improving the 109??

[Shortround6]

Maybe

I get all sorts of questions about starting a poll but no space to insert any text to go with the title?

 

[Peter Gunn]

Yeah, wish I could help, had all sorts of trouble starting threads but always got frustrated. Last one I tried was for Steve Pisanos' passing but couldn't get the software to cooperate.

 

[wuzak]

Maybe

I get all sorts of questions about starting a poll but no space to insert any text to go with the title?

Started a thread for you.

Don't know if my OP was what you had in mind.

 

[GrauGeist]

I've had trouble recently starting new threads also, I found that refreshing the page a few times eventually gets the text area to show up.

I know it's a pain in the rear-end having to re-enter the thread's title...but eventually it works.

 

[stona]

Actually, initially, British eight gun fighters, both of them, employed the so called 'Dowding spread' in which the guns were harmonised to cover a larger area at 250 yards (still 250 yards though), the maximum convergence was at much longer range, up to 400 yards. This system was pandering to the majority of pilots who were poor shots.
By mid 1940, in time for the BoB, Fighter Command had adopted point harmonisation at 750 feet/250 yards as standard. I don't know where you found your figure but it is incorrect.

I posted the gun harmonisation chart for the Spitfire V at 250 yards, which was still the standard later in the war.

There is some evidence that certain pilots had theirs adjusted to a closer range. It is not clear how they managed this as it was done in a butt using the equipment shown in the chart I posted. It was not a straight forward process and involved several men, considerable skill and some time to achieve. Bader for one claimed that he had his guns harmonised at a closer range, but then he is not always reliable in his recollections. I think this is a misunderstanding and probably reflects an earlier stage when certain pilots and squadrons adopted the 250 yard point harmonisation before it became official policy.

If you want to resort to the semantics of synchronisation versus harmonisation as a basis for your rebuttal I would suggest you are running out of genuine arguments. I know the term was officially harmonisation, I'm the one who posted the original chart!

Cheers

Steve

 

[stona]

Hurricane wing shot into less than 9" at 100 yards, plus the guns were grouped into a single battery where the bullet streams of all four guns were parallel to one another and thus much more effective at much longer ranges, typically Zeroed at 250 Yards rather than the Spit's 200.

Repeating a falsehood doesn't make it so. Here's how Hugh Dowding, the C-in-C of Fighter Command explained gun harmonisation.

"A great deal of discussion took place before and in the early stages of the war as to the best method of harmonisation of the guns of an 8-gun fighter: that is to say the direction, in relation to the longitudinal axis of the aircraft, in which each gun should be pointed in order to get the best results.

There were three schools of thought. One maintained that the lines of fire should be dispersed so that the largest possible "beaten zone" might be formed and one gun (but not more than one) would always be on the target. The second held that the guns should be left parallel and so would always cover an elongated zone corresponding with the vulnerable parts of a bomber (engines, tanks and fuselage). The third demanded concentration of the fire of all guns at a point.

Arguments were produced in favour of all three methods of harmonisation, but in practice it was found that concentration of fire gave the best results. Guns were harmonised so that their lines of fire converged on a point 250 yards distant: fire was therefore effective up to about 500 yards, where the lines of fire had opened out again to their original intervals after crossing at the point of concentration."

Of course you can ignore him too

Cheers

Steve

 

[GrauGeist]

Neither! My gun club has a 500 M / 600 Yard Range which I use regularly. ( Almost every week!) I used to be a Sniper for the ASA-SOD and I practiced at long range every week that I was not on a mission. I qualified with the M-2 and M-82, and fired thousands of rounds out of them over a 20 year period. Did you know that the standard soft lead cored 710 grain .50 Cal bullet will perforate a rigidly mounted 3/8" AR500 armor steel plate at 600 yards? I have done it more than a few times. Heck, my .300 RUM with a 180 grain Ballistic Tip will do it at 500! Either steel cored AP round from the M-2 will perforate steel armor plates the thickness of which you would not believe at ranges you will swear it could not be done. ( Like 3/4" AR 500 at 300 Meters!)
The "Average Gunnery Combat Range" in WW-I was 250'! In WW-II it was 250 yards. In Korea it was 750 yards! That means that half of all Mig kills were made at more than 750 yards! The Transonic Mig was a very much tougher bird than any fighter plane from WW-II, yet we shot down ~800 of them?
Why on earth would you think that a gun powerful enough to do that at such long range would not tear a WW-II plane to shreds?

This is all true, but not relevant. The original premise, not stated by me, was that the P-40 would have made a better option for the RAF, if they had been bought before the BoB. All I did was agree with and defend that point of view!

All that you just posted is irrelevant.

I want you to strap yourself to the roof of a 2013 Chevy Tahoe PPV, and have it chase another PPV Tahoe that has a target attached to the roof. Space it out to 100 yards and both reach 140 miles and hour and hold that speed as you try and "snipe" at your target.

Tell us how well you did. Until then, stop with this nonsense...

 

[drgondog]

To Repeat - ZERO P-40's were available for the period defined as the "BoB" - at least in the critical phase when the LW nearly prevailed over the RAF via sheer weight of numbers. Those P-40s (TomahawkI and IB) did not have self sealing tanks. Would have been worse than a Zero in maneuver fight because it was less maneuverable...

 

[pbehn]

There is a new thread created to discuss the P40 in the BoB.

I think the 109 could be improved with a better canopy giving better visibility.

 

[stona]

NO. Standard is precisely that.
This is the Royal Air Force in wartime. Anyone who knows how any Service operates in peace time, never mind wartime, will understand that Individual pilots could not decide what they wanted. It is possible that some senior figures did harmonise their guns differently, but I haven't seen any convincing evidence for this. Some, along with their units, certainly adopted point harmonisation before it became the official standard, but they must have had some authority to do so. I haven't seen that authority, it hasn't been published to my knowledge and is probably languishing, misfiled in TNA. They couldn't have done it without such authority.

Any pilot claiming his Spitfire guns were harmonised at 200 yards is mistaken. The figure as evidenced by Dowding and the contemporary chart I posted was 250 yards. I have more evidence from Air Ministry and Fighter Command sources (including comments from Park) which I can't be arsed to dig out to further a pointless argument against your "direct interviews with RAF pilots" in unspecified sources.

Cheers

Steve

 

[GrauGeist]

But compared to all the rest of the planes in this discussion, it was the only gunfighter!

Negative.
the Battle of Britain was 10 July 1940 through 31 October 1940.
The primary fighter aircraft available at the time:
Hawker Hurricane Mk.I and Mk.IIA
Spitfire Mk.I and Mk.II
Bf109E (E-1, E-3, E-4, E-7)
There was no Fw190 at this time.

Now, the ONLY P-40 that existed at this point in time, was the first production type, also known as the Tomahawk I.
It had NO self-sealing tanks, NO bulletproof windscreen and NO pilot armor.
It was armed only with (2) .50 cowl MGs and (2) .303 MGs - one in each wing.

It had a max. speed of 357 mph @ 15,000 feet, cruising speed of 272 mph and rate of climb to 15,000 feet in 5.2 minutes. Max. range was 950 miles (approx.) @ cruising speed of 250 mph.

This was not your illustrious world-beater.It would take more development to bring the P-40 up to a competitive fighting platform. But only long after the BoB was decided.

 

[Peter Gunn]

I apologize for a bit of info I got wrong, it's been bugging me so I went back and consulted so oooold notes I had and realized I was wrong here:

"I've talked with Sabre pilots that used the radar ranging gun sight on the F-86 to get strikes from 1,200 to 1,800 yards but unless your name was Foster or McConnell or Jabara etc. they were strikes, not kills."

I thought that was off base and it was, that should read 1,200 to 1,800 FEET, not yards. Man that's what I get for trying to use my memory. So expecting a 1940 weapons system to hit at 1,800 meters is a bit of a stretch.

 

[pbehn]

The Mustang with an allison engine was superior in all respects to the P40 and in service performed well in armed recon, the first thing the Brtish said on flying it was it would be great with a Merlin engine. No Allison engined plane would make a difference in the BoB certainly not the P40 which was not even available. Now about the Me109 canopy. Was it a problem for LW pilots?

 

[stona]

Regarding the effective range of .50 calibre machine guns in fighters. I'm sure it was on this forum that I posted a quick analysis of the ranges at which P-47 and P-51 pilots claimed to have engaged targets later in the war. I can't find it now, but I remember the range at which the engagement commenced was, on average, just over 300 yards. They sometimes finished at virtually point blank range, 50 yards.
Nobody was opening fire effectively at some of the extreme ranges being claimed for the weapon.
Cheers
Steve

 

[GrauGeist]

There is a new thread created to discuss the P40 in the BoB.

Agreed!

I think the 109 could be improved with a better canopy giving better visibility.

They tried to address the canopy issues with the "Erla Haube", starting with the G-10.

I believe (going by memory here) they were working on an improvement to the Erla design, mocked up on a K model by the time the war ended. This *may* have been the design that Avia used on their models.

 

[GrauGeist]

Once again, if the Brits had had the foresight to order the P-40 because of the lack of fire power in eight gunned .303 RCMGs, then they would have been available in time for the battle of Britain. America was one of the first to realize that RCMGs would not cut it in the next war. We put .50s on mass produced planes starting in the 1920s. When did the RAF see the need for bigger guns? Long after the Germans had installed crappy 20s. I just bought a book about Russian aircraft and do not know the history of their weapons development, so any info will be greatly appreciated! Sincerely. But as far as I know, the RAF were the last force on the planet to get larger guns?

First of all - the first production P-40 manufactured was delivered to the USAAC in March of 1940. The first British ordered P-40 was delivered in August 1941.

Regarding your allegation of .50 cal. equipped U.S. warplanes in the 1920's? Pure bullsh!t.
Starting with the 1920's and going through the 1930's:
Curtiss A-3 - .30 cal.
Curtiss A-8 - .30 cal.
Curtiss A-12 - .30 cal.
Curtiss A-18 - .30 cal.
Vultee A-19 - .30 cal.
Curtiss SBC - .30 cal.
Vought SBU - .30 cal.

So tell me, where are the .50 cal. equipped aircraft again?

And again - this has nothing to do with the Bf109 discussion.

 

[stona]

The RAF had a fighter armed with four 20mm cannon in 1940. It was just considered inferior to the two front line fighters. Altitude performance was again,as it would have been for a P 40, the issue.

 

[stona]

Evidence not hearsay.I can back up my claim with data from dozens of Encounter Reports.
You are making unsupported assertions. How can you estimate range from a gun camera film? Are you a photoanalyst or have you read that pilot's report? If so you can quote it here.

 

[Shortround6]

Yes, I agree! But once again, I did not start the P-40 argument, but certainly did contribute to it. So did others. I have a valid point to make about how to improve the Me-109.These changes would have made the Me-109 into a revolutionary combat plane, far and away better than anything that actually flew in WW-II

Except with all those changes it would no longer be a Bf 109. You changes also include a fantasy engine and a fantasy gun, both of which often took longer to develop than new airframes.

I would also note that your proposed cannon is not just a slight stretch.

you are going from the round on the right to something on lines of the 4 center cartridges. Longer bolt and bolt travel reduce rates of fire unless you can get the bolt speed very high. Heavy/fat rounds need considerable power to feed the belt at high speeds to achieve a high rate of fire. Using power from the gun slows the rate of fire, using electric servo motors in the feed system can help but requires weight and complexity.
Last thing the Germans needed in 1943 and on was a super technical maintenance hog.

 

[GrauGeist]

Curtis P-30, Boeing P-26? There are others with up to 37 MM Autocannons and at a time when no other Air Force that I know of has installed anything bigger than a RCMGs in a large series of planes! ( Again, I am not that familiar with Russian planes.)

P-26 - 1 .30 & 1 .50 (introduced 1933)
Consolodated P-30/PB2 - .30 cal. (introduced 1934)

I am assuming you meant the P-36, which was first introduced in 1938, originally armed with one .30 cal and one .50 cal., both mounted in the cowl. It wasn't until the P-36A version, that wing armament was fitted - being (2) .30 cal. per wing.

None of that's relevant because no U.S. warplane, "mass produced" or otherwise, in the 1920's, was armed with a .50 caliber weapon. It was not until the early/mid-1930's that a .50 caliber weapon was considered for use in Attack/Pursuit aircraft. Even then, the Browning 1919 .30 was the armament of choice.

I think I'm done with this thread until it gets back on track...