numerous other variables. The absolute maximum range for a MG 151/20 according to German reports is 750 meters at an altitude of 3000 m. The effective range is about 400 meters.
 
"Hurricane XII
Canadian-built variant. Single-seat fighter and fighter-bomber. Powered by a 1,300 hp (969 kW) Packard Merlin 29. Initially armed with 12 0.303 inch (7.7 mm) machine guns, but this was later changed to four 20 mm cannon"

I've heard they gave such a "kick" to the aircraft, that it couldn't fly straight when shooting!
 
To answer Comiso90's question, the Fisher P75A eagle had 10 M2 .50 machine guns. However only 7 protypes were build and the contract for 2500 fighters was cancelled in october 1944.
 
Fokker D21 said:
To answer Comiso90's question, the Fisher P75A eagle had 10 M2 .50 machine guns. However only 7 protypes were build and the contract for 2500 fighters was cancelled in october 1944.
Click to expand...

Thanks!... I was familliar with the Eagle but I didnt know it had 10, .50's. Wow, what a world of hurt. I'd like to see what it could do to a Mavis flying boat!

cool.

Thanks..


according to wiki:

There was at least one remaining XP-75 as of 1998. It was in an unrestored condition at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, Dayton, Ohio.[1]
 
In the real world, for a single piston engined fighter, with no performance penalty because of the armament-Some of the F6F5s, an honest 400 mph AC, had 4-50s and 2-20mms. For air to ground, fighter v fighter and fighter v bomber and ammo load, ideal! IMO, rifle caliber mgs had no business being mounted in WW2 fighters. A quick study of the ballistic properties of the 303 British or 3006 Springfield versus the 50 BMG will tell you why. The 3006 which is slightly better than the 303, with the 150 gr bullet does not even have at 500 yards, 1000 foot pounds of energy, which is considered minimum for killing a deer or a human. Plus the bullet has dropped more than 5 feet. I don't have my ballistic tables in front of me but the 50BMG at 500 yards shoots flatter because of it's much superior ballistic coefficient, has much more penetrative power because of it's superior sectional density and the bullet weighs on the order of four times as much as the 30 cal bullet so it has a huge energy advantage from muzzle all the way to infinity. Comparing the various rifle cal loads to the 50 cal BMG or similar rounds is like comparing a chihuahua to a pit bull.
 
...and not one mention of the various sighting systems. Shame on you people. It reminds me of discussions about the best xx plane and only focusing upon speed, altitude and number of weapons. Where's Midcrow and his technical brilliance when we need it.

And kudos to the guy who mentioned the loading/storage mechanisms importance to the discussion.
 
Hi Fokker,

>my favorite weapon would be four 20mm guns against fighters (Hispano or MG 151/20) and 30 mm guns against bombers.

I like the Ta 152 battery quite well - one 30 mm cannon for immediate kills at short range, and 20 mm cannon with mine shells for medium range firepower, all nicely concentrated near the centreline of the aircraft.

(Long range fire is only possible under favourable circumstances, and the MK 108 is good out to 600 m and the MG 151/20 even beyond that under such circumstances.)

>To answer HoHun's question: The maximum effective range of aircraft weapons is the range at which you still have a reasonable chance of hitting the enemy and the round does some damage.

Hm, especially the explosive rounds are capable of doing considerable damage regardless of range. And if you figure in the hit chances, two weapons of one type have a greater maximum effective range than just one weapon of the same type.

My impression is that the term "effective range" is much used, but poorly defined. I believe Tony Williams has pointed this out in a past discussion, too.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)
 
Hi Matt,

>...and not one mention of the various sighting systems.

Good point!

The Allied gyroscopic (lead-computing) gun sight (British Mk VIII, I believe, and American K-14) was quite good in that regard, and actually deployed in numbers, while the German EZ42 appeared to be even more advanced, but comparatively rare.

The Germans even seem to have had a radar-ranging computing gunsight under development, but I have only seen one mention of this in the Baade report, outlining the state of the art for the Soviets immediately after the war.

The Germans also experimented with magnifying telescopic gun sights (not quite the same as the WW1-vintage telescopic sights which were in use in some aircraft at the beginning of the war - Japanese fighters and US dive bombers, I believe). The German version differed by having a useful magnification, and by being combined with a reflector sight into one unit so that the disadvantages of the telescopic sight - badly limited field of view - wouldn't be a problem. However, it seems that with the optics of the day, there was really little to gain from telescopic sights, and I'm not aware of any combat use.

Going back to the beginning of the war, the British had introduced stadiametric sights with a sighting circle that would match the wingspan of a target if that was properly identified, its wingspan dialed into the sight, and the desired firing range also dialed into the sight and achieved by approaching to the correct range. Though this was supposed to be a military secret, it had leaked early on and failed to impress the Luftwaffe, who relied on training their pilots to use graduated crosshairs instead. As the RAF pilots usually set some compromise values and extrapolated from there, actual gunnery practice probably was similar for both technological approaches.

(The excellent success of the Polish fighter pilots in RAF gunnery competitions seems to suggest that pilot training was the critical factor even with the stadiametric sight.)

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)
 
HoHun said:
Hi Fokker,

>my favorite weapon would be four 20mm guns against fighters (Hispano or MG 151/20)

Henning (HoHun)
Click to expand...

maybe I'm a sissy but I'm not a fan of the low rate of fire and limited round capacity of the 20mm... nice stopping power.

I like the idea of the high rate of fire of a .50 with incendiary rounds if you're plucking off others fighters.

.
 
Low rate of fire?

MG 151/20 has 700 RPM
M2 .50 has 750 RPM
Hispano II has 600 RPM

Limited round capacity?

Fock Wulf 190 A6 and further has 250 rounds for two wing root cannon and 140 rounds for two wing cannon = 780 rounds of 20mm ammo

P51B only has 1260 rounds of M2 .50 ammo, P47D has maximum of 3400 rounds of .50 ammo.

It all depends on how much ammo you can stuff in a plane.

See my website for technical data about guns.
 
Tony Williams also points out that the effective range has more to do with the training of the pilot, gun mounting, stability of the aircraft, gunsight and other factors that have nothing to do with the used guns themselves and their ballistics.

This is the reason why my gun power formula says nothing about effective range.

The amount of ammo depends more on the efficiency of the aircraft design than the calibre.

So any ideal armament should include your favorite type of guns combined with your favorite type of aircraft and the best possible gunsight.
 
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