John Sessoms wrote: > From: Adam Maas > >> Well, Canada did buy a bunch of F-104's. Too bad ours were low-level >> nuke ground attack birds (Absolutely no air-to-air capability due to >> lacking a gun prior to 1972 and a dedicated ground-attack radar >> instead of the normal air-to-air set). We shoulda bought F-105 thuds >> instead. >> >> The CF-104 killed a lot of Canadians. > > > AFAIK, none of the F-104s were equipped with guns. > > There's one minor problem with guns in super-sonic interceptors. Once > the bullets leave the barrel, air resistance slows them dramatically. > The aircraft, still flying at super-sonic speed, rapidly overtakes them. > > Doesn't matter if the bullet catches up with you from behind or you > catch up with it ... the end result is still un-wanted holes in the > aircraft. >
All combat F-104's were equipped with a single 20mm cannon except the CF-104's, which had an auxilliary fuel tank installed instead as they were intended for Nuclear strike missions only. The CF-104's were updated with the 20mm cannon after they stood down from the NATO nuclear strike roll in 1972, when they transitioned to a conventional strike mission. The issue with guns in supersonic interceptors is essentially moot. Gun combat occurs at subsonic speeds (in fact most supersonic aircraft can only exceed Mach 1 in an afterburner-fueled dash, the CF-105 would actually have been the first Supersonic cruise-capable combat aircraft, as it is the F-22 became the first combat aircraft with this capability). There were issues with older, lower-velocity cartridges with fast aircraft (notable .50mm BMG) but that was solved with the introduction of the 20mm NATO round, which is fast enough to avoid shooting down the aircraft which fires it. -Adam -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
