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Old 19th May 2009, 21:09
kennethklee kennethklee is offline
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kennethklee
Re: gun synchronization to fire through propeller arc

Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterVerney View Post
While my experience is not strictly relevant to the thread, I'll stick in my two pennorth.
We had Mosquito night fighters with 4 fuselage mounted 20mm. We then upgraded? to the Meteor night fighter which had 2 20mm in each wing, mounted outboard of the engines.
We got lower scores on air firing exercises with the Meteor and particularly noticed stoppages as a problem. A stoppage meant abandoning the exercise because the yaw induced made accurate aiming impossible. Whereas on the Mosquito a stoppage had no effect, except for reducing the number of rounds fired which reduced the score.
Peter-

Thanks for sharing your flying and gunnery experiences with the Mosquito and Meteor. I find interesting that a gun stoppage on the Meteor would induce such yaw as to make accurate aiming afterwards impossible. (I assume this occurred because of the resulting assymetry of recoil of the remaining outboard guns firing.) I'm surprised that this would occur with a two-engined aircraft, I would think single-engined fighters would be more vulnerable to this. I haven't read of the gun stop-related yaw occurring in other fighters with outboard (i.e., wing-mounted) guns, but your experience induces me to wonder if it has.

Kenneth
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