WW2 Cannons

[+SkippyBing]

Having probably come close to being banned at Sim-Outhouse over this I was wondering if anyone here could clear things up for me.

 

One of the Mods over there is working on a P-61 for FSX, which is coming along nicely, at some point they said the Mosquito wasn't a good night-fighter which I queried, because it seemed to do alright. One of the points they raised was that the Mosquito couldn't match the armament of the P-61 and said 'With the P-61s four canon alone its considered to be the most devastating aircraft of world war two. it could shred anything' and 'The Mossie didnt have that kind of firepower.'.

 

However as far as I can tell both aircraft had 4 x Hispano 20mm cannon, while some P-61s had four .50 cal in a turret I'm not sure they'd be making much of a difference once you'd been hit by all that 20mm anyway. So are they wrong to say the Mosquito didn't have that kind of firepower or did the P-61 have better 20mms?

 

Don't get me started on the radar side of things where apparently the P-61 had better equipment, despite the later Mosquitoes being fitted with the same model...

[fallenphoenix1986]

I see I'm not the only one to wander away from a certain site in search of sanity and or grown ups...

 

Dont really know too much about the P-61 or the various models of the Mossi for that matter however I'd like to throw the Me-262 into the ring, depending on the model you may have up to 6 Mk-108 30mm cannons in the nose. Or the Ta-154, 4 Mk-108's and 2 MG-151's. Then theres the Ju-88... 4 BK37 37mm cannon.

 

Whichever way you cut it 4 x 20mm does not make the P-61 the most heavily armed night fighter.

 

Craig

Edited May 27, 2011 by fallenphoenix1986

[ezlead]

Mossies had 4 20mm Hispano's. Some also had 4 .303 Brownings plus the 20's.

The top RAF nightfighter pilots got to fly the 'Widow' near wars end.

They all preferred the 'Mossie'.

One of the Pilots said "The best thing about the Mossie was the speed.

If you got into a pinch,you just added power to those Merlins and out ran anything that 'Jerry had."

 

Check this link:

http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_mosquito_night_fighter.html

[firehawkordy]

Skippy, if I remember right the 50s were mounted in the turret so that the crew could get a kill from it's targets blind spot. Also the 50s had a higher rate of fire than the 20mm's. That said it seems that the American built HS.404s were not as reliable as the British built ones. Found this on Wikipedia

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispano-Suiza_HS.404

 

Most things there are suspect but this seems legit.

 

As for the German's 30mm, true their birds were more heavily armed but the rate of fire was painfully slow, added to that was a heavy shell that, according to articles and books I have read, needed the nose of the plane pitched up slightly in order to "loft" the shells into a target. Firing whrere the aim point was useless as the round would drop below it's intended victim.

[liamp51]

LOL, the Mossie, (most versions) had 4x 20mm Hispano cannons, and depending on the variant, 4x .30cal Browning machine guns. Either way, if your hit by those 20mm cannons, it's pretty much game over for you.

[Slartibartfast]

Okay P-61 vs Mosquito...

 

Both had 4 20mm Guns... as well as backups... The Mosquito Night fighter though only carried 4 20mm also if I remember rightly some of the production runs off the P-61 also only only carried 4 20mm as they had airflow issues with the turret.

 

And has been said before the cannons built in the US where generally of inferior quality to the UK built ones. Also the later marks of Mosquito carried the same Radar and also had slightly better range and performance specs... If I was driving one of them I know which one I would have preferred and yes its the Mossie simply because it looks damn good...

[+SkippyBing]

The Mosquito Night fighter though only carried 4 20mm also if I remember rightly some of the production runs off the P-61 also only only carried 4 20mm as they had airflow issues with the turret.

 

That's pretty much what I thought, although the early Mosquito Night Fighter also had the 4 .303s the radar wasn't really up to much consisting mostly of some aerials stuck on the nose!

 

Thanks for clarifying the armament situation, I was/am kind of stumped as to why they thought the P-61 had the better armament and thought I might have missed something, as they temporarily locked the thread and deleted one of my posts I figured I should stop asking over there!

 

Interesting to hear about the German experience with the 30mm, do you know if the sight could compensate for that or was it basically done by eye?

[+Gepard]

Its the old discussion what is better a armament of fast firing machine guns or of slow firing machine cannons. Americans prefer the fast firing smaller calibers the rest of the world the bigger guns, up today. US birds have usually the caliber 20mm, european, chinese, russian birds use mostly caliber 30mm or nearby calibers.

 

The german experience in WW2 was that it was neccessary to hit a B-24 up to 30 times with a 20mm machine gune to shot it down, while only 3-5 rounds of 30mm were able to bring down such a bird.

[Toryu]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MK_108_cannon

 

650rounds per minute is quite enough for a gun that would do the following to your aircraft:

Blenheim

Spitfire

 

@Firehawk:

I've never had heard about that 6-gun steup in the 262 before, till it googeled and found this illustaration:

That's four 30mm guns and two 20mm guns.

The MK103 is a low-ROF gun with a higher muzzle-energy than the 108.

In fact, serial-built 262s flew with two (fighter-bomber version) MK108s or four (fighter versions) of them.

 

The only other variation to see limited (!) service was the 50mm bomber-destroyer:

Edited May 30, 2011 by Toryu

[Hokum]

I've read a fair bit about the Mossie and the P-61, overall the Mossie was a hotter bird but the size of the P-61 made it a stable gun platform. The P-61 usually had the turrts removed in early models and the later models didn't have it at all. The issue was the turret masking the elevator in nose up flight.

 

Overall the P-61 was a late comer and so SHOULD of been better. I think many believed the RAF when they under played the Mossies abilities, some USAAF pilots suspected it was due to the RAF not wanting to divert aircraft to US hands as they shouldn't get enough for themselves. Between a P-61 and a NF 30 Mossie I'd prefer to be in the Mossie... The germans hated them with the Uhu pilots feared the NF 30's.