Vermillion,
I should have clarified that the Ho-5 was the Army Airforce weapon. You are however incorrect about the quantity. No single place in the book states that the Ho-5 was the most widely used. You actually have to read the entire book. Just look at the armament for each aircraft and the breakdown of which variants carried what weapons. It's pretty easy to see that the Ho-5 was the most common on Army Airforce aircraft.
The Ho-5 was used extensively on:
Ki-45, 61, 100, 46, 43, 44, 84, to name a few.
Please don't read extensively as exclusively, because there were exceptions, however these are listed in the book.
On a different note, I forget who was posting about the energy imposed on an aircraft by a bullet.
This is how it works. The kinetic energy imposed on the aircraft is the difference between the kinetic energy of the bullet before it enters the target and the kinetic energy of the bullet after it exits the target. No more no less.
What this means is that if the bullet lodges somewhere say in an engine block then there is a great amount of energy transfer however if the bullet hits a relatively benign area like say the aft fuselage or wing tip then a much smaller amount of energy is transferred. A cannon on the other hand can transfer much more energy to the target for two very important reasons. First, is a higher kinetic energy due to greater mass and second, is the fact that a cannon carries an explosive charge. This charge adds an even greater amount of energy. However the explosion has a dual effect. It can cause massive damage from the force of the explosion and the smaller fragments of bullet can now impose more of the initial kinetic energy to the target because their energy is now dispersed over a larger area.
I don’t think that the .50s are good snap shot weapons. I forgot what you said your hit percentage was Vermillion but if it was between 3 and 5 percent then in any given shot only 3 to 5 percent of your bullets are connecting.
I think that the .50s are probably modeled correctly. I think what we are seeing is that gunnery skills need to be 5 times better with machine guns than with cannons.
Towd,
No offense but your .22 analogy is incorrect. Aircraft are not made out of ballistic jelley or milk jugs full of water. A more accurate example would be to go shoot at empty beer or coffee cans with the two different rounds. Your case only works if a bullet hits a fuel tank.
Spritle
[This message has been edited by Spritle (edited 03-28-2000).]
