Curious about fw190D and why a 30mm wasnt used in spinner

[II/JG17_HerrMurf]

Not surprising. Ah, the good old days.

[Kurfurst]

On 3/5/2020 at 4:53 PM, Yogiflight said:

But for example you have the 2cm Flak. So there it is qualified as a cannon.

 

And for the aircrafts they were also titled as Motorkanone, Flügelwurzelkanone, Flügelkanone (engine cannon, wing root cannon, wing cannon). This is really odd.

 

Well I guess they were just not terribly consistent or perhaps there was no agreed nomenclature for big caliber automatic weapons. They were kind of new at the time,  although the first ones appeared in WW1, just were not very widespread. Some Flight articles in the 30s refer to them as ‘shell guns’, for example.
 

Or maybe the fact that the 2cm was mounted on a carriage made it some sort of an artillery piece in the minds of the ordnance departments, I don’t really know.

 

The gun itself was still referred to as MG C30, and the later version as MG C38 (c standing for Construction year, which was common in pre-ww1 german naval nomenclature), yet when the same thing was put into a tank, they started calling it KwK 30 or KwK 38, a tank cannon.. In MG FF the second part simply stands for Fest, Flugel, or ‘fixed, wing (installation) machine gun’, although that was of Swiss origin.

 

Add to that the ever present ‘anything 18’ designations, which was simply a ruse to circumvent development bans of versailles, by suggesting its some kind of end of the great war era legacy gun, the designation system was perhaps intentionally confusing.

[Sublime]

Makes sense.  Even with the nomenclature such as 'minengeschoss'