Zigrat wrote:
So what does this mean? To me, it means the MG151 should be a much better Buff killer (since thats what the germans wer eprimarily doing) and the hispano should be great at anti armor operations….
Well I certainly agree with that. But I also think that round-for-round the Hispano shells should be very good at killing fighters also.
There is a declassified document: “The development of German Aircraft Armament during WWII”, which was written for the US just after the war by a LW colonel. Penetration of the German cannon is not mentioned even in passing anywhere in the document. The Germans were obsessed with explosive content and a lot of effort was spent trying to get enough explosive on target to reliably down a US 4-engined bomber.
Conversely in the declassified books by the Bureau of Ordnance and the Rand Corp (respectively) “The Machine Gun” and “Aircraft Vulnerability in WWII”, they seem to talk a lot about killing fighters and projectile penetration, with very little attention given to explosive content.
I believe that because fighters are relatively compact and that there is little room within them that does not contain components that are absolutely necessarily, they are very susceptible to critical hits. A round that penetrates to and kills the pilot, ammunition box or engine finishes the aircraft. Bombers on the other hand, have multiple engines and pilots, better fire retardant systems, etc…. and should be much harder to take down with a single hit in the right place. Given what they were shooting at, the Allied emphasis on penetration/critical hits and the German emphasis on explosive effects/structural failure make perfect sense to me.
I don’t really think the AH damage model takes all of this stuff into account so we are left with a sort of hybrid damage system which is probably skewed towards giving correct results vs. fighters.
As far as the belting of Mg151 goes, I have an English translation of a German document which gives 20mm belting information. On the Western front it was:
1-Mine
1-Incendiary Tracer
1-Armor Piercing Incendiary
Now I have no doubt that belting was different for different Fighter Groups and missions etc… Nonetheless, I believe that it is representative. I believe that AP must have been considered useful for shooting Allied fighters because the German Fighters weren’t typically used for Ground Attack, and they certainly weren’t hunting Sturmoviks over France.
As AH progresses I hope we see more sophisticated damage modeling, penetration effects and fire. At that point we would have the ability to change which rounds were belted and possibly even good reasons to depending upon what we were hunting.
Let me know if you want me to email the ammo belting information to you. It’s about 800K of scans.
Hooligan
