My little 109 v spit experiment

[trademe900]

Originally Posted by Robo.

I'd very happily swap my eight .303 for two nose mounted MG 17s with 60 seconds of fire. I fly both RAF and LW and the stopping power and accuracy of the nose mounted mgs is great and suits me well. You can shoot long range and you can keep the thumb on the trigger for much longer. The effect is suprisingly strong when you hit well - works against 109s and RAF fighters as well - fire, PKs, important parts falling off etc... Flying for the RAF, you might have more guns but unless you get your target on the convergence range, you're wasting your 14 seconds of fire. Now getting a good 109 pilot to convergence range is a bit of a problem on its own, but even against the bombers, the MG17s are very effective and you can snipe from very long distance. Works great, trajectory is nice as it should be. Just my 0.02, YMMW of course...

Whoever said in this thread that the armament was an advantage on LW side was right - nose mounted mgs + cannons = hell of a punch. Good shot will be succesful with anything, but I admit the MG17 are a great weapon when used right, as a RAF pilot I fear not the Oerlikon cannons, but long range MG 17.

German plane armament is a huge advantage.

I actually feel the .303s are undermodelled in current state, according to many combat reports. 8 .303 is actually pretty lethal at close range with an astonishing amount of rounds tearing through the plane. What's strange is you can get pilot kills all the time with the MG17, but with 8 guns putting down an enormous amount of lead you can barely get pilot kills??

All the .303 are good for in this current state is putting a large amount of rounds over a plane, with 1 or 2 rounds likely to strike the radiators and cooling system- thing is though, the planes can go forever with burst rads/streaming glycol. This claimed a huge amount of aircraft in real life.