This is what I love about this forum, one can ask almost any question like this and it always gets answered!

About the shells hitting the tube walls, isn't that pretty easily calculated? I could do the math, but, as always, there is always someone who have thought about this before :)
There you go, post no 8:

http://warbirdsforum.com/showthread.php?t=1420

but like always with physics, it's always more complicated than this... But theoretically, you'd need to pull about 80 G to make it hit the wall.

By the way, if in any post or discussion related to guns, especially aircraft guns you see the name "Tony Williams", he knows pretty much everything about the subject.

Thanks very much for posting that.

Also the angle of incidence that the round would stike at would be extremely small causing it to ricochet down the tube.

How did the German rounds arm themselves? Was there a delay or did it occur as soon as the propellant charge went off?

Cheers

BoB era German cannon rounds had no delay on the fuse so would explode on impact. They introduced delayed fuses in '41.

I believe you misunderstood, winnie.
The fuses were save until a certain time after firing the round,
So if there was something in the way in the first few yards of flight the round wouldn't explode.
The MG FF used the "Bodenzünder (Bd.Z.) 1511, 1512 and 1513.
http://www.munitionssammler.com/foru...e6960d46178961
Funktion: Centrifugal arming using steel balls that move outward. When air resistance slows down projectile spin, balls move back toward center
and cause a spring to force firing pin into detonator for self-destruct

You're right, I should have said fast acting fuse.. (original M-Geschoss, the delayed fuse was fitted '41)

...


http://users.teledisnet.be/web/mfe39146/009b.jpg


http://users.teledisnet.be/web/mfe39146/MGFF0.jpg


...

If you look carefully, ammo drums are dissapearing one by one as you shoot. When you run out of ammo, there are no more spare drums around in your gunner position!

There is a chance though that the drums you saw belonged to another gunner, you can see spare drums of waist gunners from the ventral gunner hatch in He-111 for example.