A cherry bomb is harmless enough. A fist is nowhere NEAR a sealed pressure system. However, put a cherry bomb inside a fist and you just lost your hand. Same principle has been proven to work on aircraft wings and fuselages. The RAF did their own tests, suspending german ammunition inside fuselages and wings of their planes (including spits and hurris and also bombers) then detonating them. Most of the time the damage was massive.
Karnak is quite on the money with this one.
Batfink: Those images are so amazing because they are the rare exception that survived. Sure the plane was tough, but thousands more (than are shown in those photos) took the same damage and didn't make it home.
P.S. First time I saw this footage (P38's 20mm firing on barrel) I was almost expecting it to have a small entry hole and a large exit hole. I'd heard about some BoB-era stuff passing right through a plane's tail, through the armor plating, through the pilot, and out the front without exploding, I wasn't sure what would happen.
AH's gun damage might not be spot on, but it has to be dumbed down because we have one of the most simplistic damage models since Warbirds. Does no good to model accurate damage if the damage model just goes "pop" and that's it.
