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Originally Posted by Fredfetish
I accept the inefficiency of the .303 rounds and should be pretty useless against internal armour fitted at an angle. Just also do realise that the 1% of the rounds fired at the bomber would mean that of the 160 rounds of one second firing, that 1.6 bullets would at least penetrate.
Anyway, again back to the structural damage and this is in regards to the fighters. If the bullets are hitting internal structures from the dead six positions, than surely the must be damaged? These are the things that hold the aluminium up in the first place. Also, at 160 bullets a second you are going to let in a lot of air in no time as well. If let’s say the .303 bullet makes a 7 millimetre hole in diameter and we times that with 160, a second’s worth of fire would open up a meter’s worth of area.
With regards to 111 bombers, the article states that some returned home with up to 200 bullet holes in them. With a large exclamation on how big this number is. However, that is little more than a second’s worth of firing. Again I state the sheer volume of rounds that is being fired. (Look at what the 1/3 of the volume mini gun does to the derelict car in the video)
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The armour that they were penetrating was 4mm. He-111's armour for example was 12mm or 3 times thicker.
I believe that the 8x .303 were actually pretty effective against fighters, main reason being that all the vital stuff (as I said earlier) was concentrated in a much smaller space. You need to also remember that in RL there were only usually 2 guns loaded with AP, the rest were ball ammo (good at killing people, not aircraft) and incendiaries with maybe 1 gun loaded with tracer.
The mini gun comparison only works with RoF, obviously the bullets all get fired from the same place so the concentration of fire is better, and you can independantly aim a mini gun. You're basically aiming the plane with the .303's, the wings are vibrating madly the guns are spaced out over 20 feet the target is moving and possibly firing back. it's almost impossible to hit the exact same spot with a 2 second burst so you'd just end up with lots of holes as opposed to one big hole. Also the loss of velocity associated with tumbling bullets is huge. The ammo in a mini gun is also a lot more modern (most of the RAF .303 rounds in use at the start of the battle were WW1/ 1920's designs)
If you want to put a big hole in a plane then use HE.
You could always try 111 squadrons head on tactics!