In the process of burning up perkies in deuces I see far too many instances of popping a fighter or bomber with multiple 30mm sprites to only get an assist.
I am assured that there are NO errors in the coading.
From what I understand the guy who gets the kill is the one that does the most damage
up to fatal damage has occurred. After the target has received fatal damage further hits do not count towards getting the kill. So if someone raked the target with .50 cals and did a lot of damage (points), but spread it all over the aircraft so no critical damage occurred, he is likely to get the kill when someone comes in and does that last bit of damage to a critical component. Your first tater probably did that last bit of fatal damage and thus all your subsequent hits didn't count.
Let's say a the wing of the target aircraft can take a total of 100 damage point before failure. I rake that wing with machine guns and do 80 points of damage; not enough to take the wing off. You come in with your 262 and fire a 100 round burst of 30mm shells at the target. Your first shell does the last 20 points of damage to the wing and it falls off. At that point the target has received fatal damage and the game stops registering damage for the purpose of awarding kills (to prevent people from kill-stealing crippled aircraft). The rest of your thousands of points of damage are ignored and you're only awarded 20 points of damage dealt to the enemy. I'm awarded 80 points for my initial attack, and thus I get the kill.
At least that's how I understand how it works...