Might have been a late-war development. I think the FlaK units showed some interest in adopting Mineshells themself.
From the attack angle, Mineshells actually make the most sense, since you’re most likely to hit the wings. A fragmentation round will have almost no effect when it hits a wing. Only when fragments hit some imporant modules.
Then again, a 20mm Mineshell would still have very little effect on the plane while a single HEF round might actually knock out the pilot or damage the engine with fragmentation.
So I’m not sure, if using 20mm Mineshells would really be better compared to a 20mm HEFI.
Never mind i found it op actually mentioned it in the mg 151/20 section so basically it’s real and been used and it’s used on mg 151/20 then i believe it’s been used on the flak 20/38 too
Oh, well i understood that it has 20g H.5 + xg Zink, anyway 7g of H.5 at x1,7 to 12g Aquivalent with additional Incendary effect and without Tracer is absolutly worth the effort. Its still an absolut win.
Well no mineshell are not just HE that are supposed to explode on the surface the mineshell designed with a fuse delay that allow it to penetrate then explode on the inside sending alot of shrapnel to the other side while creating abig hole of impact on the side where it entered look at this
Yeah that video is unfortunetaly complete bogus.
Almost nothing he says is grounded in reality and he makes a ton of mistakes.
A plane is made light material like wood or aluminum alloys, they don’t posses the weight which would turn them into effective fragments from a blast.
The destrutive power of an explosive rounds comes mainly from the fragments.
A plane comprises of a number of vital components, which are:
The engine (including cooling system)
Fuel tanks
Pilot
Structure (includes controls and surfaces)
Mineshells are designed to down a plane by targeting the structure since it’s the biggest area of a plane. They are however not as efficent in knocking out the other systems compared to regular fragmentation rounds.
They can be very effective, as long as they are destructive enough to the airframe since that combines the biggest target area with the least amount of shells to shoot the plane down.
However when planes grow in size, so does their structure making them less effective compared to shells that rely more on fragmentation.
Actually I’m wrong about that. Unlike the Brandsprenggranate o. L’Spur the one with Tracer uses the body of the HEF-T with heat sensitive self-destruct mechanism, and uses an unkown explosive with aluminum powder. So the weight of the shell without the added aluminum was already 120g.
Which of course doesn’t change the fact that the amount of explosive must be lower than 6.2g PETN.
The japanese 30mm has an Aphe round, which in reality didnt have a fuze, it worked upon shattering, the 2 cm gun also has the Pzgr. L’Spur zerl. which has an 2,4g Pent filling, without fuze, mainly for self destruct, but in game it could also be implemented to be detonating on impact.
Furthermore, even tho i thought it didnt exist, i found this Pzsprgr. for the 20 x 138 mm ammo. Does anyone have more info? It appears to be a further drilled out Pzgr of 120g (so going by the weight, which is the same as the He grenades with 900m/s, with an somewhat small filling with a Sd and an internal inertion fuze. It would result to 33mm/10m with 20mm 120g 900m/s 3,6g filler.
An interesting fact is that the flak 341 was not created because 37mm was not enough and the caliber was changed to 50mm, but then the program was canceled, it would be interesting to see the flak 341 in a game with 50mm cannons
Maybe it’s navy ammunition? It almost got the same weight as the Luftwaffe 20mm AP rounds. With such large cavity the penetration would be quite low.
On the ground the 20mm was used as tank and recon vehicle armament after all, so they needed a heavier round.
Otherwise, some came to the conclusion that the 2 cm Pzsprgr. L’Spur with and without, as found in the Handbuch für Flugzeugbordmunition 1936-1945 is sayed ammo. However, (which could be simply a different way of writing) its weight is (like the other ammo for the Mg 151) only 117-119g instead of 120-121g and certainly not of the full tip 148g.
Don’t think so. The 20mm AP for the MG FF/M and MG 151/20 is 80mm long, for the FlaK 30/38 it’s 85mm but the source about the 121g round you provided says it’s 87-90mm.
There’s obvously something weird going on with the second picture that shows a round with reduced cavity but still 121g.
It would be very nice to see the APCR/HVAP ammo for the Ostwinds ingame. most other nations have AP rounds with 65+mm Pen meanwhile the ostwinds can pen almost nothing at its BR.
H.5 or RDX (~1.82g/cm³) phlegmatized with 5% paraffin wax (~0.9g/cm³) by weight has a density of around 1.73g/cm³.
Zinc has a density of 7.13/cm³ and 70:30 mix with H.5 based on volume results in a combined density of 3,35g/cm³.
We have 90g of filler, meaning that the total amount of H.5 in the mixture is 32.5g H. 5.
→ 0.7 * ((90g * 1,73g/cm³) / 3.35g/cm³)
I meassured the cavity of the Brandsprenggranate o. L. and noticed that while it’s longer, it’s also thinner. Resulting in a cavity that would hold around ~63% more than the regular shell with tracer, meaning around 44-45g of Np. 10, which has roughly half the density of that H. 5 Zinc mix, that would have a weight of 90g. So my calculation and assumption it’s a 70:30 mix by volume, seems correct.
However a 70:30 mix by volume is almost identical to a mix of 30:70 by weight.
So that could also be correct, since meassuring the volume of the cavity doesn’t lead to 100% accurate results. Then it would be simply 27g of RDX.
However the destructive power would be a lot higher.
I recently looked a bit into the whole aluminizing explosive business and adding metal powder to explosive result in them releasing a lot of heat during oxididation, increasing energy relase and pressure.
Zinc releases more energy than aluminum but is also much heavier.
If we replace the zinc with aluminum in the mixture, we would instead get ~24g of aluminum, for around a near 50:50 RDX Aluminum mixture.
In comparison, Hexal is a 60:40 RDX Aluminum mixture.
But because it’s zinc, it’s going to relaese even more energy.
The downside is reduced fragment velocity but for enhanced blast and incendiary effect.
