Cannon QI-23

QI-23 (on behalf of the chief designers Volkov and Yartsev, the index represents the caliber in millimeters) Auto Aviation a gunDeveloped by Soviet designers in 1940g. The principle of operation is based on a gun powder gases energy, the essence of which is that parallel to the barrel tube, which is connected thereto closer to the outlet of the barrel.

A piston is located in the tube, which is activated during the shot, it happens in this way: during the shot, the powder in the sleeve is ignited, expanding significantly, due to this it pushes the bullet (in this case, the projectile) inside the barrel, at a certain point there is a connection with the same parallel tube where part of the gases rushes under pressure. These gases push the piston, which in turn opens the bore, ejecting the sleeve, and also feeds a new cartridge. Most automatic weapons work according to this principle.

But back to the load cell-23. The need to develop it aviation weapons, rather than the use of conventional guns, as it was in the First World War, became apparent with the increase of security of both air and ground targets, as well as increasing the speed of flight. For aircraft weapons priorities are somewhat different parameters than for a conventional small arms.

The most important parameter in determining the efficiency of aviation instruments, is the mass of second volley, simply put, the weight of all that flies out of the barrel of gun (whether gun or machine gun) for 1 second. This option is absorbed and rate, and caliber, because with increasing caliber, mass of the charge is also increased, and with the increasing rate of a large number of charges fired. Accordingly, the greater the mass of the second volley, the more firepower has a gun. Cannon QI-23 designed specifically for parallel designs the Il-2And are known to attack aircraft - airplanes, sowing death and destruction in the first place on the ground and do not require such high performance characteristics as a fighter.

This in many respects determined the characteristics of VY-23. The gun came out very powerful (the mass of the second volley was 2kg, for comparison, the 20mm ShVAK gun did not exceed 1.3kg), had high accuracy (this parameter is determined by the initial velocity of the projectile, again it was 920m / s, against 815m / s for the ShVAK gun , Also this characteristic affects armor penetration). In addition, the effectiveness of the high explosive fragmentary VY-23 was more than twice as high as that of the ShVAK (for good reason, the German pilots tried not to get into the aim of Ilam, otherwise the outcome was rather sad for them).

However, the gun also had flaws, such as a large mass (66kg, against 40-45kg from ShVAK), large dimensions (2150mm, against 1600-2000 from a ShVAK gun) and high efficiency and a smaller resource. For these reasons, almost all Soviet fighters had a less advanced ShVAK cannon on their weapons until the end of the war, and only a few were trying to use WYa-23, however, these attempts were not crowned with success. But then, after installation on the IL-2, the WN-23 proved to be an excellent tool and was notorious for the German ground forces. 

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