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
Technically, the triple turrets of the old battleships operated sort of like a minigun.
The barrels didn’t all fire at once, in spite of what it looks like on film. The barrels fired in sequence, otherwise the muzzle blast from the adjacent barrels would effect the trajectory of all the rounds.
When you’re lobbing a shell 20 miles, deflecting a shell’s trajectory 0.00001 degrees as it leaves the barrel would result in a massive miss. So a battleship’s broad side was really a very short burst from a very big machine gun.
If a 9-round burst from a battleship doesn’t do the job, you’re gonna need a bigger boat.
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