Clustering all the armament in the nose was unusual in U.S. aircraft, which typically used wing-mounted guns with trajectories set up to crisscross at one or more points in a convergence zone. Nose-mounted guns did not suffer from having their useful ranges limited by pattern convergence, meaning that good pilots could shoot much farther. A Lightning could reliably hit targets at any range up to , whereas the wing guns of other fighters were optimized for a specific range. The rate of fire was about 650 rounds per minute for the 20×110 mm cannon round (130-gram shell) at a muzzle velocity of about , and for the .50-caliber machine guns (43-gram rounds), about 850 rpm at velocity. Combined rate of fire was over 4,000 rpm with roughly every sixth projectile a 20 mm shell. The duration of sustained firing for the 20 mm cannon was approximately 14 seconds while the .50-caliber machine guns worked for 35 seconds if each magazine was fully loaded with 500 rounds, or for 21 seconds if 300 rounds were loaded to save weight for long-distance flying.