So the concept started with the Gatling gun, the first rotating multi-barrel machine gun, and then was scaled up into the modern minigun. That was then scaled up to the 20mm Vulcan and 30mm Avenger autocannons.
Why can’t we scale it up even further with a multi-barrel rotating artillery cannon? One that shoots 3000 artillery rounds per minute and sends massive barrages of artillery?
In: Engineering
You theoretically can make a Gatling howitzer. The biggest problem is that it would need very robust design or it would destroy itself with the heat and recoil. It would need to be too heavy for the typical artillery truck to tow it and so expensive that you couldn’t really have very many.
It’s not worth the effort to get a single six-barreled howitzer when six one-barreled howitzers will do the same job just as well, especially when you can form several times more six-gu artillery units for the cost of a single Gatling howitzer. Six howitzers are a battery, the fundamental building block unit of artillery.
The other big problem is the feeding mechanism. Ammunition for tank guns and anything larger isn’t typically packaged as a single cartridge with primer, propellant, and projectile held together in a brass case. There are a variety of reasons for this. One of the most important ones is that a 120mm cannon’s ammunition is heavy enough that a human loader can’t really handle the weight of both projectile and propellant at once, so they have two-piece ammunition. That’s a tank gun. Howitzer ammunition is even heavier. Again, in order to design a mechanism which can handle large quantities of self-contained 155mm cartridges, you need something ridiculously heavy and robust.
Because artillery is an area weapon, not a point weapon, you aren’t going to get much more of an effect than if you fired a few rounds from a normal howitzer and covered the area in shrapnel and other fun stuff.
What you are going to do with a Gatling howitzer is consume a lot more ammunition to accomplish very little more than a normal howitzer. How many people do you think you can hire at the ammunition factory, what about materials? Where do you plan on storing all of this extra ammunition? How many extra trucks, drivers, mechanics, and other resources (including fuel) do you want to use on transporting this extra ammunition to wherever the Gatling howitzer is?
>That was then scaled up to the 20mm Vulcan and 30mm Avenger autocannons.
The M134 Minigun is a scaled-down Vulcan designed for helicopters, not the other way around.
Do you know why Gatling guns made a comeback starting in the 1960s? They’re for situations where the firing platform (nearly always) and the target (in most cases) are both moving fast and any good aim that you line up will be gone almost instantly. Usually, this means aircraft-mounted weapons firing at aircraft. The Vulcan is for fighter jets to shoot at other aircraft (it has since been repurposed so that the Phalanx CIWS can put a lot of shots from a slow-moving ship in the direction of a fast-moving missile, the C-RAM is a Phalanx on the back of a parked truck), the Avenger is for CAS to shoot at tanks that were obsolete 50 years ago, the Minigun is so that helicopters don’t have to slow down and become an easier target when they need to put a lot of my lead in a specific area. This isn’t how you use artillery.
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