Just playing Call of Duty and noticed the death machine spins and I always wondered why.
In: Engineering
TLDR – Single barrel shoot fast, multiple spinning barrel shoot crazy fast (10x faster)
Gating guns and rotary cannons are distinctly different from machine guns
Your [standard machine gun](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/Browning_M2HB_Normandy.jpg/1280px-Browning_M2HB_Normandy.jpg) has a single barrel, a single breach, and does not spin.
Gatling guns spin so they can pull off stupid high rates of fire. A 6 barreled weapon like the [M134 Minigun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M134_Minigun) has basically 6 of everything – barrel, breach, and bolt. This duplication means that one barrel can be firing while a couple others are unloading and others are loading the next round and preparing to fire. Instead of having to make one gun that can fire, reload, and fire again extremely quickly ($$$), the duplication allows for each barrel to fire/reload much slower letting things be a bit cheaper and run a lot cooler. The reduced barrel temperature is more important for big guns like [the 20mm M61 Vulcan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M61_Vulcan) shooting 6000 rounds per minute
There are other spinning weapons like Revolver cannons which have a single barrel but duplicate the breach assembly so one round can be firing while others are loading/unloading. They can’t shoot as fast as a Rotary Cannon but they’re a lot lighter since they don’t have big spinning barrels. They’re less common because standard style completely non-spinning weapons are almost as good and easier to work with.
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