Talk:Fulmar/@comment-5046483-20170811001945/@comment-5046483-20170813225425

Any aircraft with even a small amount of armour will take a LOT of .303 to put down. The earlier Hurricanes and Spitfires often reported rounds glancing off engine cowling on bombers during the battle of Britain. Also the round is rather light, being rifle calibre and all, meaning that there aren't all that many 'special' rounds there were basically AP, incendiary (which would generally need to penetrate to ignite) and spotter rounds with tracer variants of each, Basically you'd need to find a soft part and keep shooting until hopefully you hit something that didn't interact well with bullets.

The .50 by comparison is much heavier and wouldn't have such a hard time with metal skinned aircraft. You also have more anti-aircraft ammunition options such as AP-I, IAI, HE, HE-I plus the usual tracer variants, much better than relying on kinetic energy rounds alone.

Also not whining, just warning anyone who might have heard good things about British aircraft. That reputation basically covered RAF ground based aircraft only, anything to do with the Fleet Air Arm was usually a: obsolete b: not very good or c: both.