In article ,
"Jeff Crowell" writes:
Peter Stickney wrote:
And then, there was Operation Pinball, the ultimate simulator. Real
bombers with real turrets, but the .50 cals have been replaced with
.30 cals firing frangible (break up on impact) bullets. The targets
are specially armored P-63s that make passes on the student gunner's
airplane. There are acoustic sensors in the P-63s that can hear the
impact of the bullets on the skin for measuring the number of hits.

Wooden bullets, if I recall correctly. An old family friend,
now passed on, experienced some of this.

Lead dust in a Bakelite matrix, actually. There were .30 caliber
rounds with wooden bullets, though. They were used with some models
of Rifle Grenade Dischargers. Later models of Grenade Dischargers
used blank cartridges to propel teh grenade. (That's one of the
reasons that the M1903 Springfield was retained in the Infantry Squad
until late 1944/early 1945. It was real easy to fire grenade from
it. Garands required a whole lot of fiddling (You had to add & remove
parts from the gas system - not something you want to do in combat)
and you didn't get any better rate of fire, since the blank rounds had
to be manually loaded into the rifle.

He said the ballistics of the frangible bullets were so far off
from Real Life (tm) that the usefulness was limited.

Yes, the ballistics were different. But if you're not mixing
ammunition types in the same belt, that's really not all that
important. (And I'm sure that the RP-63 pilots would be a lot happier
if that didn't happen) The sights, and the cams & springs in the
lead-computing sights used at the time Late 1944 on) would be
recalibrated to provide the same sight picture that you'd get with
service ammunition in a .50 cal.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster