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
I’ll give you a hint: why can’t miniguns simply go faster than they already do? Why can’t regular rifles go faster than they already do?
The answer is heat. You need much more explosive material to bring an artillery round up to speed. That heat dissipates through the metal in any gun. 3000 rounds per minute is so much more heat than it could ever possibly dissipate. The gun would break down very quickly.
You’d also have issues with recoil – it’s easy enough to bolt a minigun to a post, but what holds the force of 3000 recoils per minute at the scale of an artillery shot? That’s not trivial anymore.
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