drgondog
Major
You were right about the cannon armed Spits, I was just agreeing with you, I found it last night in one of my books.
My original question was about 6, but if you feel they would have been to heavy(I don't think they would, especially for the Hurricane) what about 4 and a larger supply of ammo per gun. If they were having to get to point blank range to hit them anyway, I doubt that 4 50's with a decent ammo supply would have been any harder to hit with. One Spitfire pilot with 20mm said one of his 20's jammed throwing the aircraft sideways and he had to get so close to an Me110 to hit it that he nearly cut the tail off with his prop. If your gonna be that close I think even 4 50's would have been devistating. With a bigger supply of ammo and only 4 50's, they might have been able to down more than 1 target per aircraft.
The P-51B/C with only four .50s had many, many examples of 2-3 awards per sortie. The first example of shooting down more than 4 Me 109s in one mission and more than 4, for the 8th AF were also P-51B's. In one mission over Munich in which only two Fighter groups were present to defend the bombers, there were 5 P-51B pilots that shot down 3 or more (one had 4 plus another shared) - all with 4 gun .50 batteries.
The weight differential of 8x .303 vs 4x .50 is trivial in comparision to the effective capability between the two batteries..True, climb would be reduced by the approximate % differential of weight and straight ahead speed might be reduced by a couple of percent at worst.