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
First we need to understand that even these smaller Gatling cannons are only capable of firing in short bursts. They overheat and it’s impractical to hold and supply that much ammo. The A10 warthog can only carry 1300 rounds. The same limitation would apply to the auto-cannon making it not practical for a sustained barrage.
But of course there are other problems too. The size difference between a 30mm Avenger and a 155mm howitzer (standard US artillery) are massive. We can’t just assume that everything would scale linearly either, since the weight of the barrels and mechanisms would have to be accounted for too. But ultimately I suspect the theoretical limit is actually the recoil followed by the heat. The recoil just wouldn’t be possible to manage with a portable system, limiting it to use only on a heavy fortified bases. The second issue is the heat…the 155mm howitzer only has a barrel life of ~2500 rounds. And this would decrease drastically if you were shooting so rapidly.
Like others pointed out, at this point a multi-barrage rocket system is just much better since you don’t have to worry about the recoil or barrel-wear or transporting a heavy and expensive carriage. But we don’t even typically see this type of bombardment used as often in modern conflicts…obviously artillery is still important and we are seeing that in Ukraine. But not at the scale of ww1/ww2 I mean if you absolutely need to level an entire square mile in seconds then you can always call in a squadron of super-fortresses and carpet bomb it. But the US hasn’t done that since Vietnam.
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