Instructors: is no combat better?

(ArtKramr) wrote:


Actually there was an error between regular rounds and tracer rounds as well.
On a strafing mission you could aim the tracers and see the ground kick up well
behind the tracers. Big difference in ballistic coefficient between the two Aim
the tracers and you would shoot over the target unil you corrected..


Arthur Kramer

Ok...what calibre rounds was that Art?. Your observations
certainly wasn't true for the .303 calibre Browning machine gun.

I've fired likely 20,000 rounds from them in ASW B&G flights and
I cannot see any difference between the trajectory of FMJ ball
ammo and FMJ tracer rounds. Our belts were set up with every
fifth round being a tracer and shooting at a smoke marker on the
sea surface it's very easy to see where the rounds are hitting,
likely much more visible than on land but I haven't done that
mind you.

I found it more effective to use the results of the water hits
rather than to use the gunsight actually. Get them shooting close
to where you needed to with the sight then watch were they were
hitting and correct slightly before firing the next burst and so
on.
--

-Gord.

Subject: Instructors: is no combat better?
From: "Gord Beaman" )

Ok...what calibre rounds was that Art?. Your observations
certainly wasn't true for the .303 calibre Browning machine gun

We had no .303's. Only .50 caliber heavy mg's.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 05:13:36 GMT, "Gord Beaman" )
wrote:

(ArtKramr) wrote:


Actually there was an error between regular rounds and tracer rounds as well.
On a strafing mission you could aim the tracers and see the ground kick up well
behind the tracers. Big difference in ballistic coefficient between the two Aim
the tracers and you would shoot over the target unil you corrected..


Arthur Kramer

Ok...what calibre rounds was that Art?. Your observations
certainly wasn't true for the .303 calibre Browning machine gun.

I've fired likely 20,000 rounds from them in ASW B&G flights and
I cannot see any difference between the trajectory of FMJ ball
ammo and FMJ tracer rounds. Our belts were set up with every
fifth round being a tracer and shooting at a smoke marker on the
sea surface it's very easy to see where the rounds are hitting,
likely much more visible than on land but I haven't done that
mind you.

I found it more effective to use the results of the water hits
rather than to use the gunsight actually. Get them shooting close
to where you needed to with the sight then watch were they were
hitting and correct slightly before firing the next burst and so
on.


Now I admit to being only 23... far too young to have been spraying
bullets around in WW2...

But I hunt wild goats and deer with a '40 Ishapore armoury .303 SMLE
Mk1 III* with the stock cut down... a damn fine hunting rifle that
with a 4x scope will down a beer can at 200 metres..

Here in NZ there is occasionally WW2 army surplus tracer rounds for
the .303 available, and firing those and normal army surplus ball
theres no noticable difference in point of impact...

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:37:20 +1300, rnf2
wrote:

Here in NZ there is occasionally WW2 army surplus tracer rounds for
the .303 available, and firing those and normal army surplus ball
theres no noticable difference in point of impact...

It would be more than a bit stupid to introduce a tracer round
designed to assist spotting and accuracy with the ball ammunition,
which actually had divergent ballistics.

Gavin Bailey

In article ,
Howard Berkowitz writes:
In article , (Peter
Stickney) wrote:

In article ,
"Kevin Brooks" writes:

"Howard Berkowitz" wrote in message
...
Seriously, would anyone care to speculate that if aircraft gunner was
still a tactically useful skill, how much virtual reality simulator
time
(e.g., in at least a 3-axis-of-motion device) would a gunner get
before
going to a combat unit? Aggressor simulators only, or perhaps a few
pilots that have flown the aggressor ship manipulating the target?

I suspect temperature, noise, fumes, etc. would all be part of the
simulator.

Heck, they used "simulators" of a sort like that during WWII. My dad,
who
was a gunner on a B-29, remembers standing in the back of a truck that
drove
along while the trainee took shots at model aircraft.

Somebody from the Film Industry (Might have been Disney) developed a
prejection system using a hemispherical dome with a turret inside.
They had some sort of system to measure tracking errors.

And then, there was Operation Pinball, the ultimate simulator. Real
bombers with real turrets, but the .50 cals have been replaced with
.30 cals firing frangible (break up on impact) bullets. The targets
are specially armored P-63s that make passes on the student gunner's
airplane. There are acoustic sensors in the P-63s that can hear the
impact of the bullets on the skin for measuring the number of hits.


That is _very_ realistic. I think, all in all, we could do it more
cheaply with virtual reality. Operation Pinball could do G-forces
better, although a simulation platform with multiple degree of freedom
movement can get awfully close.

For a bomber-type platform, G forces probably weren't all that
relavant. Not only were the G limits fairly low, but G onset was low
as well. What would be more important would be simulating the
environment of the guys firing manually operated guns, such as the
Waist and Radio Compartment guns on a B-17. There you've got a bunch
of factors that change - the force of teh windblast on the gun barrel,
the narrow field of view, the wind blast, and the intense cold of
standing at an open window in -50 degree air while a 140 mph wind
(EAS) blows past. (What they ended up doing was designing enclosed
gun positions, with power boosted gun mounts. Of course, the
computerized Fire COntrol Systems of the B-29 and later airplanes took
all of that away, with the gunner's skills changing more to mastering
the switchology of the system, and learning how to track smoothly in
Az?El and range. (Which is a lot like patting your head while rubbing
your stomach). When the radar systems came out, in the B-36 and later
bombers, gunnery was even more detached. The gunner detected teh
target on radar, locked the radar on, and followed up the automatic
tracking. That became something that could be done easily on the
ground, or practiced while in the air (Injecting synthetic targets
into the radar system using a signal generator) on regular flights.

Pinball actually stuck around for quite a while. The last SAC gunnery
class to use the RP-63s and frangible bullets was in 1948.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

In article ,
"Jeff Crowell" writes:
Peter Stickney wrote:
And then, there was Operation Pinball, the ultimate simulator. Real
bombers with real turrets, but the .50 cals have been replaced with
.30 cals firing frangible (break up on impact) bullets. The targets
are specially armored P-63s that make passes on the student gunner's
airplane. There are acoustic sensors in the P-63s that can hear the
impact of the bullets on the skin for measuring the number of hits.

Wooden bullets, if I recall correctly. An old family friend,
now passed on, experienced some of this.

Lead dust in a Bakelite matrix, actually. There were .30 caliber
rounds with wooden bullets, though. They were used with some models
of Rifle Grenade Dischargers. Later models of Grenade Dischargers
used blank cartridges to propel teh grenade. (That's one of the
reasons that the M1903 Springfield was retained in the Infantry Squad
until late 1944/early 1945. It was real easy to fire grenade from
it. Garands required a whole lot of fiddling (You had to add & remove
parts from the gas system - not something you want to do in combat)
and you didn't get any better rate of fire, since the blank rounds had
to be manually loaded into the rifle.

He said the ballistics of the frangible bullets were so far off
from Real Life (tm) that the usefulness was limited.

Yes, the ballistics were different. But if you're not mixing
ammunition types in the same belt, that's really not all that
important. (And I'm sure that the RP-63 pilots would be a lot happier
if that didn't happen) The sights, and the cams & springs in the
lead-computing sights used at the time Late 1944 on) would be
recalibrated to provide the same sight picture that you'd get with
service ammunition in a .50 cal.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

Presidente Alcazar
wrote:

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:37:20 +1300, rnf2
wrote:

Here in NZ there is occasionally WW2 army surplus tracer rounds for
the .303 available, and firing those and normal army surplus ball
theres no noticable difference in point of impact...

It would be more than a bit stupid to introduce a tracer round
designed to assist spotting and accuracy with the ball ammunition,
which actually had divergent ballistics.

Gavin Bailey

Of course...that's why I questioned him. It sounds odd certainly
why the 50 cal round would do that when the .303 doesn't.
Certainly does sound strange what the purpose could be.

Is it possible that you 'mis-remembered' Art?.

I'd appreciate a calm answer here Art rather than a 'blast for
doubting your word'. You have three people (at least) who find
your story strange.
--

-Gord.

"ArtKramr" wrote in message
...
In conjunction with your comment about the gunner's remarks to you; if
simple aerodynamics wasn't a part of every gunner's training during the
war,
it most surely should have been. What this gunner was telling you might
have
been from his training knowledge base or simply as the observed result of
his personal experience. The end result would be the same for recognizing
what the fighter was about to do, but the big difference would have been
the
advantage to gunners having this knowledge up front going into combat as
opposed to finding it out through operational experience.
Every gunner out there should have had at least some basic knowledge of
positive and negative g as that knowledge relates to a firing pass by a
fighter. Those who didn't had to learn the hard way. Gunners being taught
a
few simple facts about g and vectors would have saved many lives........
and
as this knowledge relates to a firing pass, could have been taught in
just a
few minutes during training.
The simple truth of it is that if the fighter rolled inverted during the
pass, in order to pass over you he would have to bunt the airplane into
negative g, and the odds of this happening vs going the positive g route
under you would have all but been a sure bet that he would go positive
under
you; hence the lead would become predictable based on the odds.
I should add that there were a few German fighter pilots who routinely
would
go negative, but never offensively, only defensively.
Erich Hartmann was one of them, and he was not in the theatre.
I've always wanted to ask a gunner from the period if simple aerodynamics
was indeed taught in gunnery training to help with prediction lead
solution,
but somehow I've always forgotten to ask
:-) If there are any gunners out there who can answer this, perhaps they
will post.
Dudley



I think the answer would be no. When I went through gunnery training on
the
way to bomb school they didn't even teach us about that. And the first
time I
heard it, it is was totally new to me. I had to really see it to believe
it.
And when I saw it I thought, "why the hell is he coming in on his back?
Crazy
Krauts"


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer


Art:

Did you guys use the Waller Gunnery Trainer? See:

http://www.cineramaadventure.com/trainer.htm

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/waller01.htm

Waller was an interesting guy. He invented water skies and Cinerama, among
other things.
Simpler WWII gunnery trainers were still be used in arcades in San Diego in
the early 1970s.

Joe




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Subject: Instructors: is no combat better?
From: "Gord Beaman" )
Date: 3/11/04 9:46 AM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

Presidente Alcazar
wrote:

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:37:20 +1300, rnf2
wrote:

Here in NZ there is occasionally WW2 army surplus tracer rounds for
the .303 available, and firing those and normal army surplus ball
theres no noticable difference in point of impact...

It would be more than a bit stupid to introduce a tracer round
designed to assist spotting and accuracy with the ball ammunition,
which actually had divergent ballistics.

Gavin Bailey

Of course...that's why I questioned him. It sounds odd certainly
why the 50 cal round would do that when the .303 doesn't.
Certainly does sound strange what the purpose could be.

Is it possible that you 'mis-remembered' Art?.

I'd appreciate a calm answer here Art rather than a 'blast for
doubting your word'. You have three people (at least) who find
your story strange.
--

-Gord.


No blast. Doubt my word all you like. But tnone of these three people ever
fired a 50 caliber did they? Different guns of different calibers shoot
differently. I own 10 shotguns of different gauges and no two shoot exactly in
the same place in the same way.. To assume because you shot a 303 every gun in
the world shoots exactly in same way is not a reasonable conclusion. And note
that this reply is far more well mannered than the flames you have been
throwing at me in every post the last few months.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

"ArtKramr" wrote in message
...
Subject: Instructors: is no combat better?
From: "Gord Beaman" )
Date: 3/11/04 9:46 AM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

Presidente Alcazar
wrote:

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:37:20 +1300, rnf2
wrote:

Here in NZ there is occasionally WW2 army surplus tracer rounds for
the .303 available, and firing those and normal army surplus ball
theres no noticable difference in point of impact...

It would be more than a bit stupid to introduce a tracer round
designed to assist spotting and accuracy with the ball ammunition,
which actually had divergent ballistics.

Gavin Bailey

Of course...that's why I questioned him. It sounds odd certainly
why the 50 cal round would do that when the .303 doesn't.
Certainly does sound strange what the purpose could be.

Is it possible that you 'mis-remembered' Art?.

I'd appreciate a calm answer here Art rather than a 'blast for
doubting your word'. You have three people (at least) who find
your story strange.
--

-Gord.


No blast. Doubt my word all you like. But tnone of these three people ever
fired a 50 caliber did they? Different guns of different calibers shoot
differently.

But you are not talking about different guns of different calibers. You are
talking about a single gun of a single caliber firing what reportedly was
ammunition with matching trajectories.

As to your word, who in his right mind is NOT doubting it given your
performance over the last couple of weeks?

Brooks

I own 10 shotguns of different gauges and no two shoot exactly in
the same place in the same way.. To assume because you shot a 303 every
gun in
the world shoots exactly in same way is not a reasonable conclusion. And
note
that this reply is far more well mannered than the flames you have been
throwing at me in every post the last few months.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer