Eighty-eight!

This is coolbert:

Here with a most unusual wartime development, without precedent or equal? From the web site: "Tu-2Sh attackers by A.N.Tupolev".

A Soviet Tu-2 two-engine bomber aircraft in the groud attack role [Tu-2Sh], employing no less than eighty-eight [88] downward-firing and "ganged" PPsh sub-machine guns configured in an apparatus and carried within the aircraft bomb bay - - an apparatus not entirely mechanically feasible and versatile, but nonetheless, a novel and intriguing idea, able to provide a monstrous and prodigious amount of fire power [directed downward]! 

Eighty-eight PPsh sub-machine guns loaded with the seventy round drum magazine makes for a capacity of 6,160 rounds to be fired with a single activation, the entire capacity of all the weapons expended in mere seconds! Re-loading impossible while in-flight, NOT a weapons system so totally feasible and useful, but a concept with merit nonetheless?

"The most unusual variant (flown and tested in 1944) carried 88 infantry PPSh sub-machineguns in the bomb bay, bringing concept of weapon designer A.V.Nadashkevich (first realized on TSh-1) into it final shape. All guns were fired simultaneously, providing devastating fire... but for very short time. In-flight reloading of 88 machine guns was too non-practical, and this concept was abandoned."

[given the rate of fire of the PPsh, it would have taken slightly less than five seconds to fire off 6,000 rounds!! Amazing!!]

The Tu-2Sh designated as a ground-attack aircraft, but this particular version with the PPsh apparatus most useful as a night-fighter interceptor? So it is suggested on some web sites. That Tu-2 firing DOWNWARD WHILE PASSING ABOVE AN ENEMY AIRCRAFT!

[the German during WW2 equipped some of their night fighter interceptors with a 37 mm cannon that fired UPWARD, the interceptor passing BELOW the target aircraft!]

An on-target burst of even the shortest duration would more or less obliterate your adversary, pistol round 7.62 X 25 mm notwithstanding! But an idea again unfeasible and impractical, but at least worthy of consideration!

PPsh - - don't leave home without one!

coolbert.