Switzerland have: LTH tank armed with 24mm with capacity of 6 cartridge, see photos here: “No other country had larger than 20mm autocannons as vehicle armaments” The Soviets experimented with 23mm and 37mm autocannons on light tanks (developments of the T-60), but they were abandoned, apparently because the powder gases would make the life of the commander-gunner quite unpleasant and powerful forced ventilation was not practical (in the winter in particular). No other country had larger than 20mm autocannons as vehicle armaments, either, unless self-propelled AA guns are counted. 50 cal M2 HMG to 37mm high velocity guns. Of course there are also many places with wide open plains, where continuous fire could be delivered, so magazine feed was overall still not as good as other feed systems.ĭid the US Army have much use for automatic cannons in WW2? The USAAC/USAAF seems to have preferred heavy machine guns by choice rather than lack of suitable autocannons, and US ground vehicles went straight from. AA guns on ground often did not have the opportunity to fire long continuous fire in any case, because trees and terrain features (e.g. Magazine feed in AA guns is not as good as belt, strip or hopper, but the magazine changes were a much bigger problem in naval than on ground based applications. Its initial development goes back all to way to 1918 and experiments with aircraft autocannons. To my knowledge the 20mm Scotti-IF was not directly based on any rifle-caliber weapon. 37 machine gun, but belonged to the Hotchkiss family of gas-operated automatic guns. The 20mm Breda M35 was an enlarged version of the 13.2mm M31, which in turn was pretty much a direct copy of a Hotchkiss HMG in the same caliber. The former was cheaper, but the latter was more effective at deterring low altitude air strikes… Italy: 20mm Scotti and Breda cannons were both strip-fed and based on actions coming from rifle-caliber machineguns (or an 8×59 “heavy” in the case of the Breda). The most applicable Hotchkiss large caliber automatic weapons I can think of are the 25mm and 37mm anti-air guns (not the infantry support version 37mm Hotchkiss cannon with strip feed), but these were magazine fed weapons unable to keep up with faster ground attack planes… The Japanese Army Air Force’s 20mm Browning action Ho-5 is another example done in complete ignorance of the US Army’s insistence of the “impossibility” of adapting infantry machinegun designs to automatic artillery, and indeed the Browning action was adapted to 37mm as the Ho-204 if I’m not mistaken. The Vickers QF 2-pounder naval quad-mount was one of the largest applications of what was more or less a variation of a half-century old design, but sadly lost to the Bofors in practical rate of fire, range, and destructive effects upon targeted aircraft. The Maxim, Vickers, Hotchkiss, and Browning actions seem to me the most successful infantry machinegun designs for adaptation into auto-cannons. There seem to be very few successful auto-cannons based on rifle-caliber infantry machineguns. During World War One, they would be pushed into anti-aircraft service, with the explosive rounds being extremely effective on early aircraft (when you could get a hit, anyway). These 37mm guns could fire a wide variety of projectiles, including solid rounds which could pierce an inch (25mm) of iron armor at 100 yards and hollow rounds filled with black powder and fused to explode on impact. The Manning was promptly put into military service by the Navy and steamed down to Cuba, where it participated in the first bombardment of Cuba during the Spanish-American War. This particular example is serial number 2024, made in 1889 and then sold three times before being ultimately purchased by the United States Coast Guard and installed on the USS Manning (along with a second gun, number 2026). It was a Maxim machine gun scaled up to the quite impressive 37mm caliber, intended primarily for naval use defending large vessels against small torpedo boats. “Pom-Pom” was the name given to the 37mm Maxim gun by the Boers of South Africa, based on the gun’s sound.
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