Quoted:
Lbrl,
the advantages of the Gatling hand cranked gun that you point out are valid--
I'd be interested to see a cost comparision of a gatling type gun to a autoloading single barrel gun. Maybe it's irrelevant if the Gatling guns would have been that much more efficient.
Other question I'd have is if the gatling would have been adaptable to higher pressure cordite cartridges instead of the black powder cartridges. I don't know what the breech mechanism is for the Gatling.
Also, there is always the possibility of a hand-cranked equivelant of the chaingun. Now that would have been interesting too.
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Well I fixed the link, I guess one of Goat Boys updates made the way I wrote it invalid. If you look again you will see that the last hand-cranked Gatling, the Model 1906 was chambered for .30/06.
The Gatling barrel cluster, although not a "quick change" is not hard to remove either, the single nut in the center at the muzzle end is basically all that is holding it in place. But even so, none of the hand cranked guns exceeded 200rpm per barrel. Even modern LMGs like the M60 and M249 cant fire faster than that without changing their barrels.
But with 10 barrels that Gatling could attain 1800rpm for as long as you could feed it, never having to stop and change due to overheat. Watercooled guns like the Vickers and Browning 17' didnt need barrel changes for heat unless you ran them out of water. But they had to cange do to [i]wear[/i] every 10,000 rounds or so. The Gatling barrel change would be slower, but it need be done only every 100,000 rounds.
A Gatling gun didnt have to carry more than ammo, and a spare barrel cluster- back then they were more likely to suffer a squib load before they wore the barrel cluster out. Making their load effectively less than the Vickers Gun that had to carry ammo and also water, which is very heavy.
Today, GE's Gatlings are hamstrung by the same problem that bedevils elctric car builders- the size and weight of the batteries that are needed to power them. Thus they are only used as vheicle and aircraft mounted weapons. Even then, lots of people still prefer to mount Brownings and FN's because they will still function if the vheicle looses power.
Excluding batteres, GE's .50cal Gatlings exhibit a tremendous superiority to the M2 Browning. The three barrel version fires up to eight times as fast as a M2, but weighs 20lbs less. The 6bbl version is just 10 pounds heavier than a M2 and fires 12 times as fast. Both are also shorter overall for the same length barrel. And as mentioned above, if you tune them down to around 1200 rpm they would fire as long as you could feed them without overheating.
Oh, I almost forgot; Gatling guns can have VERY long barrels, because of the way the barels in the cluster support each other. The M61A2 used in the F22 Raptor has a barrel cluster 90calibers long! The original M61 was 75cals. But barrel lengths as long as 120cals are theoretically possible. They can wring every ounce of power out of the shells they are chambered for, and still group nicely.