Hi Wilbus,
>Allready exists to some extend in AH, only plane it works is the P51 D though, the thing is called "select weapon", by using it you can select wether you want to fire primary guns or the 4 guns with the secondary fire button in the P51.
Historically, the pilot of the P-51D had no way of firing anything less than the full complement of weapons, which could be either 6 or (if the inboard guns were removed) 4 guns.
Here's a quote from the P-51 Pilot Training Manual:
"This manual isn't intended to give you instructions in gunnery, but here's a tip - before you take off on a gunnery mission, be sure your guns are correctly loaded and charged, and that you know how fully loaded they are. There's no way of counting the number of rounds once you're in the air."
(There was no way of charging the guns once in the air, either.)
Other American aircraft differed - in the FM-2 Wildcat for example, the pilot had remote gun charging handles for his 4 machine guns besides his seat, which he could use to charge individual guns or even to clear jams, albeit manually handling the 0.50"s probably detracted somewhat from flying. The pilot also could select either firing inboard, outboard, or both pairs of guns simultaneously by a seperate selector switches. He only had a single trigger, though.
The Luftwaffe's gunnery equipment was a bit more sophisticated: Their aircraft not only had individual triggers for the different weapons, but also graphical (sometimes numerical) ammunition couters, breech position indicators, electrical (or, like in the case of the MK108, pneumatical) charging mechanisms, and their guns automatically cleared jams as soon as the pilot released the associated fire button when the weapon stopped firing.
>Verm, most A8's had it like that, although some had extra buttons etc that made it possible to chose other combinations, this was however, just for some planes and not all that was built.
Since not all that were built featured the extra weapons, this makes sense :-)
Looking at the Fw 190A-8 stick grip, it's obvious that it features A-Knopf, B-Knopf, and B2-Knopf, which is addressed as "bomb release button". It would be logical to assume that on aircraft that were not intended to carry bombs, the B2-Knopf button was used to individually trigger the extra armament, like for example the 30 mm outboard cannon.
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)
