P-47????

[Gowan]

but if it was an african swallow

[Motherland]

I need to rent that movie again so I can memorize the dialogue in its entirety.

[Redlegs]

Who goes there?
 It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, from the castle of Camelot. King of the Britons, defeater of the Saxons, Sovereign of all England!
 Pull the other one!
 I am, and this is my trusty servant Patsy. We have ridden the length and breadth of the land in search of knights who will join me in my court at Camelot. I must speak with your lord and master.
 What? Ridden on a horse?
 Yes!
 You're using coconuts!
 What?
 You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em together.
 So? We have ridden since the snows of winter covered this land, through the kingdom of Mercia, through...
 Where'd you get the coconuts?
 We found them.
 Found them? In Mercia? The coconut's tropical!
 What do you mean?
 Well, this is a temperate zone
 The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?
 Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
 Not at all. They could be carried.
 What? A swallow carrying a coconut?
 King Arthur: It could grip it by the husk!
 It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut.
 Well, it doesn't matter. Will you go and tell your master that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here?
 Listen. In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?
 Please!
 Am I right?

[Bodhi]

Originally posted by angelsandair
This is probably the stupidest question ever but also kind of makes sense about the p-47.

....

It had the highest survival rate of WW2.

....

That is false.  The F6F had the best survival rate AND the Kill to Death Ratio of any aircraft.

[Karnak]

Originally posted by LilMak
The Jug had much more hitting power in reality than it does in AH (as do all .50cal planes). It didn't need 20mm guns. 8 .50s have the same or greater killing ability than x3 20mm.

Not according to the US Navy.  The US Navy's tests found that one M2 20mm cannon installation provided the same firepower as a three Browning .50 cal installation.  By the US Navy's estimate, the Spitfire Mk XIV and XVI have the same firepower as a P-47 with eight .50 cals......which is approximately what they have in AH.

Plus the sheer volume of rounds flying at a target in a given ammount time virtually insured damage to any aircraft it hit. I've read accounts of Jug pilots blowing up...

[/b]
Don't overestimate this.  Bullets are small and there is a lot of space out there for them to disperse into.  I know a lot of people think of eight gun installations as buzz saws, but they aren't.  P-51B fires approximately 48 rounds a second and the Typhoon Mk Ib fires approximately 40 rounds per second.

-Trains. Try and think of how much natural armor the boiler on a steam engine has.

[/b]
Unarmored tubes filled with high preasure steam explode when hit by bullets?  Say it ain't so!  What do you think a train straffed by a Spitfire or Mosquito did?

-Barges. By punching gaping holes in it below the water line.

[/b]
Yup, they could sink barges.  What do you think 20mm armed aircraft did to barges?

-Tanks. Shooting through the engine compartment.

[/b]
This one is false.  Same for claims of doing it with 20mm cannons.  Battlefield examinations by the British painted a very dismal report on the effectiveness of fighter bombers against tanks, particularly using guns against them.  However, the soft skinned supply vehicles were another story entirely...

Hey, at least you didn't try to claim that P-47s took out tanks by bouncing rounds off the ground into their bellies.

[Karnak]

Originally posted by Bodhi
That is false.  The F6F had the best survival rate AND the Kill to Death Ratio of any aircraft.

Other than the Brewster B-239 Buffalo.




Sorry, had to do it

[Airscrew]

Originally posted by MiloMorai
What model was that?

A Chrysler XIV-2220-1 sixteen-cylinder inverted Vee liquid-cooled engine was put in the XP-47H.

Its been awhile since I read the article, I could have swore it was an Allison.

[Bodhi]

Originally posted by Karnak
Other than the Brewster B-239 Buffalo.




Sorry, had to do it

The Kill to Death Ratio for the Buffalo is less than the Hellcat.  Even though the Finns did wonders with it, you have to take into account the amount of Buffalo's lost cumulatively by all forces.  Most of our Buffalo's were lost without shots or gang banged like in the MA.

[Karnak]

Originally posted by Bodhi
The Kill to Death Ratio for the Buffalo is less than the Hellcat.  Even though the Finns did wonders with it, you have to take into account the amount of Buffalo's lost cumulatively by all forces.  Most of our Buffalo's were lost without shots or gang banged like in the MA.

I know. I was joking, hence the  thingy.

[angelsandair]

Originally posted by Bodhi
That is false.  The F6F had the best survival rate AND the Kill to Death Ratio of any aircraft.

Rlly?? I guess on the European front then...... (saw a chart and it wuz #1 and P-39 wuz #2, assumed it was pacific and atlantic)

[Bodhi]

Originally posted by Karnak
I know. I was joking, hence the  thingy.

Sorry, did not catch it.  I feel silly now.

[Widewing]

Originally posted by Bodhi
That is false.  The F6F had the best survival rate AND the Kill to Death Ratio of any aircraft.

Actually, the lowly SBD had the best loss rate per sortie of any carrier borne aircraft in the US Navy. This includes losses from all causes, including operational losses. SBDs were robust, dead reliable and very easy to land aboard ship. Thus, very few were lost to operational incidents, raising it to the top of the survivability list.

While the F6F had a spectacular kill to loss rate (19:1 against all types), the FM-1 and FM-2 managed a 26:1 ratio against Japanese fighters, and a 97:1 ratio against bombers and various other types. Granted, the FM saw much less combat than the F6F and F4U, which may skew the data somewhat. Nonetheless, they did extremely well. The image below is a composite taken from Naval Aviation Combat Statistics: WWII released in June of 1946.



My regards,

Widewing

[LilMak]

Don't overestimate this. Bullets are small and there is a lot of space out there for them to disperse into. I know a lot of people think of eight gun installations as buzz saws, but they aren't. P-51B fires approximately 48 rounds a second and the Typhoon Mk Ib fires approximately 40 rounds per second.

So a Jug will throw 96 rounds per second and a spit will throw 20. So for every single 20mm that hits, 4.8 .50s will hit. Almost 5 to 1.

Now I ask you. (Be honest now)
You're a Geman in the middle of a dog fight in WWII. At the last second, you see tracers flying across your nose and a fighter is comming broadside for a 90 degree snapshot. You're going to have to fly through 0.20 seconds of a bullet stream. He's gonna pepper you from spinner to rudder.

What would you rather see comming at you...a Spit or a Jug? Who do you think has a better chance to do damage to your plane or, worse, your body?

[thrila]

I believe the argument is not that 2 20mm has greater hitting power than 8 .50cal.  Rather that the 20mm is more efficient at shooting down than .50cals.  I imagine the jug would  carry atleast 4 20mm if they were ever considered as an armament.

[hubsonfire]

From this thread which is really interesting. Anyone have this in its entirety?

On the topic of why the Army wasn't pushing to replace the .50 with the 20mm...

Colonel Coats from Eglin Field responded:

"I'll try to answer that in this way. I believe the feeling in the Army generally is that we would like to have a lethal density pattern. The most bullets going across one place at a given instance. We would like to have the smallest caliber gun that can do the job. If it takes a 22mm to tear a Messerschmitt or a Mitsubishi apart, we want 20's, but as long as a 50 will do the job we feel that if we can carry a greater number of guns and a greater amount of ammunition with the same weight, with an equal or greater firepower, that is the gun we want. If you are strafing an airdrome you can put out more bullets. A Jap doesn't care whether he gets killed by 20 mm's or a 50 caliber. We can put out more bullets and we have more weight covering the same area. Another thing that comes into this matter of sighting is the training of the personnel. When wew get sights to the point where we can pull the trigger just once and hit a fellow, then we can go to the bigger calibers. It is a matter of training of pilots. The Mark 14, the gyro sight, we found didn't increse our accuracy for our control gunner to any great extent. However, it did bring the people in the middle and lower brackets up as much as 5 or 6 times better than they had shot before. I think we in the aircraft game should be worrying about the people in the middle third or the bottom half, that we have to make better sights, better cockpit arrangements, easier planes to fly for those people. We don't need to worry about our top shot or our best pilot. he can get along in any kind of a rig. That is the reason- we feel we can get a bigger density pattern.

"I would also like to point out, I won't go into an argument with 20's versus 50's, but I thik a lot of it has to do with the arrangements in the plane. For instance, in a P-47 or F4U, you have all the guns in the wings. Of necessity you must cross the fire pattern at some fixed distance from the plane. With all your guns over one fixed point at a given number of yards, you have a great X forming out there. At 600 you are wasting a great amount of your bullets. If you close up on a fellow to 200 yards, you are also wasting bullets. In the F7F or the P-38 you can put all your guns in the nose; firing parallel streams of lead, your bullets all going out forming a lethal density pattern as far as the bullets go. In an installation like that you could possibly be better off firing four 20's than you would be firing six 50's. In the P-47 with four guns in each wing, we recommend that they cross the first two guns at 250 yards, the next at 350, at 450 and 550. That gives you a density pattern in depth as well as width for about 200 yards, which in turn gives the mediocre pilot a better opportunity to hit an airplane in flight."

I was actually looking for something else entirely when I stumbled across this thread. Pyro's posted a bit more than this from it; I just found this section a little more relevant. Worth a read, for sure.