Wing mounted Lewis gun.

[Ginger.]

Wot do you think?
Does the increase in the rate of fire compensate for all the buggering about changing the drum?

[StephenLawson]

No the 97 round drum replacing the 47 did the trick.

[JG1Schorner]

My own opinion is that there is no way that any increase in the rate of fire compensated for the need to reload in the middle of combat. Even the best pilots needed, on average, a couple hundred rounds to bring down an opponent. The average pilot almost certainly needed a good deal more than that. That means several reloads per combat, even with the larger drum.

There was also the fact that aiming was more difficult with a wing mounted Lewis vs. a deck mounted MG.

[Rbailey]

I don't see why aiming would be significantly more difficult as long as the mounting fixed the gun parallel to the sight alignment. There would be a couple of feet offset, but with the normal vibration and unsteadiness that should have had a pretty small effect on most pilot's accuracy.

[EricGoedkoop]

If the overwing Lewis had an advantage over the deck-mounted Vickers, then I imagine it wouldn't have been ditched as soon as a reliable synchronizing gear was available. Heck, the first thing Albert Ball did when he got his SE5 was to take the Lewis off. Same with the Dolphin (although that wasn't, strictly speaking, an overwing mounting) - most of 'em you see have had one or both Lewis removed. It rather seems like the drivers weren't too fond of them.

Might have been a different story if the Lewis could've been synchronized, but even still the limited ammo supply made it a lousy weapon for a pilot with plenty of other things to worry about.

[Ginger.]

Albert Ball never had any problem with the same gun arrangement when it was on his Nieuport scout. He was a great tinkerer and took the Lewis off his SE and then got put on a fizzer for sticking it in the cockpit to shoot through the floor, that's if certain accounts are to be believed!

[EricGoedkoop]

Right - which indicates that 1) there wasn't a problem aiming the Lewis; but 2) it was clunky and created drag which impeded the aeroplane's performance, or at least was perceived to. Ball was convinced (incorrectly) that the SE was slower than his Nieuport, hence his modifications . . . if certain accounts are to be believed.

[TomVrille]

The two fundamental sources of aiming error are sight misalignment and parallax effect. Both of these favor deck mounted guns in preference to over the wing gun mountings. The fuselage section forward of the cockpit was typically the most rigid structural component of Great War aircraft. Locating the sight and the gun(s) on the decking minimized the progressive drift of sight alignment which was unavoidable with continued use. The over the wing mounting incurred additional sight alignment errors due to any variations of wing incidence caused by changes in wire tension.
Parallax refers to the fact that the sight picture is range sensitive. This sensitivity increases the further away the gun barrel is from the sight axis. This offset was typically two or three times greater for top wing gun mounts than for deck mountings.

Why didn't the se5a have twin vickers instead of 1 vickers and 1 lewis?

[leo]

Perhaps to save weight.

Did the pilot have to stand up to pull the Vickers into a reloading position?