CobberKane
Banned
- 706
- Apr 4, 2012
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This one has doubtless come up before, but what the hell. By the end of the BoB it was - from all accounts - pretty obvious that the Browning .303 lacked the firepower to reliably deal with increasingly tough LW fighters and bombers. The Hispano 20mm proved the answer. Yet the Browning persisted in conjunction with the larger gun on Spitfires, Mosquitos and Beaufighters. Why? Wouldn't ditching the Browning for half as many .50s or a couple of extra cannon have made sense? Or was there something about the way lots of small projectiles complemented the explosive cannon shells that that made the combination more than the sum of it's parts?
They originally went with the .303 for the rate and weight of fire that eight machine guns could provide (150 r/s and 1.8 Kg/s). The Air Ministry didn't have a high opinion of the ability of pilots to shoot accurately and there was much debate about which pattern would be most likely to result in hits (ie how to synchronise the guns). The Air Ministry was proven correct
The fact that .303 was the standard British and Commonwealth/Empire rifle calibre meaning there were literally millions of rounds available may have had something to do with it too, though how much of Major Dixon's redesigned De Wilde ammunition was available I don't know.
This one has doubtless come up before, but what the hell. By the end of the BoB it was - from all accounts - pretty obvious that the Browning .303 lacked the firepower to reliably deal with increasingly tough LW fighters and bombers. The Hispano 20mm proved the answer. Yet the Browning persisted in conjunction with the larger gun on Spitfires, Mosquitos and Beaufighters. Why? Wouldn't ditching the Browning for half as many .50s or a couple of extra cannon have made sense? Or was there something about the way lots of small projectiles complemented the explosive cannon shells that that made the combination more than the sum of it's parts?
They originally went with the .303 for the rate and weight of fire that eight machine guns could provide (150 r/s and 1.8 Kg/s). The Air Ministry didn't have a high opinion of the ability of pilots to shoot accurately and there was much debate about which pattern would be most likely to result in hits (ie how to synchronise the guns). The Air Ministry was proven correct
Air Ministry was correct in their opionion of the pilots ability but they didn't seem to devote a lot of time/effort to gunnery training. Some of the "patterns" the Air Ministry devised were less than ideal, too.
Pattern size and pattern density are inversely proportional. Of course everyone wants the largest possible pattern - but everyone also wants the pattern with the highest lethal density. There was much argument within the Air Ministry as to what the sweet-spot was.
The RAF also evaluated the .5 inch Vickers and Browning guns. The results were inconclusive; the Browning was more powerful but was longer and heavier. It was concluded that the .303 inch version of the Vickers was almost as effective as the HMGs against the light, unarmoured aircraft structures of the time and it was much lighter as well as faster-firing. The RAF accordingly decided not to proceed with a heavy machine gun, while noting that any widespread adoption of armour for military aircraft would force a re-think. By the mid-1930s, when the increasing performance and toughness of aircraft began to cast doubt on the future of rifle-calibre guns, the RAF opted for the greater destructive power of a 20 mm cannon, choosing the French Hispano HS 404. A few American .5 inch Browning M2 guns were used late in the Second World War in applications for which the Hispano would have been too big and heavy, but apart from this no heavy machine guns were used by the RAF.
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I never understood the British idea of pointing all of your guns in different directions. They were already using a popgun anyway, the only real way to make a 30 caliber weapon effective against airplanes is to point them all at the same place and get a good dense pattern on your target. Trying to shoot down an HE111 with one 303 while the other 7 shoot off into space had to be any excercise in futility and extremely frustrating for the British pilot. It would be like hunting geese with an open choked shotgun and #9 birdshot. Even if you hit him with a few pellets, the pattern isnt dense enought to cause enough damage to bring him down.
On the other hand, if you have all 8 of them shooting into a 3 foot by 3 foot square at 100 yards, it would act like a buzzsaw. Each round itself is still underpowered, but in concentrated form it would still be MUCH more effective than only one gun being on target while the other 7 waste ammo shooting off into space.
Were the aircraft with mixed armament able to select only the cannon or mgs or was there just one firing mechanism?