does he-111 have any chance against p-40?

Is the damage done by the p40 below higher then say a 190? Seems like it did more damage then cannon. 

Well, it looks like the guns are closely matched, as long as the bullet weight, and powder charge per round were similar. Notice that the German guns could use US ammunition (0.51" bullets), but the US guns could NOT use the German rounds. It's a trick our enemies have been using for a long time.

That was the GUNS. The cannons tip the scales in the FW-190's favor, though. A 20MM cannon round will do some severe damage to whatever it hits. Especially an airplane.

It has to hit the target to do the damage, though. It looks to me that the P-40 is lighter, has a lower wing-loading, and so on. The FW-190 IS heavier, and has a higher wing-loading, but it's overall faster.

So, the P-40 can most likely turn tighter, a telling capability in aerial combat. The FW-190 can climb higher, though, and has a better Rate of Climb. Thus, if the FW-190 pilot can keep the plane's energy up, and keep the fight in the vertical, he will probably be able, eventually, bring the cannon to bear. Not that the .50 cal's are pikers. They do some excellent damage, so if the P-40 can get a few into the FW, he's most likely toast. But if the FW can bring the cannon to bear, it's probably over.

Generally, over-all, it comes down to the pilot's skill, as is usually the case. If he knows his plane's abilities, and liabilities, better than the opposing pilot, he will be the victor. The Germans had excellent pilots, over-all, with combat experience, at the beginning of the war. The US had excellent schools, but IMO what tipped the scales was the US tactics. The US produced more aircraft, faster, and the US schools churned out very good pilots, with combat experienced flight instructors. The use of the wing-man was a telling point in the US's favor. The Germans had the Aerial Knight, 1V1, mindset, but the US tried to keep it a 2V1 arena. Thus, if the German focused on a single aircraft, the wingman could come around on him.

If it's a pure armament fight, the FW has the advantage, with the 20MM cannon, but every pilot the Germans lost was a greater loss to their overall forces than a single pilot was to the US. The Germans couldn't turn out planes OR pilots at the rate the US could. Thus, as the war went on, they lost more and more planes AND pilots over-all, than the US did. Early part of the war, the Germans had a better kill ratio, but, as I said, every loss they suffered was a greater loss, percent of the overall force wise, than the US suffered per pilot/plane.

Not really a definitive answer, but the variables are so numerous, it's an impossible call. Pilot skill, plane's mechanical condition, engine condition, the list is immense.

Hope this answers to some small extent. Good video, BTW :)

Pat☺

Notice that the German guns could use US ammunition (0.51" bullets), but the US guns could NOT use the German rounds. It's a trick our enemies have been using for a long time.

 

I wasn't aware of that.

Yep. It's a policy, I think, to make bullets, and thus obviously the guns that fire them, able to use enemy ammunition. Not US policy, but a number of traditional enemies, like the Germans, and Russians do it.

The US .556 round, though, is just too small for most to bother with. It's drawbacks are legion. I don't blame "them" at all for disregarding it as a possible caliber to use. IMO, as a Former US Marine, and Marksmanship Instructor, is that we shouldn't use it either, but the government doesn't listen to the troops. Stoner, and McNamara sold it to the US, and then went on a massive publicity campaign, extolling it's virtues, and ignoring it's drawbacks. It seems to have worked, too, sadly.

IMO, the M-16, a badly thought out derivative of the AR-15, has killed as many of our troops as the enemy they've been used against. Sad, but there it is. Granted, the current version, the M4, has had some of the failures fixed, but even so, the lightness of the bullet is a huge drawback for a large number of reasons.

Just take a look at the 7.62×51mm NATO, a very popular round, with a good punch. The Russian version? 7.62 X 54 mm . See? same principle. They can use ours, but not the reverse. Not a bad concept, but think if both sides tried to keep up with each other. The evolution of rounds would quickly outstrip the ability to design new weapons to use them.

IMO, that's why the US doesn't bother doing it.

Ok, /rant off...

Pat☺

It's certainly possible for a simple machine gun to do more damage than a cannon, particularly when talking about some of the cannons used as armament on WW2 German fighter aeroplanes, as their cannons were not quite as devastating as you might imagine.

On the face of it, it would seem obvious that since a cannon round explodes when it hits something, it is going to do more damage than a bullet which relies purely on transferring kinetic energy to a target by simply hitting it very fast. However, the problem with German aircraft cannons, was that in order to be able to fit them on their fighters, they had to severely limit their capabilities to be able to do so.

If you ever see a Messerschmitt bf109 for real, particularly if it is parked up next to something like a Hurricane or an F4U Corsair at an airshow or a museum or whatever, you will notice that it is considerably smaller than those other WW2 fighter aeroplanes. This had a bearing on other German combat aeroplanes too, since the development of the cannons by the Germans in the late 1930s, which would find their way into German combat aeroplanes in WW2, was very much influenced by the need to be able to fit them into the comparatively small bf109.

In order to get the weapons and ammunition to be light enough and small enough to fit in the diminutive 109, and to not have so much recoil as to cause damage to its fairly lightweight airframe, the Germans opted to use a smaller cannon projectile with a smaller warhead, a reduced muzzle velocity, and a reduced cyclic rate since the gun itself was pared down in size too and could not therefore be kept sufficiently cool with a high rate of fire.

Doing this had three less than ideal consequences: First, a small explosive projectile obviously does not explode with a particularly large force, second, a slow rate of fire means that a fleeting shot, which is often all you'll get in combat, does not put a lot of rounds on the target, and third, with a reduced muzzle velocity, German cannon rounds would typically explode the moment they made contact with a target, which is not as preferable as having a cannon round first penetrate the skin of an enemy aeroplane and then explode inside it to damage the critical components within. Detonating on the skin of an aeroplane creates a lot of rather serious looking damage, but it doesn't tend to cause structural damage or damage to the critical parts and crew inside the aeroplane.

So whilst you might not think a machine gun would match the damage a cannon could do, you have to consider that Hurricanes and Spitfires for example, had eight machine guns pumping hundreds of rounds onto a target in a few seconds at a considerably higher muzzle velocity than a cannon and therefore penetrating the target much more, and the P-51 Mustang had six of them doing that, whereas a bf109 or Fw190 might only be putting a few cannon rounds onto a target in the same amount of firing time and these not tending to penetrate either. And since it was typically only carrying two cannons most of the time, backed up by machine guns, and less of those too because it was limited in what it could carry, by virtue of having those cannons on board in the first place, it was basically firing a lot less ammo at what it needed to hit.

And with regard to shooting at an He-111. This was a bomber originally conceived at a time where it was actually faster than contemporary fighter aeroplanes, so it wasn't very heavily armoured, which is one of the reasons why it was fast. But a hail of bullets at a very high muzzle velocity would often rip through many of the unarmoured compartments of German bombers, causing untold damage to it.

Not only this, but one of the features of quite a lot of German bombers which you will notice, is that they often have the crew placed in close proximity to one another. Although this was done for a pretty good reason, in that it was quite rightly thought that putting the crew members near one another would boost the moral support they would lend to one another when in combat, unfortunately it also meant that a serious hit from some machine gun fire in a compartment filled with crew was likely to injure or kill several crew members all in one go, and then this would have the reverse effect on the morale of the surviving members of the crew, as they had to deal with dead and wounded comrades alongside them.

It was a fairly commonly held belief (certainly just prior to WW2) that fighter aeroplanes wouldn't even get near a bomber (this is why countries spent so much time trying to develop radar in the run up to WW2). You can see evidence of this in the attitude of the Luftwaffe at the start of WW2: It wasn't the fighter pilots who the Luftwaffe regarded as the elite of their force, it was the bomber pilots who were lauded over. Of course as it turned out, history had other ideas about that, but it is nevertheless true that the German high command at the start of WW2 believed that their fighters would play very little part in the proceedings and they almost begrudgingly developed fighter aeroplanes at the time, preferring to concentrate on machines which dealt out damage rather than ones which they considered as more defensive in nature and might possibly be ineffective at that role anyway. They genuinely considered the Ju-87 Stuka was the elite of the elite amongst their arsenal, so much so that they insisted many of their other bomber designs must have a dive bombing capability, and to do that, they had to strengthen them up, adding weight, which slowed them down, and then the fighters could indeed catch up to them and engage them.

nice post Chock!

Alot of things I didn't know about!

Particularly about how the Germans viewed the bombers the elite over fighters

From what I recall, Hitler was bound-and-determined that the ME-262 be used as a bomber, not a fighter. I believe the developers "accidentally misunderstood", and made them as fighters, instead. They just didn't make a big deal out of it, so as to not draw attention.

It was really too late in any event, but they did do some decent damage to the bomber formations.

They would climb waaay up, where jets work quite well, but not prop planes, and wait until a formation came along, then dive down into it, spraying machine gun and/or cannon fire all over the bombers, then continue on down and away, faster than most of the fighters protecting the bombers could match.

As far as I know, a number of P-51 pilots did give chase, but unless they could get in front of the 262 somehow, for a lead-pursuit intercept, they'd never catch them. UNTILL...

The fighter pilots found that, since the ME-262 had to slow down to a "reasonable" speed for landing. If they could, the P-51 pilots, who eventually were detached from the bomber formations for hunting Targets Of Opportunity, would hang out near the ME-262 base, hoping to catch some in the landing pattern. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

It's not "nice", or "fair", but it was war, so...

I think the US made bigger bombers than the Germans. It did reduce the number of crewmen killed or wounded in a single pass by an enemy.

Have fun!

Pat☺

The use of the wing-man was a telling point in the US's favor. The Germans had the Aerial Knight, 1V1, mindset, but the US tried to keep it a 2V1 arena. Thus, if the German focused on a single aircraft, the wingman could come around on him.

The Germans switched from the WWI 3 Vic plane formations to pairs just before WWII. They learned this during the Spanish Civil War, and put it to good use during the Battle of Britain. And the Finnish also changed to the Finger Four model in the 30s too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_formation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger-four

Weight of fire on target has more bearing in a 4d world than any single large cannon shell which must `occupy` the same space at the same time to be effective. Energy is measured only as power x time and in that, cannon is superior.

For aircraft, this fails to take into consideration such factors as convergence (the range at which the cone of fire was set) and time - the number of rounds delivered into a particular area in a particular time. At which the 0.50 dominated, especially for freshly-qualified pilots.

If the priority is shooting down bombers rate of fire is less important than shell weight - a single hit with a 20mm explosive shell was often enough to disable a bomber, and while the same is also a truth for attacking fighters, getting a coincidental confluence was much harder against a nimble, small aircraft, so the likelihood of a hit was reduced, except in head-on or tail-on attacks.

The best fighter pilots either catered to those strengths (Dick Bong favoured head-on attacks for his P-38, but that of course had no need for convergence as all the guns were in the nose) or were remarkable deflection shots. Sailor Malan had armourers set his 8 x .303 guns to a `point` convergence pattern rather than the standard cone of fire to deliver concentrated fire to a point at 250 yards.

Erich Hartmann was the top Ace of WW11 and he favoured the close-in attack, often waiting until the enemy plane was filling the windscreen (about 50 metres) before opening fire, due to the relatively slow rate of fire of the 30mm boss-mounted MG108. He had his wing guns set to the same 50m convergence. He was shot down many times by the detritus from the plane he was attacking, but never in air-to-air combat...

To our OP, you are opening fire waaaaaay to far, so close in to about 100m, preferably 50m then unleash the full weight of fire - you'll blow the aircraft apart, rather than blowing bits off it.

Also build your skills in off-boresight deflection shooting - a fighter cannot shoot you if you are attacking from the side, and bomber crew have a much harder shot if you are at 45° to their line of flight...a deflection shot also increases the surface area penetrated, increasing the chance of hitting the crew or crucial machinery.

If your sim permits you to alter such things, bringing the convergence to a lower figure, and setting it to point rather than cone convergence, is a good place to start. At the moment your fighter vids show you shooting holes in the sky, not ending enemy aircraft.