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Originally Posted by whatnot
Wasn't the later Hispano's like Mk V. used in Tempest pretty realiable already? And what kind of failure rates are we talking about with Hispano? Did it jam every 10th belt or what and what made the RAF to go that direction instead of sticking with the MG. So why did it take until mid 50's or whatever to mount them?
And what about the cannons on Russia and Germany used? One would assume that the technology and production blueprints would have been either handed over through reversed lend/lease or captured as the US pushed deeper into germany. Were VYa-23's and ShVAK's just as unrealiable as Hispano's?
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The British Hispano was reliable, the RAF had eliminated almost all the problems by the time production moved to the Mk.II, and the Mk.V was very reliable.
The US M1 version was a very different beast, with a high rate of misfires and jamming. The US tried to fix the problems with the M2, but it was equally unreliable. The RAF had been hoping to use US built Hispanos to supplement British produced models, but these proved too unreliable for service introduction.
The problems with US built Hispanos were not solved until after WWII, and in the meanwhile they were only used on aircraft that could mount them in the fuselage, which reduced the problems caused by vibrations and flexing wings, although the misfiring problems remained. Even there they were not very reliable (there is a good reason the P38 had a mixed battery of 4 .50cals and one 20mm).