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
Bigger things become exponentially harder to move, especially fast. Notice how a fly can buzz its wings faster than you can see, but an elephant lumbers around pretty slowly. Rigging up 6+ artillery barrels and trying to spin them that fast, and load them that fast, would require an insane amount of power, and an insane amount of over-engineering to keep it from exploding, and even more power because you had to build it so sturdy.
It’s always been more efficient to have more soldiers manually loading large numbers of single artillery pieces. For lots of explosives delivered all at once, the USSR had trucks with 20 rockets on a rack in WWII. All of them could fire at once, and then be moved and reloaded.
Speaking of which, how are you going to *move* something that big and heavy? Artillery isn’t always on the back of a truck, but it does need to be able to move with the front, and often move after firing to avoid being located and counter-fired. Modern armies have leaned into mobility over pure raw firepower.
But, there *are* autocannons on ships and planes that use Gatling-style guns to fire larger calibers than they used to. The largest seems to be around 37mm at 3000 rpm, on an anti-aircraft rig.
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