21 replies to this topic

[trikke]

as an american, i'm metrically-challenged      i apologize to the rest of the world for this post

 

i see tons of shell sizes that mean nothing to me, so i went around my house and measured common items to compare

 

standard soup can = 66mm      wooohooo!

 

standard beer can = 55mm at widest point, the top and bottoms are much smaller 

 

pharmacy plastic tinted pill bottles = 36mm, or almost exactly what the P-39s etc, pump out at you

 

50 cals = 12.5mm    i couldn't find anything a half inch wide that we would all instantly recognize    help me think of one, please?   maybe a AA battery?

 

edit: found this   7.62mm equivalent to .308    maybe that's a AAA battery?

 

Edited by trikke, 17 May 2018 - 01:05 PM.

[HANNIBAL_LECTER_1]

20mm

 

 

30mm

 

 

 

37mm

 

 

37mm Mig-15

 

[clodhoppr]

Holy shiola!

For those of us who have no military background and little to no real understanding of military ammunition, I am assuming, in real life, if ONE of them 37 mm shells graced your aircraft you would be done!!??

Unlike the game of which it takes several shells to shoot down the enemy target...completely unrealistic...

[CorvusCorvax]

IIRC, a U.S. pilot in the Pacific got in behind a Zero, and when he depressed the trigger, his guns fired and then immediately jammed.  The Zero caught fire and went down.  It was later determined that his aircraft expended a total of four rounds of .50 cal ammunition.

 

 

[trikke]

i'll suppose it matters where you're hit, just like the human body

[Reitousair]

Generally speaking, one 37mm shell from a MiG-15 should be enough to take down an aircraft. Unless you graze the side of the fuselage or something in which case you might not blow the plane in half. There's a lot of HE filler in the MiG-15's 37mm shells, so it's not just the ballistic impact you'll have to worry about, it's the explosion as well.

[MacDaddyMatty]

clodhoppr, on 17 May 2018 - 02:14 PM, said:

Holy shiola!

For those of us who have no military background and little to no real understanding of military ammunition, I am assuming, in real life, if ONE of them 37 mm shells graced your aircraft you would be done!!??

Unlike the game of which it takes several shells to shoot down the enemy target...completely unrealistic...

 

If it hits something important, oh my yes.

Although it is possible for solid lead rounds to go right through a fuselage and cause no more damage than a hole.

Really depends where/what is hit.

 

Also rotary air-cooled engines seemed to be able to take more punishment than the in-line water-cooled engines.

[CorvusCorvax]

MacDaddyMatty, on 17 May 2018 - 03:00 PM, said:

 

 

Also rotary air-cooled engines seemed to be able to take more punishment than the in-line water-cooled engines.

 

A hit to any of the coolant system is essentially "game over".

[MacDaddyMatty]

Also noteworthy, the larger the caliber (or bigger the mm)...

- the less ammo you can carry.

- the greater the chance of jam/malfunction, especially when introducing G-forces.

 

but, yeah, the bigger the boom for sure.

[LMG]

CorvusCorvax, on 17 May 2018 - 09:30 AM, said:

IIRC, a U.S. pilot in the Pacific got in behind a Zero, and when he depressed the trigger, his guns fired and then immediately jammed.  The Zero caught fire and went down.  It was later determined that his aircraft expended a total of four rounds of .50 cal ammunition.

 

Damned Gold ammo 

[pyantoryng]

clodhoppr, on 17 May 2018 - 02:14 PM, said:

Holy shiola!

For those of us who have no military background and little to no real understanding of military ammunition, I am assuming, in real life, if ONE of them 37 mm shells graced your aircraft you would be done!!??

Unlike the game of which it takes several shells to shoot down the enemy target...completely unrealistic...

 

A teeny R4M blast would've sheared a wing off a long, long time ago...and of course, back then getting red damage to wings or tail means instant death.

 

The MK 108 could down a B-17 in a few hits IRL...it takes a lot of 3cm shells to down an IL-40P...in other words, forget about it, game's plagued with instant death problems so they had to tone it down, a lot...

Edited by pyantoryng, 17 May 2018 - 07:22 PM.

[Dude9872]

The common conversions for military objects aren't too bad:

 

1 inch is about 25 mm

1 kilo is about 2.2 lbs

100 meters is about 110 yards

[mnbv_fockewulfe]

The bigger the better.

Recently had an experience in Revit (an architecture CAD program) where I tried to delete a line and I got the error message:
Line is too small.

What does that even mean?

So I tried deleting a longer line. 

Line is too small.

[I_QQ_4_U]

Well if you are concerned about size always tell your ladies how long it is in metric, you can use bigger numbers that way.

[Captain_Underpants53]

I once worked on a B-52D that took a SAM shrapnel hit back in the midsection.  The crew wasn't even aware of it until landing.  That piece of shrapnel went through the skin, a quite thick structural member, a chaff (my concern) dispenser and fully loaded chaff magazine, and exited out the other side.  If it had his in a lot of places it would have been catastrophic.

[Ysterpyp]

enough to please the ladies   

[Worland]

We were told it only takes 3 hits from a 20-23mm high explosive shell to take down a modern fighter. The holes they make would range from softball to basketball.

I remember we were told 37mm rounds were roughly equivalent to a WW2 hand grenade, weighing more than a pound with 2.5 ounces of explosive filler. Expect holes the size of an old 27inch TV . One hit could easily bring down a fighter.

Of course, just like the rifle caliber and heavy machineguns, shot placement is key. Plenty of fighters out there that survived hits from canons.

[NovaTempest]

CorvusCorvax, on 17 May 2018 - 02:30 PM, said:

IIRC, a U.S. pilot in the Pacific got in behind a Zero, and when he depressed the trigger, his guns fired and then immediately jammed.  The Zero caught fire and went down.  It was later determined that his aircraft expended a total of four rounds of .50 cal ammunition.

 

 

 

You have to remember that zeroes had notoriously poor armor, a single well placed .50 cal round would be able to ignite the gas tank, which was very vulnerable. Compare that to most U.S. aircraft that served in the pacific, especially planes like the F4F and F6F, which had self-sealing fuel tanks. It helps a shell's killing power if the plane its fired at has practically no armor to speak of!

 

Whether or not the U.S. had the best planes in the war is certainly debatable, but we sure had quite a few types that could take an enormous amount of punishment.

 

I quote this from Wikipedia, regarding a particular P-47 Thunderbolt:

 

"In June 1943, [Egon] Mayer encountered Robert S. Johnson, a future ace from the 56th Fighter Group of the US Eighth Air Force. Johnson's P-47 Thunderbolt had been badly shot-up by some Focke Wulf Fw 190s during a routine mission. As Johnson limped home, with a canopy that would not open and hydraulic fluid and oil covering his windscreen, Mayer pulled alongside him in his Fw 190. Mayer looked the wounded P-47 over, and then circled to come in from Johnson's six-o'clock to give it the coup de grâce. The first gun pass failed to knock the heavy American fighter out of the sky. Mayer made two more runs on Johnson, without success. After running out of ammunition, Mayer pulled alongside Johnson, saluted him and headed for home. Johnson landed his plane, and counted more than 200 holes, without even moving around the airplane. He also saw that a 20 mm cannon shell had exploded just behind his headrest, which had made it impossible to open his canopy."

 

20mm shells, as HANNIBAL_LECTER's post visualized for us (+1 for that BTW), are no slouches, but this snippet right here goes to show that planes can be made to take an absolute hell of a pounding and still fly.

 

Now if Japan had made planes like this early on in the war things might have been different.

Edited by NovaTempest, 18 May 2018 - 04:46 PM.

[LMG]

NovaTempest, on 18 May 2018 - 11:26 AM, said:

You have to remember that zeroes had notoriously poor armor, a single well placed .50 cal round would be able to ignite the gas tank, which was very vulnerable. Compare that to most U.S. aircraft that served in the pacific, especially planes like the F4F and F6F, which had self-sealing fuel tanks. It helps a shell's killing power if the plane its fired at has practically no armor to speak of!

 

Whether or not the U.S. had the best planes in the war is certainly debatable, but we sure had quite a few types that could take an enormous amount of punishment.

 

I quote this from Wikipedia, regarding a particular P-47 Thunderbolt:

 

"In June 1943, [Egon] Mayer encountered Robert S. Johnson, a future ace from the 56th Fighter Group of the US Eighth Air Force. Johnson's P-47 Thunderbolt had been badly shot-up by some Focke Wulf Fw 190s during a routine mission. As Johnson limped home, with a canopy that would not open and hydraulic fluid and oil covering his windscreen, Mayer pulled alongside him in his Fw 190. Mayer looked the wounded P-47 over, and then circled to come in from Johnson's six-o'clock to give it the coup de grâce. The first gun pass failed to knock the heavy American fighter out of the sky. Mayer made two more runs on Johnson, without success. After running out of ammunition, Mayer pulled alongside Johnson, saluted him and headed for home. Johnson landed his plane, and counted more than 200 holes, without even moving around the airplane. He also saw that a 20 mm cannon shell had exploded just behind his headrest, which had made it impossible to open his canopy."

 

20mm shells, as HANNIBAL_LECTER's post visualized for us (+1 for that BTW), are no slouches, but this snippet right here goes to show that planes can be made to take an absolute hell of a pounding and still fly.

 

Now if japan had made planes like this early on in the war things might have been different.

 

I guess that explains why its HP is so high in-game 

[NovaTempest]

Back to the topic at hand, To the OP - Trikke - I've mentioned before about crazy-large shells being used on aircraft.

 

Just to give you an idea, there was one particular Italian Aircraft, the P.108A, that had a 90mm gun mounted into it, which was then upped in caliber to 102mm.

 

The closest visual analog you are going to find on the internet is a 105mm shell, take this modern American one for example:

https://www.military...119-105mm_3.jpg

 

That shell caliber (the 105) is the same one that was used in the original M1 Abrams, there was an instance where that shell was fired directly at an Iraqi soldier during operation desert storm and he practically was reduced to thin air, though from what i heard this may have been slightly exaggerated.

 

the P.108A was to be used for anti-shipping, but if you wanted a guaranteed, absolutely surefire way to knock a large bomber out of the sky while in a plane yourself, the 102mm would be the largest possible shell at the time to have done it with.

Edited by NovaTempest, 18 May 2018 - 04:54 PM.