Posted on 08/30/2013 1:39:08 PM PDT by B4Ranch
That was fun! Thanks!
Let me locate an armed P-51 and my calipers (that’s the hard part) and I’ll get back to you.
The best part was nobody yelled at me for using all caps in the title.
Maybe they’ve learned to choose their battles. we’ve got much bigger fish to fry these days, right? And heck, it’s Friday night for crying out loud! Lets all take a little time for recreation in whatever form we can.
Correcting an incorrect conception of belted ammunition, obviously.
Thanks.
So, did WWII aircraft use cotton-belted ammuntion or metallic links?
I don’t know that any of these are true, but they are entertaining. There’s a show on the History Channel that gives the origin of many words and phrases like these. Lots of fun to learn word origins, anyway.
This has been floating around the interwebs since 99.
Here’s what Snopes has to say.
http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/lesson.asp
“For example, the P-51 Mustang carried 4 - .50 M1 machine guns and a total of 1260 rounds or 315 rounds per gun”
That only applies to the earliest models. The majority of P-51s built had six guns and 1880 rounds of ammunition.
(The extra two guns hardly improved firepower as guns jammed so frequently - it just upped the possibility that something would happen when a target was in the sights and the trigger was pulled.)
Snopes is good at social engineering, IMO.
Yes, they most certainly have a liberal POV. But since this is a non-political issue, there’s no reason to suspect the truth of what they say.
Yes there is. They try to push the liberal view of everything.
OK, ya got me. What is the liberal view of the origin of these phrases as compared to the conservative one?
Thanks, interesting. I’ve got at least one of Lederer’s books.
No WWII historian or M2 expert by even the faintest of stretches.
But. considering the need for mounting the .50 on both wings, flammability issues, and feeding from both sides, the reversible nature of later linked ammo (the need to de-link and eject) would strongly suggest only metallic linked belts were used. Jams were frequent enough, how would you get rid of cloth belts in an aircraft wing space? Or link successive belts into a continuous one?
Not being an Gen-x/y/z type that Googles everything, I strongly suspect that the general feed pawl dimensions of the M2 did not very too much from the very early guns that "might" have used cloth belts.
All great fun, but if you wanted to retry the arithmetic with a nominal spacing between cartridges of about 0.2" (which my fading mind's eye says is about right for linked .50 BMG), the total length just might come up close to the magic "9 yards".
Hey, it makes for a good yarn to babble about.
We could talk for an hour while I explain it but I’m not going to type for a couple of hours attempting to get you to understand the innuendos they use while attempting to convince everyone that only government understand the difference between tight and wrong.
Snopes is liberal and twists what they say frequently. Therefore I don't have to prove by logical argument why any particular statement they make is false, since I will assume all statements they make are false.
I didn’t say they tell falsehoods. Think of the difference between CNN and FOX. CNN conveniently omits what they don’t want to say as if it doesn’t exist. Lying by omission is another way to describe their actions.
Cute stories, although I have doubts about their authenticity.
Perhaps we should start a new expression that people will be guessing about in a hundred years or so.
Well, I think I'll head out to the barn and shovel some obama.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.