Now Viewing: gatling_gunTag type: General A Gatling gun is a type of rapid fire weapon where a series of barrels and actions in a cylindrical cluster take turns loading and firing as the assembly rotates, which drives the actions through their cycles, the intent being to reach a very high rate of fire. Designs can vary widely, common depictions in media are weapons mounted to vehicles, as well as various handheld kinds. Originally devised in the 1800s by a Dr. Richard Gatling, these were all large, heavy, manually operated crew served guns using blackpowder rifle cartridges, where the gun was on a vehicle mount (like on the deck of a ship), or on a wheeled mount like a cannon. One crew member aims the gun and turns a crank to make the assembly rotate, thus firing, and then at least one crew member keeps loading the gun, ideally more. The size, caliber, number of barrels, and setups for feeding ammunition into these weapons could all vary, later variants used detachable drum magazines. Some experimenting is done in the 1800s and early 1900s with attaching electric motors to Gatling's designs as well as similar 'rotary guns,' but there's no practical application for the extreme rates of fire achieved at the time. The Gatling gun is revived in the late 1950s, where modern and lightning fast jet planes means extremely short windows of time for fighter planes to engage each other, thus extreme rates of fires are sought out to get the most shots possible on a target before it's gone or outside the line of fire. The first modernized Gatling gun is a 20mm cannon driven by a motor, the M61 Vulcan Cannon, a few years later, the decision is made to make a version for the 7.62mm NATO rifle cartridge to mount on helicopters, the M134. Being a scaled down version of the 20mm cannon it gets the now famous moniker "Minigun," frequently applied generically to all motorized Gatling weapons today. The famous action movies Predator (1987) and Terminator 2 (1991) popularized the idea of handheld M134 Miniguns and thus other handheld Gatling Guns in media. Other Wiki Information Last updated: 06/16/23 11:46 PM by chopblock This entry is not locked and you can edit it as you see fit. |
     
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