Just playing Call of Duty and noticed the death machine spins and I always wondered why.
In: Engineering
Spinny barrels make better pew, and more pew. More spinny barrels make less heat, so even more pew pew. 😁
The entire purpose of several barrels is to give the barrels a short amount of time to cool before it is its turn to fire again. This makes it so the weapon can either shoot at a much higher rate of fire and/or for longer periods.
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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.
Theoretically you could make a gatling style weapon without spinning barrels, but you’d require a system for loading bullets into each barrel, and firing each barrel. It’d significantly increase the weight to have a separate system for every barrel for no benefit, besides maybe being able to skip a barrel that wasn’t working.
Because it has multiple barrels. This allows it to shoot faster than one barrel. At a ELI5 level they strapped 6 guns together so it shoots 6x faster than a normal machine gun.
But it’s not literally 6 whole guns. As the barrels rotate they get a bullet loaded and then rotate into a position where they get fired by a single trigger. This is faster than having one barrel because it takes a little bit of time to load and unload a barrel so by having six you can do it faster
2 reason:
1: what everyone else says. multi barrels = multi loading, letting you load much much faster than single barrel, as you need to clear the chamber before firing again. in multi barrel design you dont need to immediately clear it, just cycle to the next and fire.
2. when you have 1 barrel, all your bullets are going to come out of there. when you are shooting the amount of lead a vulcan is, at the insane rof of 6k+ rounds per min, you are going to destroy/warp the barrel regardless of what alloy you use. but when you have 6 barrels. instead of shooting 24,000 rounds down 1 barrel, you are splitting it to 4,000 round per barrel. greatly prolonging the life expectancy of the gun. Because unlike games, changing the barrel is a pretty tedious task.
I’ll attempt an actual ELI5 answer:
A Gatling gun is actually several guns glued together. The ammo has to go into each gun. The guns are turned around in a circle so the ammo can go into each gun.
For an in depth, non-ELI5 answer, check out Forgotten Weapons video about the modern version of a Gatling gun: the M134 minigun: https://youtu.be/rIlwHT4IdRc
Also side note: you referred to “machine guns”and Gatling guns as though they are the same when they aren’t really. (To commenters: don’t get super pedantic on me) A typical “machine gun” is something like an M249, M60, or PKM with a single barrel and the bolt cycles forward and back using the gas from the firing shot. A minigun has multiple barrels and is electrically driven rather than gas operated.
This video is not ELI5, but has a pretty in-depth look into how the modern miniguns work.
It turns out explosions are hot. Lots of explosions in short order will deform or even melt a barrel. If you want lots of explosions quickly you either need some way to cool the barrel (water-cooling the barrel was the standard solution early on) or you need multiple barrels. Spinning those barrels helps cool them a bit, but also lets you stage the action. So while one barrel is being fired the next is being loaded, the previous is having the casing extracted, etc, and each barrel has a longer period in which to cool down before another round gets fired through it.
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