Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham Boak
I suspect there were biplane fighters with 4 fuselage-mounted machine guns, although I can't think of one offhand. The Me 209-II had a similar wingroot mounting to the Fw series. The La 7 is nagging at me - there were versions with three cannon in the fuselage and others with either two or four. My books are temporarily out of reach.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kolya1
Yes, there were effectively some biplane fighters with 4 guns firing through the propeller's arc : I can think of the Polikarpov biplanes : I-15, I-15bis, and I-153. The early models had PV-1 MGs while the late ones used ShKAS, which must have been quite difficult to synchronise, because of their very high rate of fire (1800 rounds/min unsynchronised). The MiG-3 also usually carried 3 guns in the nose above the engine (2 ShKAS, 1 UB). The La-7 had usually 2 ShVAK 20mm guns, but by the end of the war versions with 3 lighter B-20 guns appeared. The post-war La-9 and La-11 had 4 NS-23 23mm guns.
I don't know if that is among the reasons why some air forces favored wing guns and other fuselage ones, but I think I once read that Soviet pilots who fired at close range complained about the disposition of the Spitfire's armament. I suppose it's possible that air forces that emphasized deflection shooting preferred wing guns which covered a wider area...
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Kolya and Graham
Thanks for the information about the Russian WWII and post-war fighters. I certainly have overlooked the Russian fighters and their heavy reliance on synchronized guns firing through the propellor arc. I'm very impressed that the La-7 and La-9 could accomodate 3 or 4 23mm cannon in the fuselage and I can only imagine how powerful such a configuration would be.
Kolya, I think you are correct in that some pilots viewed wing guns has having too great a dispersal of fire and favored fuselage and engine-mounted guns for their concentration of fire. I recall Werner Moelders and perhaps Gerhard Barkhorn commenting they favored the concentrated fire of the Bf 109F's two fuselage-mounted machine guns and engine-mounted 15mm (increased to 20mm shortly) cannon, whereas Adolf Galland viewed this configuration as a regression from the 109E armament (2 fuselage machine guns, 2 wing cannon); I also recall that Galland felt that the majority of Luftwaffe fighter pilots did not have the marksmanship to take advantage of the 109F gun configuration.
Kenneth