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Of course there are thousands of Allied pilots saved by their aircraft armor, but a concentrated burst of 20mm cannon shells, including by a zero, will tear an aircraft like that Spitfire apart, as it will sturdier and / or better protected fighters like a Fw 190 or an Il-2.
Again I'm in disagreement, both the British and German designers went to great lengths to protect their pilots, the British used equipment such as the radio and oxygen system in front of the armour to create spaced armour, it worked the same as the hollow wedges fitted to mantlet of the Leo2
There is a very strong view that the RAF should have fitted .50 cals to the Hurri and Spit but when both the .303 and .50 calibre were tested, the .50 offered no penetration advantage over the smaller round, a result many refuse to believe. The reason the .50 did not provide better performance was the bullets were knocked of axis after entering the rear fuselage and cutting through the equipment in front of the armour plate at oblique angles, I had a copy of the test somewhere that showed that a majority of the .50 strikes on the armour plate were sideways, when we get to the Spitfire 20 series they had armour that was proofed against all German 20mm AP shells, I don't know the distance unfortunately. Both the Allies and Germany went to great lengths to harden their aircraft to the detriment of performance, that would not have been done if they thought a quick burst would still knock the plane from the sky, or the need to move to ever bigger cannons and/or more effective ammunition.
You know better than that! N is a Floatplane Fighter.
That sounds like a serious waste of time when both companies had much better things to be doing. Do you happen to know what engines were these aircraft intended to use?
Regarding A6M3 Model 32, I do wonder why the design analysis was done on this aircraft. It was the least produced variant and generally regarded as an unsuccessful design.
Again I'm in disagreement, both the British and German designers went to great lengths to protect their pilots, the British used equipment such as the radio and oxygen system in front of the armour to create spaced armour, it worked the same as the hollow wedges fitted to mantlet of the Leo2 View attachment 562759 There is a very strong view that the RAF should have fitted .50 cals to the Hurri and Spit but when both the .303 and .50 calibre were tested, the .50 offered no penetration advantage over the smaller round, a result many refuse to believe. The reason the .50 did not provide better performance was the bullets were knocked of axis after entering the rear fuselage and cutting through the equipment in front of the armour plate at oblique angles, I had a copy of the test somewhere that showed that a majority of the .50 strikes on the armour plate were sideways, when we get to the Spitfire 20 series they had armour that was proofed against all German 20mm AP shells, I don't know the distance unfortunately. Both the Allies and Germany went to great lengths to harden their aircraft to the detriment of performance, that would not have been done if they thought a quick burst would still knock the plane from the sky, or the need to move to ever bigger cannons and/or more effective ammunition.
Without getting into the specific armor panoplies of each major aircraft type, which were not, lets just say, always ideal, let alone the notion that .30 caliber bullets had equivalent armor penetration to .50 caliber (if this was really the conclusion of an RAF study, why did they start putting .50 cals on RAF fighters late in the war?), how many rounds of 20mm cannon shells do you think a given fighter aircraft can absorb without going down? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?
The armor only protects certain vital area. You put 5 or 10 cannon shells in the wing root or tail of most WW2 fighters and they are going to break apart. The same will happen with enough .50 cal or equivalent HMG, or even (at closer range) enough LMG bullets.
Nor is 5 or 10 or even 15mm of armor necessarily going to even stop a heavy caliber bullet, especially armor piercing bullets or shells.
That is an incorrect statement. The wing loading of the P-40 (between 31-35 lbs / sq ft depending on model and weight) was better than most other Allied fighter aircraft - the Spit and the Hurricane were the best of the bunch in that regard, but the Hurricane in particular was hampered by it's sluggish roll performance and high drag.
The Spitfire was the most maneuverable Allied monoplane fighter of the war (considering turn, roll and vertical maneuverability together) so few other types could match it.
No Allied fighter in large scale prduction could out-turn an A6M or Ki-43, including the Spitfire, the Hurricane or the P-40, but the turn rate or 'horizontal maneuverability' of the P-40 was considered one of it's main virtues, along with roll rate and dive speed / acceleration.
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We are also confusing things here with the British use of the .50 in the Spitfire. The British started fitting the .50 cal guns once they had gone to gyro gunsights, The .50s extra striking power was no longer balanced against the much greater hit probability of the four .303s. The Gyro gun sight raising the hit probability of the 20mm and .50 cal guns substantially
The Hurricane had an excellent roll rate:
A Critical Analysis of the RAF Air Superiority Campaign in India, Burma and Malaya in 1941-45
Most fighters were NOT going to stand up to very many 20mm hits (like 4-5) as shown by the Spitfire in the photos earlier in the thread. (snip). Germans figured about 20 rounds of 20mm ammo to take out a B-17 on average. Chances of any single engine fighter surviving more hits than a B-17 are pretty slim.
Some surprising info in that chart. Most notably the later model p38s outroll anything( save one model of the p40) if you really keep it moving. Not what I would have expected to see.
I'm going to leave the other (to me ridiculous) debate about LMG vs. HMG alone, this is the point I was making. I might put the threshold slightly higher depending on the fighter but that was the same point I was making - a short burst of 20mm cannon could knock out just about any fighter. Armor helped and it's also possible the fighter might survive but it's no guarantee.
Again, was that RAF test conducted with Browning or Vickers .50s? The different cartridges are apt to give different terminal ballistics. I don't know if the cartridge in the video was Browning M2 or not, but I did notice it went through 6 sheets of 18 gauge steel before it started to keyhole, which is a lot more than the 1 or 2 pieces of aluminum it would encounter in the aft fuselage of a WWII fighter before it hit the armor.the bullet keyholes and deviates off target shooting through thin steel sheet, the same thing happened during the RAF testing, the bullets tumbled after entering the rear fuselage and hit the seat armour sideways giving no penetration advantage over the 303 guns.