Hi Hooligan,
>In the case of a fighter aircraft in a tailchase, ballistically things are worse because the shooter and target are both moving.
Of course, you're right. That's why I provided data for up to 500 m range though Charge specifically asked for 300 m :-)
But actually, drop isn't a big issue since the sightline is depressed to compensate for that. From the trajectory diagram for the Fw 190A-7/A-8, at 650 m was about 1.2 m below the sight line, which is not quite 2 mil. (A typical WW2 gunsight circle would have 70 mil diameter.) From the P-38 boresighting chart which only runs to 500 yards, I'd say its 20 mm cannon was about as far below the sight line as the Fw 190's at 650 m.
(The flatter trajetory meant that the P-38's cannon arched to only 15 cm above the sight line compared to the Fw 190's 80 cm.)
It's interesting to have a look at shooting accuracies the Luftwaffe considered to be realistic against heavy bombers under combat conditions:
d (m) - Ph MG151/20 - Ph MK103 - Ph MK214
500 - 9.1% - 10.0% - 10.5%
1000 - 3.3% - 3.8% - 3.8%
1500 - 0.8% - 1.3% - 1.5%
The 50 mm MK214 as a large-caliber high-velocity weapon of course had a significantly flatter trajectory than the MG151/20, but that only paid off beyond effective range.
I think that reinforces my belief that drop is less interesting than flight time, and in fact, Charge had originally asked for deflection shots :-)
The necessity to account for deflection of course greatly reduces the sensible engagement range, so it certainly makes sense that Charge wanted to look at ranges of up to 500 m. Judging from the typical convergence settings used by the USAAF, they did indeed expect to fire at ranges of 250 to 300 yards only :-)
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)
