Instructors: is no combat better?

Subject: Instructors: is no combat better?
From: "Gord Beaman" )

Ok...what calibre rounds was that Art?. Your observations
certainly wasn't true for the .303 calibre Browning machine gun

We had no .303's. Only .50 caliber heavy mg's.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 05:13:36 GMT, "Gord Beaman" )
wrote:

(ArtKramr) wrote:


Actually there was an error between regular rounds and tracer rounds as well.
On a strafing mission you could aim the tracers and see the ground kick up well
behind the tracers. Big difference in ballistic coefficient between the two Aim
the tracers and you would shoot over the target unil you corrected..


Arthur Kramer

Ok...what calibre rounds was that Art?. Your observations
certainly wasn't true for the .303 calibre Browning machine gun.

I've fired likely 20,000 rounds from them in ASW B&G flights and
I cannot see any difference between the trajectory of FMJ ball
ammo and FMJ tracer rounds. Our belts were set up with every
fifth round being a tracer and shooting at a smoke marker on the
sea surface it's very easy to see where the rounds are hitting,
likely much more visible than on land but I haven't done that
mind you.

I found it more effective to use the results of the water hits
rather than to use the gunsight actually. Get them shooting close
to where you needed to with the sight then watch were they were
hitting and correct slightly before firing the next burst and so
on.


Now I admit to being only 23... far too young to have been spraying
bullets around in WW2...

But I hunt wild goats and deer with a '40 Ishapore armoury .303 SMLE
Mk1 III* with the stock cut down... a damn fine hunting rifle that
with a 4x scope will down a beer can at 200 metres..

Here in NZ there is occasionally WW2 army surplus tracer rounds for
the .303 available, and firing those and normal army surplus ball
theres no noticable difference in point of impact...

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