Just playing Call of Duty and noticed the death machine spins and I always wondered why.
In: Engineering
When a gun fires a bullet, a lot of the explody gas heat energy transfers to the gun barrel; hot gun barrels can warp and deform which isn’t good. So a part of the reason you have multiple barrels is you can fire one barrel while 4 or 5 others are cooling down; by the time a barrel comes around to the active firing position again its cooled down enough. Also, a hot barrel might cause a round inserted in the breech to fire prematurely or explode or something. So cool barrels.
The other part is there is only so fast you can eject the spent shell casing and insert another shell casing into the breech of a gun. Attempting to do it faster with a single barrel+breech would cause the gun to jam. [Gatling guns are designed so a bullet is inserted and the casing ejected in numerous steps into each barrel as they rotate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq6m7mpfc5A).
Gatling guns had rotating barrels because it handled loading, ejecting the cartridge, and reloading the barrel. The innovation of ejecting the cartridge using exhaust gas hadn’t been developed yet. The Gatling gun was faster than a bolt-action gun.
More modern miniguns have multiple barrels to reduce overheating. Each barrel only fires a fraction of the shots, meaning you can fire more rounds before overheating.
Guns heat up when they are shot. A lot. They get even hotter even faster when more bullets are fired. If they get too hot it can warp the metal in the barrel, which destroys the gun, or warp/melt the bullet, which makes it useless.
Most heavy machine guns are built with cooling systems in to disperse this heat. Getting guns, which fire too fast even for cooling systems, solve the problem by having multiple barrels. When the gun is fired, it’s only shooting one bullet at a time, but from a different barrel with every bullet, so the heat buildup is shared between multiple barrels instead of just one.
Firearms with multiple barrels have the advantage of being able to fire for longer bursts as the heat build up is spread out. If a weapon is fired for too long the barrel can warp.
In simplest terms, firing at extremely high rates of speed creates a tremendous amount of heat. Firing that many rounds through one single barrel would likely Heat it to the point of very likely melt or distort the metal. By using multiple barrels, that distributes the heat over a wider range and prolong the life of the weapon. Second, it’s a simplified mechanism that allows the gun to operate at a high rate of fire while at the same time reducing extreme movement of the firing mechanism that would otherwise be required.
Latest Answers