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Old 6th August 2010, 20:54
Johnny .45 Johnny .45 is offline
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Re: Hurricane Mk IIC cannon:drum-magazine or belt-fed?

Perhaps removing the two cannons from the Seafire was in the interests of saving a bit of weight and making carrier-operations a bit easier? I know the Spitfire was far, far from an ideal carrier plane. Reducing the outboard weight a bit might help lessen some of the difficulties of landing on such a narrow-track landing gear? And takeoff, of course, although compared to landing on a carrier, taking off is a piece of cake. I suppose the landing gear made everything more difficult.
It also could be to improve climb rate. I don't know that the Seafire was lacking much in that department, but depending on the height a shadower was loitering at, he might have time to escape before the fighters could reach him. And the lighter armament would also improve range a bit, another area that the Seafire was lacking in.
I don't know, those are all guesses. Have you ever heard a specific reason?
I'm also curious as to what you mean by "accepted the limitation to 2 (cannon) on the Spitfire". Any Spitfire that was fitted with a Universal wing could carry four cannons, if they were fitted. I know that most had Hispano/Browning mixes, but they COULD hold four cannons. I've heard different reasons for this. The original argument for retaining the MG's along with the cannon was that the cannon couldn't sustain fire very long, but once they ditched the drum-feed and doubled the ammo capacity, that wasn't such an issue.
I've also heard things about RAF pilots (at least initially) dis-trusting the cannons, mostly due to the reliability issues that they had during the first attempts at fitting cannon into the wings. I think that those issues weren't entirely cleared up for a while, and the pilots were just getting used to the idea of a all-cannon fighter. And the heavy cannons tended to soak up power and performance, which was a bit lacking anyway. I suppose it makes sense that they'd give the Hurricane the 4-cannon armament first, since after the BoB was over it became essentially a ground-attack plane, and it didn't have to scrap it out in any dogfights.

As for the Fw 190 and it's guns...I've seen a number of photos of Fw 190's lacking their outer cannons, and I've read at least one anecdotal account of an Eastern Front pilot ditching the outer guns to keep up with Soviet fighters. But you're right, and probably most of the Fw 190 without outer cannons were done by the factory or official maintenance units. They were deleted from a number of "U-kit" versions, and from Jabo's. And I don't think the F or G had them either, but that was probably intended from day one, to counter the weight of all the extra armor. And the Dora only had the wing-root guns too, I think.
So, yeah, I probably mis-stated that one. Although who knows...things were pretty chaotic towards the end of the war, and Allied fighters were getting pretty dominant...it seems likely to me that at least a few units did some modifying of their own, but I won't even insinuate that I can prove it!
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