Originally posted by lazs2
you admit that guys did hit targets at 800 yards and further... you admit that they could hit em pretty regular at 3 or 400... you admit we have thousands of more hours practice and no real stress... why is it hard to believe we might get pings a lot of the time out to 800 yards?
Most of the WW2 pilots
made no attempt to get hits at 800 yards. Why? Because they knew they'd be wasting their ammo. As OldMan has tried to explain, the dispersion at such a range would be absolutely huge. And cannon rounds simply would not fly that far. .50 cals were better.
Remember how the gunnery was in WB 2.7x? You had to close to 300 yards or less, or else you were simply wasting your ammo - whatever the plane or ammo type.
I've just scanned through Gabreski's book, and found a couple of instances where he got kills at 300-400yds. Remember, the fact that he got hits at all was, as with any other pilot, because dispersion was built into the 8x.50cals so that he wouldn't have to aim his plane to within fractions of a degree, as explained in my previous posts. But that same dispersion at 800yds would result in an overall target area so large that only lucky pings would hit the target - not enough to bring it down.
Gabreski also mentions how some of his bogeys broke up after they'd been "done", with fragments from those doomed planes almost hitting Gabby's P47. Surely you can tell from that how close he was. Erich Hartmann liked to get so close to his quarry that it filled his windscreen.
