After about a week of deliberation and paper shuffling, you came to the critical realization that you could do guns as a testing aparati totally separately from everything else, and probably weed out a lot of the dumb vehicles that would get mailed in to you by the manufacturers who seemed to be popping up like weeds these days. After making plans to do some tests, you went out to Ulm the next Monday and got ready for a show.
First was muzzle velocity, which would be measured by means of a Loomis chronograph, taken at a range of one hundred meters. Three shots would be taken, and then averaged.
Starting things was the Baal Arms entrant, which clocked in at 745 meters per second, and had no issues during test firing, delivering the entire clip of ammunition easily.
The Potsdam Armory gun, meanwhile, clocked in at 720 meters per second, and during testing proved disturbingly ornery with afixed metallic belts used.
The Kriegsmarine Schnellboot Program gun performed admirably well, shooting at 865 meters per second with no issues in the gun.
The Furrer and Mukame gun, firing the short cartridge, tested in at 870 meters per second with no issues of the gun or feed mechanism, despite a small number of rounds landing over the target due to a poor fit on the testing bench.
The standard Armor Branch 2cm autocannon performed in a rather lackluster fashion, clocking in at 684 meters per second. No issues were had with the gun or the feed strip loading.
The Lighting Knife, after some exciting issues with the fire control and the fact that one could not spool the gun "full", proceded to test fairly normally, with rounds hitting in around 853 meters per second.
Next up came the sustained fire testing. Shooting would start, and continue for thirty minutes, with the rounds per minute being calculated via division of rounds fired in the test over time. Fire would take place at zero degrees of elevation, and time would not be stopped for stopages that did not require an armorer to repair.
Again, the Baal Arms entrant went up, and continued belting out fire without any care in the world. With three stoppages due to shell non ignition (two due to primer failure, one due to a faulty firing pin strike) the gun kept up a cyclic eighty one rounds per minute, getting as high as ninety-five rounds per minute at one point before a stoppage. The gun handling crew liked the ease of the top loading arrangement, but disliked the gun's loud report and massive dust clouds it could kick up. It was requested also the gun be fitted with a flash hider or other muzzle device to help with these issues. It was noted, however, that due to the automatic loading system, there were two run-on fires in testing, neither of which were easily controlled.
The Potsdam Armory gun had issues, as testing crews quickly determined it would need two tests. The first test, with metallic continuous feed belts, was riddled with jams, extractor failures, shell lift failures, and failure to feed. Stopages were had nearly every three minutes, and the gun had the tendency to overheat massively on at least two occasions. After the numbers rolled in, the consensus was the gun averaged roughly two hundred and twenty rounds per minute, with a frankly disastrous number of jams and two one-minute periods spent cooling the gun after it had started suffering runoffs. Once cool to the touch and equipped with separating metallic belts, however, the majority of the issues disappeared, and were instead replaced by rampant overheating issues as the gun regularly suffered runoffs, each requiring a minute of cooling. Despite this, the gun was much more reliable, which lead to an average of four hundred and sixty one rounds per minute on the second test.
The Torpedo Boat Gun was next, and performed in an amazingly mediocre fashion. With only six stoppages due to overheating, the gun fired amazingly well as long as there was a steady supply of ammunition in the hopper. The only major complaint the testing crew had was the weight of the mainspring when manually recharging the gun, and the fact the bolt had to be locked open in order to rotate the loading spindle- although the fact the bolt had a lock-open position was appreciated. The only major suggestion was for a muzzle device for the same reason as the Baal- reducing dust and noise. In cyclic fire, the gun maintained about sixty five rounds a minute, and crews felt the spindle loading system was fairly reasonable, especially with the new "backup loader" gravity chute on the opposite side of the spool's drum that held an additional ten rounds in case the main load chute emptied out or something made it skip a cylinder.
Fuerer and Mukame were after the Torpedo Boat Gun, and promptly started demonstrating why nobody seriously liked toggle locks anymore. With a whopping ten stoppages, in large part to the gun over-recoiling and then 'bouncing' as it hit the chamber thus bringing it out of battery. Other than that, it had a very pleasant feel to it, and felt familiar to anyone who'd used a butterfly trigger Mg.51 for any length of time. Thanks to the ability to link the Nylassander-pattern canvas belts together into an infinite feed, much like a modern metallic non-disintegrating belt, the gun otherwise kept up a very good stream of fire, until it ran its water jacket dry and needed a refilling. In sum, with five hundred and twenty rounds a minute nearly constantly, the testers quite liked the gun and couldn't hear a word you said otherwise.
The bog standard 2cm Slk.69 was on the blocks after that, and to the suprise of nobody was a complete bore to watch. Rattle off a belt, stop, clear the action, thread a new belt in, drop the bolt out of the safety notch, repeat. It had two extractor failures, somehow, and one overheating that required a minute to cool the gun. All in all, it had a good five hundred round a minute pace, which was rather nice.
Last, but certainly not least, was the Lightning Knife platform, which caused some test concernation. Once the two thousand round chute was loaded, the testing team started the generator, threw the switch, and watched it go. Aside from one stopage when a test assistant accidentally loaded a box into the hopper backwards and several nominal pauses in firing where the feed was empty and the motor was still running, the gun operated continuously without issue through the entire test. After, however, there were some issues discovered, including one barrel with the bolt edifice nearly fused shut, one barrel with the firing pin punched straight through the back of a cartridge, and one barrel which had snapped a firing pin. This last barrel, most interestingly, had attempted to fire every cartridge put through it, and then ejected the still-unfired projectile without noting the issue. That could be a plus or a minus, you weren't sure yet. What was nice was the fact it was belting out an (estimated; those lost barrels probably futzed the math) eight hundred ninety rounds a minute.
You wanted to test mounts, but there was the slight issue none of the guns had AA mounts, and more importantly wouldn't work with the standard double 13.2mm gun mount. A minor oversight, but educational, since currently all your tests were being done on the old wooden W.45 and .48 artillery carriages with varying amounts of modification.
While you planned to do balloon tests, the voice of wisdom you had (and your chief of staff) told you it might be a good idea to start out with fuse tests. As the Fuerer & Mukame design, Slk.69, and Lightning Knife all fired solid shot, they would be excluded from this round of testing. The targets were all going to be some dozens of condemned planes the Luftwaffe had provided, explaining they had basically flown the wings off and structural damage had made them terminally unsafe. Fire was going to be put on the planes at one, two, and five hundred meters.
The Baal was up first, and quickly ran into the issue it's shells wouldn't fuse on the canvass at the close range targets, only the five hundred meter target. They would, however, fuze on just about any other hit to the plane at any range- gas tank, engine, cockpit armor, wings, radiator, frame, and even one memorable shot where the shell fuzed on the canvas after tumbling through the wing, through the fuselage, and then on the other side.
The Potsdam Armory gun, meanwhile, had shells that exploded on every hit regardless of strike location or range. While you weren't convinced the rather sorry-looking holes they punched into the planes were going to do anything, Janzen informed you that all of these planes had been terminally damaged, and any one hit would take them out of the sky.
The Torpedo Boat Gun wasn't as bad as the Baal when it came to fuse failures, since it would sometimes fuse on the two hundred meter target's canvass, but it still prefered a solid hit. Also like the Baal design, what it hit was most certainly not operational. In one rather memorable shot, a radiator hit (under the forward fuselage) was enough to destroy the wing spars, and therefore take off the lower right wing.
Balloon tests were postponed, as the only balloon-certified working unit, the Erika battalion of Ninth Air Regiment, were currently helping work up the Eleventh Air Regiment, tentatively scheduled to be a Naval Attack Squadron based out of Edelweiss Air Base on Edelweiss Island.
Towed glider tests, meanwhile, would procede when you actually had mountings for these guns lined up. Considering the number of horses you'd swapped to get five Krammer racing coups from GBA, those tests were happing hell or high water- unless they managed to totally fuck it up, you'd almost have to drag whatever they sent you through the first round of testing.
Which, speaking of mounts, got you a message back from High Command that was a bit of an issue. Apparently, the anti-aircraft corps of the artillery branch had decided to standardise on a two-level flak project, and recommended that therefore the correct response was for you to adopt a two-level flak system- a short-range point defense gun, and a longer range gun that might be able to make crossing intercepts. More importantly, however, was the fact your vehicles were totally absolved from any strategic defense imperative, due to the creation of Flakcorps regiments responsible for protecting strategic assets like rail lines. Said Flakcorps might look into buying some of your tanks, though, so please please look into working quickly because they couldn't actually start a procurement program right now.
Votes
(You have guns, you have a testing plan. Time to write a Request For Quotes.)
