eli5: Why do machine guns or gatling guns have to spin to shoot?

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Just playing Call of Duty and noticed the death machine spins and I always wondered why.

In: Engineering

25 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

1. Shooting out of more barrels can increase the rate of fire. If you just had one barrel, it would be harder to achieve the same fire rate.
2. Heat. When you fire a gun, the barrel heats up. On machine guns, the barrel gets very hot with a continuous rate of fire. Increasing the number of barrels makes the barrels heat up slower since the bullets aren’t always being fired out of the same barrel.

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