Wings of the Red Star - Ilyushin IL-2 Shturmovík
69The Ilyushin Il-2 (Cyrillic: Илью́шин Ил-2) Shturmovik[3] (Cyrillic: Штурмови́к, Shturmovík) was a ground-attack aircraft produced by the Soviet Union in large numbers during the Second World War. With 36,183 units of the Il-2 produced during the war, and in combination with its successor, the Ilyushin Il-10, a total of 42,330 were built, making it the single most produced military aircraft design in aviation history, as well as one of the most produced piloted aircraft in history along with the American postwar civilian Cessna 172 and the Soviet Union's own then-contemporary Polikarpov Po-2 Kukuruznik multipurpose biplane.
To Il-2 pilots, the aircraft was simply the diminutive "Ilyusha". To the soldiers on the ground, it was the "Hunchback", the "Flying Tank" or the "Flying Infantryman". Its postwar NATO reporting name was "Bark". The Il-2 aircraft played a crucial role on the Eastern Front. When a factory fell behind on its deliveries, Joseph Stalin told the factory manager that they were "as essential to the Red Army as air and bread."
The 23 mm (0.91 in) armament of Il-2 was subject to a competition. One of the first 1940 photographs of the Il-2 show it equipped with two MP-6 23 mm autocannons developed by Yakov Taubin (Яков Таубин [ru]) at OKB-16. The MP-6 gun weighed 70 kg (150 lb) and developed an initial muzzle velocity of 900 m/s (3,000 ft/s). It operated on the short recoil principle and had a rate of fire of about 600 rpm. In the early Il-2 prototypes, these guns were fed by 81-round clips. In flight, these clips sometimes became dislodged because of their large surface, which caused them to experience significant aerodynamic pressure.[citation needed] Competitive tests were conducted in the spring of 1941 between the MP-6 gun modified to belt-fed and the newly developed, gas-operated Volkov-Yartsev VYa-23, which had otherwise rather similar characteristics. The VYa-23 was declared the winner at this trial. Subsequently, in May 1941, development of the MP-6 gun was terminated and Taubin was arrested and summarily executed in October that year.
Wikipdia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilyushin_Il-2