Is there a discrepency with Aces High's Ho-103 gun rate of fire?
I've been reading about the Terrible performance of the Ho-103 machine gun in Japanese service. Specifically, I was interested because of how the Ki-43 had one gun and then one much more reliable 7mm MG. Not only was the gun liable to jam or explode at first, but it was slow. Very slow. A combination of the Browning design and the Japanese synchronization gear, the gun reportedly only had a rate in the range of 400-450 rpm give or take. This was the very real reason why the Japanese pilots preferred the 7mm MGs so long into the war.
That made me wonder... The Ho-103 was common, right? You find it on our Ki-61 as well, but this is outside of the sync area, and fires unhindered from the wings. Doing an AH test gives roughly 882 rpm for those wing guns. Not bad.
I was thinking about the earlier versions of the Ki-61 that had the 4x 12.7mm guns or the MG151/20 in the wings and the 12.7m in the nose. I was thinking about how they would suffer the same problems with sync on this configuration.
Then I realized our Ki-84 has this same gun in the nose. At an in-game test that shows ~945rpm. Surely this is the unsynchronized rate, firing through the prop? That can't be right? Should it not be even slower than the unsynch'ed rate of the Ki-61? That seems to be the most high-end unsynch'ed ROF for the Ho-103.
Shouldn't the Ki-84 nose guns also fire in the 400 rpm range, same as the reported rate of fire of the Ki-43 and other craft? They are the same guns, right: Ho-103?
Isn't this also the single heavy MG in the nose of the A6M5b we have in-game also? Thus that should also have a slower ROF? I did not quite time that one (it's linked to a 7mm, hard to add that one up), but it seems to fire pretty fast.
As another related issue, the C2's 12.7mm nose guns fire about 634 rpm in-game, but some cases the Breda SAFAT was rated/estimated down as low as 400-450rpm when synchronized. Strangely enough, that mimicks the similar Ho-103 performance found in several places, and the guns were very similar (I believe the Ho-103 fired a Breda shell).
Some other sources/studies show the synch'ed RPM as in the 550-575 range. It would appear our ROF is too high in-game (and yes I'm painfully aware of how slow the guns already fire on this plane!).