Originally Posted by
onetrack
The M60 machine gun was apparently mounted under the LH wing for night missions.
The M60 front bipod support legs can be easily and quickly folded in or out, and shortened as well.
But the wing-mounted weapon would almost certainly have been something like the M60C, which had hydraulic cocking and solenoid trigger together with a box-fed ammunition belt. They were certainly easily available because they were standard and role-fitments on many of the aircraft that were in theatre at the time. The aircraft-mounting versions never had stocks, handgrips or bipods because, well why would they...
The weapon in the picture is clearly the standard infantry weapon. If you mounted this on the wing you'd have toi find a way to cock it, fire it and feed it with ammunition - none of these would have simple solutions. As Eric says - this is an infantry weapon placed between two helmets on the cowl for a photo.
I must say I'm pretty impressed with the size of the rocket pods fitted, and I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at what it did to IAS, when any number of rockets were fired!
Erm...probably nothing much - that's rather the point of rockets. They are mounted in what is essentially an open tube, and when the rocket fires they just pull themselves out of it. Almost nothing impinges on the host aeroplane at all.
PDR