It only recently came to my attention that the Yak-9UT can also be equipped with the NS-45 like the Yak-9K and rain down doom on the enemy team with 45mm APHE rounds.
While I was reading through a book about Soviet airplane armament I noticed that there was one mention about the Yak-9UT.
Namely that after the war it was equipped with a „N-45“ cannon.
In-game the Yak-9UT can change the engine armament from the 1945 NS-23 to the post-war N-37, the lighter and faster firing version of the NS-37.
Reading through the book it mentions that the N-45 is a very obscure experimental gun and was most likely a 45mm version of the N-37 but with new ammunition.
It seems after the failure of N-57, the N-45 was some an attempt to increase the anti-bomber firepower of future fighters.
Like the NS-37 to NS-45, it could be built by simply changing the barrel.
The Yak-9K was an obvious failure with the gun recoil being so strong that it slowly destroyed the plane with every shot. Likewise the Yak-9T also didn’t have much success as a tank hunter.
So I don’t see any logic in that the Yak-9UT to be equipped with the NS-45 again, especially since equipping the NS-45 means that the NS-37 could also be equipped, since they are practically the same gun in different calibers.
But if the Yak-9UT was equipped with the N-37, it’s quite logical that it would have been equipped with the N-45.
Now there’s basically no information about this cannon and the author of „Soviet Cannon“, Christian Koll, writes that even Alexander Nudelman himself doesn’t mention the cannon in his book.
Yet „Soviet Cannon“ does feature a picture of Alexander Nudelman standing next to a cannon which must be the N-45 based on the ammunition clips next to it, which clearly shows a N-37 cartridge holding a larger shell than standard 37mm rounds.
There’s no information on either gun and ammunition but my guess is that the N-45 would have fired lighter, high capacity explosive shells, thus the cannons velocity wouldn’t have been much lower than the N-37 while increasing the firepower significantly.
Why this never came to be is unknown.
But from what I can tell is that the Yak-9UT was never equipped with the NS-45.
However one secondary source isn’t enough to proof that.
