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
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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.
Why? Whatever you hit with an artillery shell is going to be obliterated. You don’t need to hit it with 100 artillery shells
You’d prefer to spread your shots around to cover more area, not repeatedly hammer the same exact location
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.
A rotating gun is a highly complex piece of machinery that needs to remain within very specific tolerances or it will tear itself apart.
If a gatling gun comes out of alignment and misfires, you just have a solid bullet stuck in the machinery. You may need to realign your barrels and repair the ammunition feed mechanisms but you can probably get things back in place. Worst case scenario it eats half a belt of ammo wrong and blows the barrels to bits.
If a Gatling artillery cannon comes out of alignment and misfires, a very large explosive charge detonates inside your battery, sending parts of your Gatling cannon into your gun crew and all your other artillery pieces. Worst case your entire fast-loading ammunition supply detonates and everyone associated with the gun are spread evenly across the ensuing crater.
Also, artillery weapons are frequently directly targeted by enemy artillery. It’s better to have five guns spread all over a field than a single gun with five barrels, because if someone hits one of your five guns you still have four left to counter fire. If someone hits your Gatling cannon you again lose a hugely complex and expensive weapon and an inordinate amount of ammunition goes up in flame.
If you want to fire a ton of artillery shots all at once from a single platform, rocket batteries already exist and are easy to make, easy to maintain, and don’t typically blow themselves up.
one thing I dont see is that artillery does not use a cased bullet rather the charge and projectile are separate, you load the round and then the charge packs depending on how far you want to launch said round. could you even imagine the auto loader required to load 3000 arty rounds per minute?
He much does an M240 weigh, and how much does an M134 weigh?
Apply that to artillery and then reflect on the fact that artillery is deployed in places where there are little to no roads.
On top of that, you don’t need 3000 rounds of artillery to get the job done, Ukrainians have showed that much.
It would be a nightmare to operate, and it’s unnecessary.
High rate of fire is good when you need to hit one target multiple times, or if accuracy is poor and you need multiple chances to hit. Artillery is generally pretty accurate (especially with guided munitions) and needs few hits per target.
Hitting the same place 10 times with artillery doesn’t do much that 1 shell won’t do. For tough jobs, we use larger or specialized munitions instead of more shells.
Paying for, transporting, and loading thousands of artillery shells is no simple task either.
The US has an automatic artillery cannon that can fire a barrage of shots while adjusting the angle of the cannon on its own after each round so that all the rounds land in an area at exactly the same time. It’s like carpet bombing an entire area at the exact same moment with am army of artillery cannon, except you only need one.
It’s been around for over a decade.
there wouldn’t be a vehicle capable of moving it and it would be a target large and valuable enough that it would justify extreme efforts to destroy immediately. also there is already self propelled artillery that can have 6 rounds arrive at the same time using a different propellant amount and ballistic arc, so the absurd effort required and all the issues with it just aren’t justified
TLDR: we can. it would be dumb
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