Originally posted by lazs2
and beet... beet lecturing me about guns? this is amusing in the highest degree.. You gonna tell me about dispertion? as for knocking off a wing... Never happens for me. dispersion does not mean that rounds go off in wild patterns like a shotgun... it means that they go in the path that the gun is aimed at and if the guns are aimed slightly differently (more or less angle) they will travel in a relatively straight path with some bullet drop.
Lazs,
You're not the only gun expert in the universe, and I have talked to some of the others. I was quoting from guys who know about how RL gunnery would have been in WW2. True, you know more than I do about guns, but I know more than you do about Math(s). And I see that a lesson is in order.
Did you know, Lazs, that if you were landing hits on a target 800 yards away and at the same height, that if you then increased your aircraft's attitude to a pitch of 1° above horizontal, your rounds would pass more than
forty feet above the target? What was the maximum thickness of the wing of a WW2 fighter plane? I'm guessing, but let's say it was about 6 inches. At 800yds, assuming your rounds flew in a "laser" stream as described in your post as quoted above^, your pitch angle would have to be accurate to within
0.012°. Deviate your pitch angle by more than that, and the rounds would miss.
Could the WW2 pilots fly and aim accurately to within ~a hundredth of a degree, not forgetting the environmental factors of wind and turbulence? Anyone who believes they could can kiss my arse. Of course they couldn't, and that's why dispersion was built in - to give the pilots a chance of hitting something - and that's why at 800yds the rounds would be dispersed over such a large area that only odd pings would be possible, not the AH1 gamer dork laser beam.
Don't believe that a 1° pitch change would cause that 40ft error? Well here's the proof. I've drawn a little diagram for you. It's not to scale, but it's good enough. Your plane is at A, the bogey is at B. Raising the nose by only 1° would cause your rounds to fly through C, more than 40 feet above the bogey, the distance denoted by line BC.
Oh by the way, the trig laws state that Tan(A) = BC/AB, therefore BC = AB multiplied by Tan(A).
If you would actually spend more time trying to understand the scenario being discussed, instead of drawing on your experiences from gamer dork utopia, you would realise that it would be quite impossible to inflict catastrophic damage to a bogey 800 yards distant in a controlled and systematic fashion - the sort of thing we'd see on a daily basis in AH1 and early versions of WB. You had to get much, much closer. Granted, the odd stray round might end up plinking the wing. Could the wing of a 190 be sheared off by a single .50cal round? Erm... don't think so.
