What started this line of posts
I find it difficult to believe that a fighter armed with one LMG and one HMG scored many victories at all.
The use of one heavy and one light machine gun was only in the first year or so of the war, during which time they were mostly against flimsy and hapless opposition like Blenheims, Buffalos and Hurricanes. Initially there was a problem with the Ho-103 machine guns as you probably know (along with a whole host of other fairly serious teething issues with the Ki-43) but these were fixed and the more normal armament became two 12.7mm machine guns.
Hey if YOU want to change the goal post fine. But don't call BS when I give the facts on the original position.
They did not by the way only shoot HE shells and to imply that is disingenuous, as it is to show the pre-synchronization rate of fire of the German LMGs but the post synchronization rate for the Japanese, and lowball the synchronized ROF.
Well I did put the word shells in quotation marks and I did give a range of weights, the HE projectile weighed 33 grams and the AP weighed 35.4 grams according to one source.
Now as to over rating the German guns. did I or didn't I??? Wiki says the German MG 17 was good for 1200rpm. Anthony WIlliams in "Flying Guns of WW II ) says 1000rpm (although the MG 15 is rated at 1200rpm) perhaps the 1000rpm is after synchronization? Some sources say the MG 17 was good for 1200rpm when used as a ground gun near the end of the war.
Japanese 7.7 fixed aircraft machine gun (both army and Navy although they had different type numbers) were developed from the Vickers type E mg and I haven't seen any source that says the type E or any of it's offspring exceed 900rpm unsynchronized. So tell me how I under rated the Japanese 7.7mm machine gun?
The German MG 151/15 was not synchronized, I also only gave the weight of the HE shell in
this comparison The AP projectile weighed 72 grams and will really skew the 'weight of fire'
Mr Williams book (and co author Dr Emmanuel Gustin) says 800-900 rpm for the Japanese 12.7 machine gun in the tables. In the text it says the gun was criticized for it's rate of fire, which was seriously reduced by synchronization. Going back to wiki we have;
Rate of fire 900 RPM 400 RPM (
synchronized)
So I rated it almost 25% higher than wiki but that is not good enough for you and you call me disingenuous.
If you can find a decent source that says the gun fired much faster than 500rpm when synchronized please list it.
Like it or not, and I know you and some others here don't, there are a host of fighters in WW2 that were very successful - at least against other fighters- with two or three guns in the nose armament. Ki43 is definitely one of them. Even a Corsair or P-38 pilot had to be very careful against these planes and fight just the right way if they didn't want to die. Hurricanes were dead meat. Yak 1/7/9 series and the Yak 3 were also good examples of this. As was the Bf 109F2 and later F and early G series. And the Macchi 202 as many of them had their wing guns removed by the pilots in the field.
No plane was bullet proof and nobody adopted a tatic (on purpose ) of giving the enemy first shot and then turning the tables, so yes it was possible to shoot down aircraft using light armament. However your argument can also be looked at in a different light. The YAK series needed to save all the weight it could for flight performance and a much heavier armament would have seriously degraded flight performance, The Russians sure didn't use light armament because they like to use finesse. And they added guns just as soon as more powerful engines or lighter guns became available. The 109s had a bit of trouble getting the intended engines up to power (both the DB 601E and the DB 605) and there were a number of German pilots who were not happy with light armament. As for the MC 202?? If you are pulling 55kg of guns AND ammo out of plane are you really happy with the fuselage mounted guns or like P-40 pilots who pulled guns out, are you really unhappy with the engine power and flight performance?
Guns in the nose ARE more accurate than guns out on the wings. Every pilot familiar with both configurations said so.
Really, every pilot? Just how many were familiar with both configurations?
No British( and Commonwealth) pilots unless they flew Gloster Gladiators or Tomahawks.
For US it was pretty much P-38, P-39 and very early P-40s. for fuselage guns so please come up with some quoted of US pilots that flew them and then flew Warhawks, P-47s or P-51s With something like 200 US pilots flying the long nosed P-40s out of tens of thousands of US fighter pilots during the war that means what?
Few Russian pilots unless they flew both Russian and Lend lease aircraft. OK I-16 pilots maybe but the i-16 was known to snake and was a lousy gun platform.
Ah yes, a few German pilots, but how did they know? were they comparing like to like when it came to guns and ammo?
two slow firing low velocity 20mm MG/FFs vs a faster firing higher velocity fuselage cannon with more ammo than both wing guns put together. Yeah, a really fair comparison.
And the 109 gun pods aren't quite the same thing as guns in the wing.
And if you had a mixed battery (some in the fuselage and some in the wings) how did the pilot know which guns scored the hits?
I know you already know this but refuse to believe it anyway because you think your own back of the envelope calculations trump what every war veterans says. But that doesn't change it from being a fact.
Really???? EVERY war veteran? You talked to them ALL?
Sorry, it is far from a fact. It is a best an unproven. bu tit is not helped but BS such as this.
From Defence of the realm
"It's name may have been "Spitfire" but in the early marks, Supermarine's legendary fighter was barely an adequate gun platform. It's
eight .303 machine guns were spaced out across the wing making it difficult to train them to a point ahead of the aircraft where their collective firepower could inflict heavy enough damage on an enemy aircraft equipped with self sealing fuel tanks.
This was why the Hawker Hurricane, with its eight .303 machine guns coupled closely together, was the superior gun platform in the Battle of Britain.
Now for some strange reason the british government say fit to publish diagrams like this
For the Spitfire. Now please note that convergence was later changed to 250yds or so it is claimed. But that must be impossible as that web site said "
it difficult to train them to a point ahead of the aircraft"
Maybe the harmonization charts were fakes intended to give the pilots confidence?
Or since you can get all eight guns to hit in a small area in front of the aircraft (although 200-250 yrds ahead that website (and many others) is wrong.
Now the Hurricane may very well have been a better gun platform but there is more to being a good gun platform than just how close the guns are grouped together. Like steadiness, an absence of snaking or yawing or pitching as the aircraft flies. being sensitive to the controls but not too sensitive so as to have the line of sight to the target disturbed by over corrections or a slightly jittery hand on the stick.
SO you can call my back of the envelope calculations BS but I have seen an awful lot of BS on the other side of the question.
Hurricane was being produced in greater numbers in 1941 than our wonder plane the Spitfire. Ever asked yourself why?
