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
in the rare instance you need to saturate artillery fire into a small area it’s easier to use a volley-gun style device which at that point is just aiming a bunch of howitzers at the same place and synchronizing fire but with less flexibility
also i can’t think of a situation in a modern war where you’d want just inaccurate “general area” artillery fire but if you did there’s missiles with submunitions that can do the job easier, more accurately, and from further away
The amount of heat would be insane.
OTO Merla has a 76mm cannon for boats that can fire like two times per second. The breech and the chamber has a massive water cooling system.
And this is for just a 76mm, we aren’t even talking about the heat from cannons of 155mm, 203mm, etc.
Too many and too big bang bang makes too much wobble wobble.
Also, I can’t hear you over the sound of that much freedom. /s
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.
The soviets created a mortar that fired rapidly in an automatic fashion from feedable magazines.
It’s not that nobody has thought of it, it’s just not really feasible on a large scale. In order to land a shot repeatedly 12 miles away, things like barrel heat, the movement of the artillery piece/vehicle after each shot, and the flex/oscillation of the barrel need to taken into account. Slower and well placed beats out sending a round accidentally flying into your own troops any day.
If you want rapid fire and long range, MLRS other rocket artillery are the ideal, but they have their drawbacks. Sending multiple rounds through eachothers aerodynamic slipstream can aggravate issues with accuracy that come with the slow initial speed of a rocket.
Probably cheaper and less troublesome to buy several dozen artillery pieces. Then you dont have all your ducks in one pond if the enemy decides to lob an anti-artillery barage you way
One of the reasons is precision. Military might has been moving towards more accurate weapons rather than higher power. You can see it in how nukes have only ever been used as a scare tactic, alot of collateral damage and little penetration. We can hit a specific military target without killing an entire city, and we can penetrate down into bunkers. Nukes were great at a shock and awe kind of thing but they are extremely outdated and not the weapon an advanced military would ever use anymore.
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.
because it’s pointless, wasteful, and would require an immense amount of space. Why do I need to fire 3000 artillery rounds at anything when I can just fire a missile?
The typical 155mm shell weighs around 100lbs. I would pay to see the mechanism required to cycle that at 3000rpm.
ETA: Back in WWII, we had semi-automatic naval guns. They could fire 4-10rpm. Technology has certainly improved since then, but I suspect there’s still limitations.
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