Another urban legend. The fact is that by the time the bullets slowed that much their trajectory would have dropped below the aircrafts line of flight.
I saw a training film while in the AF of a pair of F-104's strafing concrete pillboxes in which they first hit it with rockets and then made a second pass with their Gatling guns, so the idea that they did not have guns is ridiculous. The most interesting thing to me was that after the rocket attack the pillboxes looked like the photos of bombed out buildings you saw in magazine photos, after the Vulcan Gatling gun pass there was nothing left standing. Of course the supersonic shock wave from a couple of 104's going over at 25 feet, or so, most likely helped flatten the shattered pillboxes, but the Gatlings were outright amazing. IIRC, they were the 20mm's which means 5000 HE rounds per minute. So, as I recall it the F-104 (or at least one version) was armed with one 20mm Vulcan Gating gun in the nose, four rocket launchers under each wing, and I believe there was a hard point under the belly for one bomb or drop tank for increased range. John Sessoms wrote: > From: Adam Maas > >> Well, Canada did buy a bunch of F-104's. Too bad ours were low-level >> nuke ground attack birds (Absolutely no air-to-air capability due to >> lacking a gun prior to 1972 and a dedicated ground-attack radar >> instead of the normal air-to-air set). We shoulda bought F-105 thuds >> instead. >> >> The CF-104 killed a lot of Canadians. > > > AFAIK, none of the F-104s were equipped with guns. > > There's one minor problem with guns in super-sonic interceptors. Once > the bullets leave the barrel, air resistance slows them dramatically. > The aircraft, still flying at super-sonic speed, rapidly overtakes them. > > Doesn't matter if the bullet catches up with you from behind or you > catch up with it ... the end result is still un-wanted holes in the > aircraft. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
