Why does Manitoba have Mosquitoes?

Originally posted by Keith Webb
What's the weapon? Is it the COW gun? (I don't mean something to take out the moo-ing things)...

Heh, heh.

Nope, a 57mm or 6pdr with an auto-loader made by Molins who usually make cigarette vending machines. The idea was as an AT device but hitting the beggars was a problem, proved very good for anti-shipping though.

The poor old Mossie, if the 6pdr wasn't enough, they did do trials with an auto-loading 17pdr which worked just as well but really too late for much effect in WWII, and it gets worse.

Just post war some bright spark went one further and had an auto-loading 3.7" put in one aircraft and that worked too but tended to reduce the airspeed a bit after firing a few rounds.

In this latter process some ballasted trials were done to see the effect of loading and its placement in the Mosquito. On one flight the pilot reported it was a bit sluggish and possibly too much for combat use. This was supposed to be a 5 ton load, but on taking the sandbag ballast out they found a bit of a mis-count and it had actually been loaded to over 10 tons.

Not bad for a balsa and plywood glued-up aircraft.

Here's the 57mm Molins out of the aircraft.

R.