| Buster_Dee |
05-23-2012 03:45 AM |
Well, backup as in manual control, but I don't know how effective it was. Look in most turrets, you'll often see two short, 4-sided shafts, with cranks clipped somewhere to work them. The A6A's cranks are at the top of the frame in front of the gunner (the red ones), and the shafts are on each side wall, sitcking out of some kind of gear box. In this turret, the left one is for elevation, the right one for azimuth. There would have been some kind of feature that let you, then, fire the guns with a foot control (since you're hands are tied up). The Martin had two cranks hanging down below, and to both sides of the hand control. The Sperry Ball has the shafts near the gunners shoulders; I don't remember where the cranks were clipped (above his head?). Usually, the gunner had to take steps to disengage the dead powered drives before trying to crank anything. You can see some of that in the ball: the small, red, L-shaped lever above the gunner's right shoulder was probably how the powered azimuth was declutched. Except for the top turret, manual control was important just to get the gunner out of the thing since the doors/hatch had to be in a certain position before it could be used. There may have been some external features that would let another crewman help extricate a gunner. The "Aircrewman's Gunnery Manual" CD is an excellent source if you are interested. I think I got mine from Liberatorcrew.com. If you get it, you'll be able to see how badly I've misquoted it. Oh, there were also circuit breakers you could reset. Some also allowed switching off one gun to see if the other would work by itself.
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