Training aircraft gunners has always been a task requiring some creativity, as it requires a lot more than just a paper target for an infantryman to blast away at. In the very early years of aerial combat in WWI, a wide variety of ideas were considered, and one of the better ones was building a [...]
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The Russian ShKAS (Shpitalny-Komaritsky Aircraft High-Speed Machine Gun) is a machine gun design form the 1930s that doesn’t receive nearly enough attention. It was the result of a need by the Soviet air force for a very high rate of fire machine gun for arming aircraft. A high rate of fire tends to be a [...] Very good guns. Not so sure about that landing gear. The guns are aircraft Degtyarevs (DA-2), and appear to not have the drums mounted when the photo was taken. Note the vane-type front sight, and the distinctive muzzle brakes. Was this article worth 15 cents to you? For less than the cost of a [...] We came across an interesting manual (in English, as a bonus!) for a variety of Hotchkiss machine gun which we have very little information on. It’s an aircraft gun, intended for use by the observer in a two-seater plane: Hotchkiss aerial observer’s gun (click to enlarge) Mechanically, the gun is a pretty standard Hotchkiss [...] A pointed account of the Schwarzlose M1907 aircraft machine gun, from John Biggins’ hilarious description of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in WWI, The Two-Headed Eagle (The Otto Prohaska Novels): The 8mm Schwarzlose had been the Austro-Hungarian Army’s standard machine gun since 1906 or thereabouts, selected after an exhaustive series of competitive trials in which it alone [...] |
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Richard Wray Machine Gun Auction Followup
So, the auction of the late Richard Wray’s machine gun collection (see previous post) was yesterday, with the non-NFA guns being auctioned today. The final prices are interesting to look at, with some wallet-wrenchingly high and some great deals – at least for folks who are into the unusual.
Basically, the key was to be [...]