La Vickers de 11mm était en fait une évolution française de la version britannique de 7.7mm.
Nous avons donc décidé de modifier l'une de nos mitrailleuse pour en faire un modèle à 11mm. Vous remarquerez que la mitrailleuse modifiée est peinte avec une bande rouge et une bande jaune comme elles l'étaient à l'époque. Elles servaient notamment à distinguer quelle Vickers était une "Mitrailleuse Anti-Ballon", comme fut rapidement surnommé ce modèle 11mm.
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As you know, our Spad XIII is painted as Henri Trémeau's aircraft he had in 1918. When reading his war diary ("J'étais pilote de chasse au-dessus des tranchées", published by Gilles Platret editions), we noticed his Spad was equipped with two different Vickers machine-guns. One of them was a common 7.7mm (.303 cal) machine gun, and the other one was a 11mm (.45 cal). This was not an unusual set-up, and was used by several Spad XIII pilots in late WW1.
The 11mm Vickers was, in fact, a French development of the British 7.7mm one.
We then decided to modify one of our machine gun to turn it into an 11mm caliber model. You will notice that the modified gun is painted with two stripes : red and yellow as per the original. They helped identifying which one of the Vickers was the "balloon gun", as the 11mm gun was nicknamed.
