It seems pointless
In: 10
The basic minigun is a six-barrel, air-cooled, and electrically driven rotary machine gun. The electric drive rotates the weapon within its housing, with a rotating firing pin assembly and rotary chamber. The minigun’s multi-barrel design helps prevent overheating, but also serves other functions.
It’s the same premise as the Gatling gun. By mounting multiple barrels with two triggers the output of the weapon is exponentially increased. The barrels spin and the two triggers are able to keep the stream of bullets at an almost uninterrupted blast of ammunition.
A mini gun is MUCH more destructive than a regular machine gun.
Heat. It means you can send the maximum tolerance of the barrels down each and multiply the number of total rounds on your target.
The main reason is so that it can fire faster. With the 6 rotating barrels you have each Barrell in a different state of loading, firing, ejecting, etc. The mini gun is designed to fire as fast as possible.
To fire a gun you need to eject the spent cartridge, load a new one, fire and repeat
by having multiple spinning barrels, each can be in a different step of the firing process, there will always be one barrel ready to fire, this greatly increases firing speed, as you don’t have to wait for the gun to be ready to fire, since you have another barrel already loaded.
The spinning action performs the loading and firing by means of a set of cams that actuate each barrel independently
As the barrels fire only at one relatively precise position in the rotation, it’s more accurate and consistant than separate machine guns
Edit: Many people seem say that the reason is heat, which isn’t wrong, but it’s mainly because the heat is distributed over more barrels rather than the fact it’s spinning
The reason is speed and heat. If a single barrel machine gun fires too many bullets without stopping the barrel gets hot, very hot, and hot metal goes soft like a chocolate bar and is no longer straight. The speed part is because it takes time to load, fire and clear a chamber for the next round. 6 barrels mean they can load at one point, fire at another and offload at another point. Spinning gives better cooling too.
If you need to move a lot of sand bags 15 feet away it is easier to use 6 people and form a chain than it is to do it yourself. You will use more energy and become tired more quickly, it will also take you a lot longer to move all of the sand bags by yourself.
Firing a gun is a multi step process. You have to load a round, close the bolt(sometimes), drop a firing pin to actually send a bullet down the barrel, and then finally eject the spent casing. All of this takes time. Having multiple barrels allow each barrel to be in a different part of the process, decreasing the delay between shots. This means that even when you are ejecting and chambering new rounds you can have another barrel firing. The barrels rotate so that they always fire from the same position keeping things accurate.
[https://youtu.be/jHWhYnwNnfo?t=16](https://youtu.be/jHWhYnwNnfo?t=16)
for this reason, also it’s faster.
* When a bullet is fired down a barrel, the barrel gets hot (bullets are pushed by a hot explosion, and also make heat when they scrape along the barrel)
* Barrels are made of metal, which can melt, changing shape if it gets too hot
* If the barrel melts even a small amount, bullets will get stuck, and the gun might explode.
* Each bullet makes the barrel hotter than the last bullet.
* In a minigun, each barrel fires one bullet, then moves around in a circle, so it gets a “rest” to cool down between bullets
* If one barrel can fire 10 bullets before getting too hot, then 6 barrels can fire (at least) 60 bullets before getting too hot.
* Firing 60 bullets is usually better during wartime than firing 10.
* So that’s why they have spinning barrels.
Modern mini guns are just the evolution of the original gatling gun, electrically driven instead of hand cranked. As mentioned, barrel cooling and high rates of fire are big factors. The A-10’s GAU-8 is a classic example. As some wag once said, “If dragons were real, that is the sound dragons would make”:
[https://youtu.be/3Io96sA63Wo](https://youtu.be/3Io96sA63Wo)
The GAU-8 Avenger:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger)
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