Hi Richard,
>>2 shots per target would probably be all that was
>> needed/practical. So I'd peg the practical rate of fire at somewhere
>> around 3-5 rounds per minute in ideal circumstances. Just a guess!
>>
>No, I'd disagree, it fires at a rate of 60rpm.
Yes, the cyclic rate is 60rpm. But for starters... since the gun didn't
have 60 rounds loaded up, it couldn't possibly fire 60 rounds per minute.
If one tried there would be 27 noisy seconds and 33 of dead silence ;-)
I am also suspicious that even though the reload time might have been one
round per second, in reality the gun in the plane in combat conditions
wouldn't be able to fire 27 rounds in a row without malfunction, damage
to the gun system, or causing some other sort of problem. So in combat,
for these reasons and the shortage of ammo, the gunner never expended all
his ammo as fast as he theoretically could. Therefore, the number of
rounds expended in 60 seconds of an engagement would be far lower for a
variety of reasons. That is the difference between "practical" and
"cyclical". I guessed at 3-5 and it sounds like from something you wrote
that was a pretty good guess.
The rounds per minute is only an indicator of how long it takes a single
shell to be replaced by another shell, not how fast the weapon can expend
ammo in a single minute's space of time. This is a common misperception
and it leads to all sorts of perception problems. All too often the
cyclic rate of fire is used to compare combat effectiveness of one
platform vs. another, and that is a big mistake to do since PRACTICAL
issues are highly variable and often have little to do with the weapon
system itself (i.e. human factors). In fact, the same gun system mounted
on one platform might actually have a higher/lower practical rate of fire
than the SAME EXACT gun system mounted on a different platform due to the
peculiarities of the platform it is mounted on/in.
Again, this is just a different way of looking at things. I make
computer based military simulations for a living, so I rarely think of a
weapon's performance in terms of cyclical abilities. Practical rates of
fire are all that really matter if a simulation is to hold water :-)
Steve
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 23:18:32 PDT