Originally posted by Pongo:
You keep saying that Mav. Cause you have experiance with the M2 hb. Thats not what is in these planes. The barrel on the M2 in the planes is consderably lighter and I believe they did have to worry about burning it out with long bursts. Some of these planes carry 400 rpg. That is a long burst.
Also the gun bays on these planes where very constricted compared to what you are used to I bet. Gas build up in the bay could cause lots of problems. I doubt they were designed to vent the whole ammo load at once.
Not a bad question. Here are a couple of points.
I spent most of my time with the cupola mounted M85. Pretty much same gun but lighter barrel and a much nicer quick disconnect for rapid barrel changes. Dealing with the cupola was a pain for clearing the gun and loading the ammo tray. As long as the gun was kept well lubed (half drowned it seemed at times) it worked just great.
Aircraft have a couple of advantages. The gun is not in a sealed environment. It was set into the wing but had a pretty fair amount of air passage from the muzzle and gun port. This leads to exceptional cooling capacity particularly when compared to a ground mount gun. The sleeve the barrel is mounted in allows for space around the barrel so the barrel can move during firing. The barrel and bolt recoil together for a short distance before the barrel stops and the bolt continues, stripping the empty out of the chamber and shoving a new round into the gun.
Gasses as well as brass and links were vented from the bottom ejection port. Since this port was open all the time there is a good flow of air.
Normal infantry MG teams had 2 barrels. The one in the gun and a spare. They aren't light so there is a limit as to how many can be carried. The 50 BMG is a heavy MG so they typical infantry squad isn't going to have one. They used the 30 cal mg's instead.
Barrel changes are dependant on a couple of factors. The amount of firing done and what is the enemy situation. You might have a hot gun but if you need to fire you do so. The infantry guns were the ones that had the reputation for burning out barrels, sometimes firing until the darn thing drooped.
AS far as this game is concerned. the only guns I can see firing for extended time periods are the PT boats and buff guns. I have yet to fire a lengthy sustained burst at another plane, including a buff simply because the darn targets just don't stay still. The ride of choice for me is the P51D, B and the F6F. All use 50's and generally require more ammo than any cannon bird in the game to down a plane. Not once have I fired the entire load in one burst.
I repeat my original position. There is no need to write a bug like random jams into this game. There are no random engine failures, low octane gasoline options, routine breakdowns of aircraft systems modeled. I think that those would be much more of a prevalent problem in real life than gun jams. No squadron, wing or group ever had 100% operational aircraft during WW2. We do in this game as that is what people pay for here. They pay to play a game based on WW2 combat. They don't pay to have the plane they fly randomly suddenly stop working properly as an attempt to induce additional "immersion" in the game play.
How long would you play if at least a couple times an evening your plane quit working spoiling your mission or sortie. Probably not very long. I can imagine the whining from that happening.
The main thing that people pay to play for is the combat against live players not a computer AI. Not random failures. If there is no combat you might as well play MS flight sim # whatever by yourself.
Mav
