Shells can continue on for as long as we want. The 75mm on the Panzer can be fired to it's maximum range. We set these lifetimes according to the weapon type. There's no point in tracking a .30 cal round for over a mile as that would be inefficient, especially considering the large amount of rounds you could put in the air and the fact that they really wouldn't do anything if you did manage to hit. For larger caliber weapons, that's a different story.
The Ostwind didn't use box magazines like on the 20mm Flak 38. They used strip clips that could be linked into one another and fed serially into the weapon. For example, the Ju 87G mounted Flak 18's which used 6 round clips but two of these clips were held in the magazine to give each weapon an ammunition capacity of 12. On the Flak 43, 8 round clips were used with an open feedtray(not gravity fed btw) that held two of these clips. The ammo loader just had to keep piling these clips onto the feedtray as the weapon was fired. He didn't have to wait for all the ammunition to exhaust before more could be loaded. Because of the space limitations in the turret of the Ostwind, I suspect that the feedtray could only handle 1 clip at a time for the Flak 43 instead of two but I haven't been able to verify this suspicion.
As to whether we'll ever model reloads on weapons that make use of multiple magazines or belts, I don't know. It's kind of a tedious thing to model and filled with special cases of every type so I don't know that it will ever be worth putting the effort into it considering the minimal gain. It might be something we revisit later when all the major stuff is finished.
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Doug "Pyro" Balmos
HiTech Creations
