Tony WilliamsNot according to my information, which includes a detailed cutaway drawing of the type.
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Tony WilliamsIt’s turning out to be an excellent series. I must admit I prefer the WW2 footage, the commentary from the historians and the interviews with surviving BoB pilots from both sides. The original purpose of the series, to give current pilots the chance of flying the Spitfire, is for me the least interesting bit!
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Tony WilliamsThe Hurri Mk IV could also be armed with the Vickers 40mm guns as an alternative to the RP rails, and many were.
This may be of interest: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/sgun.htm
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Tony WilliamsTony WilliamsRudel flew around 400 sorties in an Fw 190, in which he shot down 11 planes. A brief biog is here: http://www.achtungpanzer.com/gen9.htm
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Tony WilliamsRudel was famous as a Ju 87 dive-bomber pilot before the Ju 87G emerged. He was one of the first of the G pilots, trialling the type during the great tank battle at Kursk.
He also flew fighters; I don’t know when, but I have read that his air-to-air kills were primarily if not entirely with an Fw 190.
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Tony WilliamsThere was at least one case in which a Ju 87 rear gunner shot down a P-61 night fighter.
For details of the armament and how it compared with other airborne tankbusters, see: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/tankbusters.htm
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Tony WilliamsOne of the great ‘what ifs’ of aviation. I still think it was a better idea than the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor: there was some inefficiency from having separate propellers and rotor, but each was specifically designed for its purpose whereas the V-22’s prop/rotors are inefficient at both tasks. The Rotodyne was also technically far simpler and less risky. This is some detail: http://www.groenbros.com/tech/FaireyRotodyne.htm
As a matter of interest, the Groen Brothers Aviation are proposing reviving the idea and have suggested fitting a tip-jet powered rotor to a C-130 Hercules to give it VTOL performance. See: http://www.groenbros.com/tech/crnt_tech.htm
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Tony WilliamsTony WilliamsP.S. re the Lahti weapons: the full-auto AA gun was the L39/44, not L40 as I posted before. Information about this weapon and the AT rifle is here: http://ankkurinvarsi.com/jaeger/AT_RIFLES1.htm
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Tony WilliamsOriginally posted by GarryB
” all different, all failures, and all that effort was a waste of time. ”According to Hogg and Weeks, few were ready for action in the winter war of 1939-1940 and that there were no records of their performance. He states that between 41 and 44 production started again and 1,906 weapons were made.
The calibre he gives for the weapon is 20 x 138B Long Solothurn. Other details are weight… 93lbs yet only 20mm armour penetration at 250m (at zero degrees incidence).
We may be at cross-purposes here. There were three different Lahti 20mm guns to see service that I know of:
1. The L34 ‘boat gun’ in 20×113, of which only ten examples were fitted to small craft. This was a recoil-operated weapon, firing 350 rpm from a 15-round box or 45-round drum magazine.
2. The L39 semi-automatic anti-tank rifle chambered in 20x138B, made in quite large numbers in the early/mid 1940s. It used a 10-round box magazine.
3. The L/40 fully-automatic version of the L39, used in a twin AA mounting and firing at around 250 rpm (sources vary) from a 32-round box magazine (one of these was in the MoD Pattern Room).
None of these was fitted to aircraft.
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Tony WilliamsMike, the dates I have for cartridge development are rather different. The .308 Winchester was introduced in 1952 as a civilian version of the new 7.62×51 NATO round. The NATO round was developed as a shortened version of the .30-06, and the closest comparator (examined during development) was the .300 Savage of 1920, which was slightly shorter still.
Similarly, the origin of the .223 was the .222 Remington small game cartridge, introduced in 1950. This was originally selected as the basis for the military cartridge, but the case was extended slightly to make the .223 Rem of 1957, adopted with the M16 rifle by the USA in around 1964 then, much later, as the 5.56×45 NATO.
Garry,
The .280 actually had a better long-range performance than the 7.62×51 because the relatively heavy bullet had a better ballistic coefficient. At 1,000 yards the .280 had better penetration. The only criticism the American testers had was that the trajectory should be flatter. OTOH, they hammered the 7.62mm for excessive flash, blast and recoil, and recommended that the .280 be adopted as the basis for developing the new NATO round. This was rejected by the Chief of Staff of the US Army, apparently due to NIH – the Army Ordnance Department had been developing its ‘.30 Light Rifle’ concept since the end of WW2 and didn’t want to give it up. I’m up to speed on this at the moment as I’ve been researching the history for a new book I’m writing with Max Popenker on the history of the modern military rifle.
The 20mm Lahti aircraft cannon is a fascinating puzzle. Chinn has a chapter on it and gives the impression that it was in Finnish service, but I have corresponded with a Finnish enthusiast who has translated for me the relevant parts of Lahti’s autobiography. Lahti wasn’t exactly modest (everyone else was a fool for not doing what he wanted etc) but all he says about the 20mm aircraft cannon was that he produced four prototypes, all different, all failures, and all that effort was a waste of time. I have found no hard evidence to suggest otherwise. There was a Lahti L34 ‘boat gun’ in 20mm, fitted to a dozen light coastal craft, which chambered a special 20×113 cartridge (I have one in my collection) but it wasn’t fitted to aircraft. I spent some time researching this for ‘Rapid Fire’ as I was anxious to pin it down! I suspect that Hogg and Weeks relied on Chinn for their information.
One thing I have discovered in researching and writing books is that not many authors do much original research – they just take information from existing texts and rework it. So you often get mistakes perpetuated in book after book, thereby gaining a currency which is quite difficult to challenge. For example, I blame William Green, writing in the 1960s, for saying that the Messerschmitt Bf 109K had MG 151 cannon in the cowling (no chance), MK 103 on the engine (planned but not delivered) and MK 103 underwing (no chance). But you still see such ‘facts’ quoted…
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Tony WilliamsOriginally posted by GarryB
Most trends with the small calibre weapons that were trendy for a while seems to be a trend for slightly larger calibre and bullet weight. In a few years I think the Americans might even admit that the British .280 round for the EM-2 wasn’t a bad idea at all.. 🙂
The official US Army tests at Fort Benning in 1950 conlcuded that the .280 was better than the US .30 – but the top brass rejected their own people’s conclusion…
The Chinese have a 6.8mm round that seems to be entering into service, while the Russian have experimented with a 6mm round, although they can of course fall back to 7.62 x 39mm weapons still widely available to them, unlike the Americans and NATO who have comitted to the 5.56mm weapons. The Americans are currently experimenting with a round very similar to the old British experimental round.
The Chinese round is actually a 5.8×42, and the Soviet 6mm experimentals were very hot, high-velocity rounds intended to replace the 7.62x54R in MGs and sniper rifles. However, the American 6.8×43 Remingon SPC is a very interesting development which appears to come closer than anything else in recent years to the ‘ideal’ military small arms cartridge (see: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/Assault.htm )
Also the 20mm Lahti Model 39 was made in semi and full auto models… the latter becoming more popular as the anti tank capability of the round made it redundant so they were converted to full auto for use against aircraft.
My uderstanding of the sequence was slightly different; that the full-auto L40 version of the L39 was specifically developed as an AA weapon, to be fired from a mounting.
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Tony WilliamsOriginally posted by mike currill
You have improved my education somewhat on the matter of these weapons. I did know about the Barrett and the other American one which I can not remember the name of at the moment but I did not realise anyone actually made any thing larger. Do you have anydetails on these two such as dimensions, muzzle velocity etc.?
Well, there’s an entire appendix of my book ‘Rapid Fire: the Development of Automatic Cannon, Heavy Machine Guns and their Ammunition for Armies, Navies and Air Forces’ on heavy rifles: the old anti-tank rifles and the new anti-materiel ones. 😉
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Tony WilliamsOriginally posted by GarryB
I’ve never seen such a usage, as a cannon is by definition fully automatic, and is always mounted rather than hand-held.Some anti tank rifles, like the Model 97 were not mounted… they had bipods, often with an extra leg at the rear of the weapon, though not always as they occasionally got in the way. A 20mm calibre weapon (20 x 124mm) that was capable of firing fully automatically but only from a 7 round mag.
That’s a (common) misapprehension. I have examined a Type 97 and had correspondence with someone who has a translation of the handbook. It was semi-automatic only. The belief that it could fire full-auto may have come from two sources; the fact that it was developed into a full-auto aircraft cannon (the Type 1 and Type 3, initially known as the Type 97), and the fact that when the gun was tested in the USA, the sear failed and the whole magazine let rip…
The only 20mm shoulder gun design for auto fire I’m aware of was the Solothurn S18-1100 anti-tank rifle (the much more common S18-1000 was semi-auto only). So that’s the exception which proves the rule :), although at a weight of 50kg (110 lb) it hardly qualifies as ‘hand-held’!
The term ‘rifle calibre’ refers to the standard military rifle calibre, i.e. up to 8mm; the term HMG is reserved for larger calibre weapons, in practice between 12.7 and 15mm.
Yet there are rifles now that go beyond these figures. The Anti Tank rifle as such is dead, but the anti material rifle lives and is becoming quite widespread.
True, but those are not in the ‘standard military rifle calibre’, by which is meant the rifles carried by the ordinary infantry. That distinction has admittedly become a bit blurred from the days when (almost) everyone carried .30/.303/7.9mm weapons, but it can currently be taken to refer to anything up to 7.62mm.
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