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That is what I always understood. Four cannon was possible but the outside two could not be heated adequately. With the number of machines damaged on the ground I guess they had many cannons and MGs anyway.Didn't later spitfires only have 2 20mm cannon anyway? Plus the 4 machine guns.
Wonder what the wing load factor was between a Spit w/o MG and or cannons, and the same aircraft with 2 cannon and 2 .303 Vickers MG's wing mounted. No problem with firing through a prop rotation, as with nacelle mounted ordnance, but just curious as to affect wing mounted guns had on lift, climb, roll and over-all performance in combat maneuvers??I'd have to read the book again, but I seem to remember that, for the long flight to Malta, the cannons were removed from the Spits, and I believe a very small bag of essentials was carried in the cannon bay of one wing.
You are correct. The Browning (1919A-1?) in the British .303 were used. Perhaps Vickers were used in WW1 British aircraft?Not sure about wing loading or lift without checking,, but the weight saving certainly helped with overall performance and cruise economy.
BTW, the machine guns were .303 Browning, not Vickers.
Thanks-- was the Lewis gun a machine gun with a long and heavy barrel jacket, as judged by the few I may have seen in military periodicals-??- and was it fed from a top-mounted round drum magazine? Apparently Browning had a contract to produce air-cooled machine guns for the RAF in .303 British cal. As the Germans took over Liege when they occupied Belgium, I wonder where they were produced from 1939 to 1945?Vickers fixed guns and Lewis free guns were used from WWI to the beginning or WWII. By the time the second war started the Vickers V and Lewis III had almost entirely been replaced by the Browning and Vickers 'K' respectively.
I don't believe anybody contemplated using four cannon plus 4 machine guns in the same plane.
No need to delete posts. I'm not a moderator but sometimes act like one, and I know that I probably shouldn't. But then I do lots of things that I shouldn't do....
It was possible to have a passenger in the back of a 109??[/QUOT
According to Helmut Lipfert, during the evacuation of Crimea in May 1944, each Bf 109G6 of his unit (II/JG52) leaving for Romania had the head armor removed and a second pilot somehow "stored" in the impossible small space. He himself escaped that way. The 109 was completely out of trim and the landing very difficult. The same person reports that earlier in the russian campaign , they often carried bottles of wine in the radio compartment. A pilot even carried a barrel of beer using the bomb rack , with very little ground clearance
The Fw 190 quite often carried a second person. I have read that it was possible up to 3 persons. Gerhard Thyben, of 7/JG54 , even scored a victory with his mechanic in the radio compartment on 8/5/45 while escaping from Courland. On the other hand , several pilots were killed unable to abandon their damaged aircrafts because of the presence of passengers in the radio compartment