page_title: Synchronization gear
section_title: Other German synchronizers
hierarchical_section_title: Synchronization gear / History / Fokker's Synchronizer and other German gears / Other German synchronizers
caption_attribution_description: English: LVG E.I prototype serial E.600/15. Two-seat monoplane - first aircraft with forward firing and ring mounted machine guns (1915).
context_page_description: A synchronization gear, or a gun synchronizer, sometimes rather less accurately called an interrupter, is attached to the armament of a single-engine tractor-configuration aircraft so it can fire through the arc of its spinning propeller without bullets striking the blades. The idea presupposes a fixed armament directed by aiming the aircraft in which it is fitted at the target, rather than aiming the gun independently.
  There are many practical problems, mostly arising from the inherently imprecise nature of an automatic gun's firing, the great velocity of the blades of a spinning propeller, and the very high speed at which any gear synchronizing the two has to operate.
  Design and experimentation with gun synchronization had been underway in France and Germany in 1913–1914, following the ideas of August Euler, who seems to have been the first to suggest mounting a fixed armament firing in the direction of flight. However, the first practical—if far from reliable—gear to enter operational service was that fitted to the Eindecker monoplane fighters, which entered squadron service with the German Air Service in mid-1915.
caption: LVG E.I, with Schneider ring and forward-firing synchronized gun, presumably with a Schneider-designed gear, about which nothing is now known.
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