Just playing Call of Duty and noticed the death machine spins and I always wondered why.
In: Engineering
The main problem machine guns in particular need to deal with is heat. You have a small explosion of very hot gasses pushing a hunk of metal down a very tight metal tube and that’s going to create more heat from friction. If you only fire a few shots a minute, the barrel heat isn’t going to be a super big problem, but if you’re firing 800-1000 rounds per minute down the same barrel for long periods of time, then that barrel can get hot enough to actually warp the barrel.
The point of the Gatling gun is that with multiple barrels, you can keep the rounds per minute of a barrel down and give that barrel more time to cool down in between shots. So you can have a ridiculous rate of fire like 3000-6000 rounds per minute while each individual barrel is only truly firing 500-1000 rounds per minute.
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