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Old March 8th 04, 08:24 PM
Keith Willshaw
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"zxcv" wrote in message
...
It seems to me that the Germans and Japanese had a lot more cannon in

their
planes than the Americans who seemed to rely almost totally on .50 machine
guns.

Why was that? What was the rate of fire or the 20mm cannons and what type
of projectiles did they fire?



Because most continental powers were using .30 calibre MG's and often
only mounted 2 or 4 of them which gave pretty poor firepower

4 or 6 .50's give a much better armament and less incentive to
move to cannon. Various calibre cannon were tried with some success
and towards the end of WW2 the USN started to adopt it more
rapidly.

Keith