CharlesBronson said:
Lunatic.
I have the chance of shot some .50 in the local gun range so I now that already.
If you want good armor piercing capabilities sure, there is better guns than Mauser, but the objetive of cannon is deliver explosive round and in this bussines the MG-151 was excellent. The blast effect seems to be more vicius for the plane estructure than put holes on It. Especially in the less robust or with wooden parts aircraft like some russian figthers.
I'm not saying "armor piercing capaibility", I'm saying the likelyhood of scoring hits with a weapon of poor ballistic quality is a huge issue for fighter-vs-fighter combat. The MG151/20 round takes 25% longer to reach 300 meters than the .50 BMG round. Furthermore, it has dropped below mach 1.5 (sea level) by 250 meters and gone subsonic by 550 meters, where the BMG round dropped below mach 1.5 at 900 meters. By 600 meters the .50 BMG round is traveling twice the speed of the MG151/20 mine round. It is harder to score with a round that requires more deflection. It is also harder to score with a round that "dies" quicker as it flies (i.e. decellerates more quickly), if you've ever done any skeet shooting you know this is very true.
Finally, velocity not only effects how hard the round hits, but also increases the probablity of a hit on a moving target because the time of intersection increases. If the target is in line with the stream of bullets for 1/10th of a second, a bullet traveling 74 meters has a much better chance of intersecting the target than one traveling only 48 meters (relative speeds of the two types at 300 meters).
Also, approximately 25% of German HE rounds were duds, and a signfiicant number that were not detonated either too early or too late to maximise effectiveness. Contact fuses tore large holes in the planes skins, which might or might not be crippling. Delayed fuses could pass through and through before detonating or could be deflected off armor plate. While the round can do tremendous damage, often they did not achieve their potential.
The Hispano round had most of the positive qualities of the BMG round (only slightly inferior ballistics)
and with 3 times the impact damage and armor penetration and delivered 2/3rds the explosive effect of the German 20mm mine rounds. It was the best of both worlds.
CharlesBronson said:
Still it was feeded with some AP like :
APHE
API-Ph: the best of all AP round for the Mauser, his incendiary mixture was parts of withe and red Phosphore that have a very explosive effect when it can reach self sealing tanks.
API- E Filled with a substance called "Elektronthermite" that can burn even underwater, mostly used for twin engined bombers in the anti-shipping role.
German phosphorous rounds were not used that much for a variety of reasons. They were hard to store and dangerous to handle. Also, phosporous often blew away doing minimal incendiary damage, and it requires available oxygen to burn so it does not work well at altitude. The Japanese actually had better phospherous rounds than the Germans (but they were willing to fire unfused pectn HE rounds which could blow up in the gun, no one else was that crazy!).
German "Electron" was composed of a 50/50 mix of Alluminum and Magnesium and required a starter charge of some kind. It was unreliable to burn in most circumstances. Yes it can burn underwater but it does so by creating enough heat to seperate the H2 from the O, so it will not burn effectively at altitude.
The USA (and to a lesser degree Britain) had much better incendiary metal rounds. The USA utilized IM11, an alloy consisting of ~25% Aluminum + ~ 25% Magnesium + ~ 50% Barium Nitrate. Barium Nitrate is a very strong oxidizer. IM11 will spontanously ignite when sufficiently crushed (it becomes quite sensitive under the heat of firing and flight). Because it carries its own oxygen supply, it works equally well at any altitude, and when it ignites it does so uniformly resulting in a small explosion which spews 4000+ degree burning metal perpendicular to the axis of travel. Germany did not have the metallury technology to create such an alloy in anything but labratory quantities.
=S=
Lunatic