MK108 30mm Ballistics from Rechlin and Rheinmetall-Borsig

[Ardy123]

What the British did not understand about the Mineshell was the highly energetic explosion turned the thin steel caseing into tiny, sharp, very high speed shards that blew through aluminum skin, control cables, internal structures and crewmen like knives.

To sum up, one hit would ruin your day. Look at the thread in the general discussion, Changeup has a picture of himself holding up a shell (it looks like a 20mm though).

[bustr]

To be honest after all of this research I think the damage modeling is not currently capable of doing justice to the kinds of hi speed shrapnel damage cuased by the 30mm Mineshell and high temps with preassure wave. And when eventualy it does, I hope Hitech finally locks all aircraft with motor mounted cannon to the airscrew shaft line and forces everyone to shoot from 0 incidence from the airscrew line rather than allowing you to average the drop across the first 250 yards.

That up tilt inside of the engine lets you describe your kill zone rather than having to learn to shoot to a static kill zone described by the limitations of the cannon to engine mounting.

[MK-84]

To be honest after all of this research I think the damage modeling is not currently capable of doing justice to the kinds of hi speed shrapnel damage cuased by the 30mm Mineshell and high temps with preassure wave. And when eventualy it does, I hope Hitech finally locks all aircraft with motor mounted cannon to the airscrew shaft line and forces everyone to shoot from 0 incidence from the airscrew line rather than allowing you to average the drop across the first 250 yards.

That up tilt inside of the engine lets you describe your kill zone rather than having to learn to shoot to a static kill zone described by the limitations of the cannon to engine mounting.

I agree it would be more relevent to have each aircraft convergence setting set to 100% realism.  But that would not really matter in AH, the player would adjust for it and the result would be essentially the same.

As for realistic dmg of a tater whacking your aircraft, I have no idea, but it feels right.  Smacking fuselage of an aircraft with several rounds and no kill seems to make sense to me overall. (sure you might break a ton of stuff...but is the plane flyable?)  and hitting a wing usually results in the wing saying goodbye to the air frame.  This makes sense overal, is it perfect...prolly not, but its close.

     I suspect the problem is that a 30mm is viewed as a one shot kill period. weapon.  It isnt, it never pretended to be either. 

So yes, if you smack an enemy with a tater it will prolly die with one hit, thats true.  Nothing says it's supposed to do that 100% of the time though, and history will agree with that idea.

[bustr]

The 30mm Mineshell is pretty much a spin stabalised aireal mortor round with a very High Explosive detonation. By design it was expected to damage bombers with it's sharpnel and if possible it's blast wave.

As for the motor cannon in the game, let everyone adapt to how all the guns in each aircraft were really harmonised. Right now with tilting the cannon up inside of the engine you can create a focus point for all three guns rather than accept your accuracy becomes crapola past 250. In the real aircraft with MG and 20mm, due to similar velocities, had a resonable dispersion circle out to about 400 with the 20mm dropping lower than the MG by 600. With the current up tilting cannon you can make the 20mm rise to meet the MG at 400 dropping with the MG at 600. Very nice patterning.

This gets worse with an MG and 30mm mix where your best patterning for fighter to fighter was 100-250 meters while 400-550 meters was your best pattern for bombers if you wanted to not attract a cloud of 50cals. In the game you can create an excellent pattern 100-400 tilting the MK108 up inside of the engine with the MG as long as you learn the lead timing for a 400 yard shot. As far as I can tell the hood MG on all the fighters in the game are set to level or zero while the nose cannon and wing guns are angled up to their line with the convergence application.

[Charge]

"By design it was expected to damage bombers with it's sharpnel and if possible it's blast wave."

The other way around actually. The MG shot was special at its time because they both 20mm and 30mm used a very thin casing maximizing the explosive content so that in practice the only heavy shrapnel was the thicker fuse in the nose of the projectile. So the primary function of MG was to provide pressure and depending of type the secondary was the incendiary effect the shrapnel effect being only a minor factor. In comparison the Hisso HE was had only little HE content but the shrapnel effect was better due to thick walled round but even in that round the fuse was a significant particle to penetrate if it hit a thicker target.

http://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/me163/weapons15.htm

-C+

[titanic3]

The 30mm Mineshell is pretty much a spin stabalised aireal mortor round with a very High Explosive detonation. By design it was expected to damage bombers with it's sharpnel and if possible it's blast wave.

As for the motor cannon in the game, let everyone adapt to how all the guns in each aircraft were really harmonised. Right now with tilting the cannon up inside of the engine you can create a focus point for all three guns rather than accept your accuracy becomes crapola past 250. In the real aircraft with MG and 20mm, due to similar velocities, had a resonable dispersion circle out to about 400 with the 20mm dropping lower than the MG by 600. With the current up tilting cannon you can make the 20mm rise to meet the MG at 400 dropping with the MG at 600. Very nice patterning.

This gets worse with an MG and 30mm mix where your best patterning for fighter to fighter was 100-250 meters while 400-550 meters was your best pattern for bombers if you wanted to not attract a cloud of 50cals. In the game you can create an excellent pattern 100-400 tilting the MK108 up inside of the engine with the MG as long as you learn the lead timing for a 400 yard shot. As far as I can tell the hood MG on all the fighters in the game are set to level or zero while the nose cannon and wing guns are angled up to their line with the convergence application.

So what's the realistic setting to set a hub cannon to? I suck at reading comprehension, but from what I can tell, the maximum is D250?

[Charge]

As the hub cannon cannot be adjusted the limit comes from sight adjustment limits. So when adjusting the convergence IRL you adjust the sight to converge with 30mm trajectory at desired range and then adjust to MGs to converge with that point.

-C+

[bustr]

Go in the hanger and pull up the convergence applet. F3 and set your view off to a side using NUM_Key's. You will have to play with the view keys and zoom to get a complete view of the white MG line and colored cannon line together. Look at the lines for the MG vs the HUB cannon. MG lines are level but, change where the streams cross when you pull them out or in. The motor cannon colored line angles up and slides along the white MG lines 150-650. I will venture the reticule line of site is tied to the colored motor cannon line becasue at any convergence you set the motor cannon the reticle is zeroed for that distance like zeroing a rifle scope. Befor and after the zeroed distance you need to know how much to aim low or hi.

You can graph this outcome by flying auto leveled offline at about 250-280 t.a. and recording impact points from 50-650 at every 50 yards for say convergences of 150, 250 and 350. Throw 650 in if you only beleive what you prove to yourself impericaly. I created a reticle for recording IP points with 2.5Mil gradients for that purpose. I've done this numerous times with most of this games fighters while researching the ballistics for the MK108 over the past few years. With wing mounted guns that have hood MG the wing guns convergence point slide along the level line of the MG. With Wing only guns, one of the 2-4 pairs of guns is the primary that the reticle center line is tied to.

Where the wing guns are concerned that is realistic if you had a very cooperative armeror who didn't mind micro adjusting your gunsight center each time you wanted to change your horizontal convergence from 150-650. Bf109 rumpf MG were adjusted ballisticly pointing slightly down to zero at 400 meters with the motor cannon. This gave you 2 horizontal convergence sweet spots. One about 250 meters and one at 400 meters. You can see this in any 109 armeors manual. This is part of why Revi gunsights had about 14 degrees of adjustment. The most I can determine for Yak's is the MG fired level with the motor cannon becasue their MG and cannon had similar ballistics out to 500 meters.

I keep searching the internet to find the armerors manual for the Ta152-H. I'm curious how they resolved the ballistics between the two MG151/20 and the MK108. If they followed the Bf109 setup then the MG151/20 have to be down angled to impact -338cm at 400 meters with the MK108.

[Ardy123]

    I suspect the problem is that a 30mm is viewed as a one shot kill period. weapon.  It isnt, it never pretended to be either.  

I think the flaw in this reasoning is that unlike our cartoon planes, most airplanes, flying shrapnel would sever control cables, ruin all sorts of stuff in them, etc... leaving your plane 'in-tact' but unflyable. The net effect is the same, you can't fly it. Our AH planes are all or nothing deals, ie either your wing is off or its fully functional. In RL, maybe the wing didn't fall off, but it was so damaged, that the moment 2+gs were pulled, it would fall apart, twist off, etc...


As for the cannon being useless beyond 250 meters... well in game, for everyone but grizz, it is useless beyond 250 yards.

[nrshida]

So Bustr, without knowing the angle of the thrust line and all the other details pertaining to the hub cannon that you know, what would be the best 'convergence' setting for the Mk-108 in Aces High to reflect the actual real world set up of the weapon?

[bustr]

All of the convergence are lofting the round up to the MG line.

150 will peak you closest and give you an aproximate realistic drop by 400 through to 600. 200-250 as the conventional game wisdom goes sort of flatens it out to 400. Flaten in a 5Mil versus 10Mil by 400 from your reticles perspective. The random dispersion introduced by the code will fill about a 5Mil circle out to 400. This means offline against the drones at 400 in a low E angle off chaseing shot, lead by 20-25Mil and loft by 10Mil with a 1sec burst. Connected over the Internet in the MA...yes, maybe, no.......just be inside of 250.

Having a slight tilt up in all of the motor mounted cannons gives you a miniscuel amount of loft in angle off lead shots. Sort of like having your fighters nose angled up into the turn just a bit farther than you realise. Kind of an invisible mini reverse Concord landing nose configuration.

Take a water hose and hold it out level in front of you and watch how the stream emidiatly arches straight out but always down in responce to gravity. Now roll it slightly to a side and see how the stream keeps responding to gravity the same way. Go back to the starting position but angle the nosel slightly up. Now the stream first goes up before arching down in response to gravity. Keeping the up angle roll it over to the side. Notice now your stream shoots out to that side then down.

No matter if you pull our motor cannons back to 150 they are still angled up in your engine block and shooting like the second water hose example. I just figure if Hitech is now working on making the GV ballistics as realistic as possible along with the optics he might visit the motor cannons and make their ballistics authentic. Just lock them level and let them shoot from zero straight out responding to gravity.

By the way, the MK108 shoots a right hand curve ball (Spin Drift). Rougly 18 inches right by 400 yards. And a bit over 3 feet at 600 yards. I'm not sure it is modeled in the game so much as random dispersion is. In real life I think it was a sub 200 yard shooter for anything smaller and faster than a bomber. If you also combine the ballistic drops of aproximently 12ft@400 and 30ft@600. Ain't it nice we don't have air turbulence and prop wake turbulence in the game to bounch your aim about? Well, in a way if the pots in your joystick are boffo. There is a section in the german gunnery manual Schiessfibel that warns about prop wake turbulence from bombers and it screwing your aim.

[Babalonian]

damn, 330g 

We call it a tater for a reason.

[PR3D4TOR]

"A1" is the U.S. .30 and .50 cal. "G" is the 30 mm used in the MK 108.

[titanic3]

Ow. 

[bustr]

And (H.) 30x184B Minengeschoß is fired in the MK101 and MK103.

I hope our Me410 has the 2 MK103 varient option. Mineshell at 860m\sec versus 500m\sec. Be like having 2 NS-37 firing HE rounds but more potent. MK108 - 85g HE versus NS-37 27g HE.

And if we could vote in the Hs-129 with the Mk103 belly pack for killing tanks.

Armour penetration: AP-T 231g Wolfram-Karbid core. 960m\s: AP-T 70 mm (2.75 in)/60°/300 m  or 100 mm (3.9 in)/90°/300 m.