On Tue, 24 Sep 2013 19:04:20 -0500, "Lloyd E. Sponenburgh"
lloydspinsidemindspring.com wrote:

Gunner Asch fired this volley in
:

6. It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round
with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake. Tracers
had different ballistics, so (at long range) if your tracers were
hitting the target, 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet
tracers, instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which
direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of
tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were
out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the
enemy.

Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly
double and their loss rate go down.



Gunner, I don't know how it was in WWII, but by the time Viet Nam came
around, they'd fixed that ballistics problem.

All we shot in both the M-60s and the Browning .50s was 4-and-1 ball and
tracer. I can guarantee you that out to about 500 yards (maybe 700),
they both held target on the tracer rounds, perfectly.

We had a lot of 'directed fire' kills to attest to that.

LLoyd

Oh indeed. But the article was about WW2

Gunner

"The socialist movement takes great pains to circulate frequently new labels for its ideally constructed state.
Each worn-out label is replaced by another which raises hopes of an ultimate solution of the insoluble basic
problem of Socialism, until it becomes obvious that nothing has been changed but the name.
The most recent slogan is "State Capitalism."[Fascism] It is not commonly realized that this covers nothing more
than what used to be called Planned Economy and State Socialism, and that State Capitalism, Planned Economy,
and State Socialism diverge only in non-essentials from the "classic" ideal of egalitarian Socialism. - Ludwig von Mises (1922)