You in the Squiddleys fleet Air Arm, once apon a time Metters ?
Whats that? I started in National Service but only got to work on things like Centurion tanks, Landrovers, Studebakers, Diamond Ts, M543s, Austin Champs and the CO's Humber Super Snipe.
The guns came along when I changed to the RAAF. The Hispano was at Wagga Wagga and the Oerlikon, Aden and Defa at Richmond.
I suppose you are wondering what the Air Force was doing with Navy Oerlikons. They were going to be used for ground defence in Vietnam. After overhauling and test firing about thirty, I went back to Wagga for more training and didn't return to Richmond.
The Hispano was gas operated, electrically fired, belt fed and cooled by the high speed air passing over the aircraft. The Oerlikon was recoil operated, manually fired and had a 60 round circular magazine.
The Aden was used in the Sabre fighter and the Defa in the Mirage. Both were set up on a cradle with a fairly short barrel and a chamber like a revolver. The rounds came in from a belt. I think from memory the chamber held five rounds but they were not all fully in position at the same time. They were in various stages of being pushed into it as it was spun around by a gas operated sliding mechanism under it in the bottom of the cradle. The rate of fire was about 1200 per minute for the Aden and 1400 for the Defa.
That was in the late 1960s and all the fine details are fading away now. Those two Armed Forces were the last things that I expected to be involved in when I left school.
