Can Pathfinder find out what is the inscription on the “headstamp” of the cartridges? This may allow someone to find out where they were manufactured. This is an interesting mystery and shows how fearful the bombers were of German tactics and weapons like “Schrage Musik”.

That would be helpful. I have reference books dealing with this subject so would probably be able to identify the manufacturer, although this may not be decisive: .50 cal ammo was made in Britain, but US manufactured ammo was also used.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

You might find this of interest – and it’s free!
http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/BoB.htm

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

I still have my great-grandfather’s axe. The handle has been changed four times and the head twice, but it’s still my great-grandfather’s axe 😉

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

After the Iraq War, many published reprots of RN studies the negative effect of DU ammunition to personnels. More and more people in RN are now against using DU charges.

So, it is likely that DU charges of RN may not serve long in the future.

Do you have evidence that the RN uses DU? As far as I know, they don’t. The British Army does, in its Challenger tank APFSDS ammo. So does the US Army in tank and Bradley MICV ammo, the USAF (in A-10 ammo) and the USMC (in the GAU-12/U ammo in the AV-8B). And if RN personnel were exposed to the resulting dust, through examining knocked-out tanks for instance, then their health could be at risk.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

There is a tendency these days to assume that odd names are acronyms because we use them so much (especially in the USA), but that is quite a recent phenomenon.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

I agree with those who have stressed the need to evaluate Mexico’s requirements rather than jumping in and talking about specific aircraft.

The analysis should go (very briefly) something like this:

1. What are the threats to be faced?

2. Is an aircraft the best way of meeting these threats?

3. If so, what characteristics should the aircraft have?

4. What aircraft are there which have these characteristics?

5. How much do the aircraft cost – what can be afforded?

Some of the issues which need to be considered are:

a) Can the need be best met by one type of aircraft, or would two (or more) complementary types be better?

b) Is there a possible trade-off between quality and quantity? (e.g. a given volume of airspace can be covered by a small number of high-performance, long-range planes at one base, or a larger number of lower-performance planes at dispersed bases).

c) How do the life-cycle costs of different choices compare? (second-hand planes, or new planes from e.g. China, might be cheap to buy but will probably cost more to run).

When you’ve run through that exercise, you’ll have a better idea of what might be suitable.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

Reading in one of those old mags that i bought about the GAU-7A.

What was the flaw in it’s design?

It was to use caseless ammo, so how would it have worked? Are there any other guns in service anywhere in the world that have caseless ammo?

Stricktly speaking, it used combustible-case ammo: it just looked like a fat cardboard tube six inches long. The projectile was buried inside it. The idea was that when each round fired, the case was burned up, so they didn’t need to eject it.

The problem was that the case didn’t provide good protection from the elements, such as changes in humidity, which affected the performance of the propellant. Also, they realised that having a large quantity of highly combustible material in the ammo mag wasn’t so clever, so they ended up wrapping each round in fireproof material which then had to be stripped off before loading into the gun.

One genuinely caseless gun – the German Heckler & Koch G11 assault rifle – came very close to entering production in the early 1990s, only the Berlin Wall came down and led to a shift in spending away from the military. Very recently, the USA has revived the idea for a new machine gun.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum