"Why gatlings?" Topic

I know why we use gatlings now, increased rate of fire, and getting rid of that horrid heat you build up from that high rate of fire.

But why have those on a grav tank or a mech? Sure you may still want a very high rate of fire. But it would seem that a rail gun could do that, without many of the drawbacks of a gatling.

First, yu can achieve a very high rate of fire with only a single barrel. All that weight you put into those extra barrels can be made into more armor, or more ammo. The energy to power it should only be a small edition to the power needed to move the vehicle, so you dont need all that bulky propellent. Again more ammo.

And heat. Heat comes from the burning of the propellent, not done on a rail gun. And from friction of forcing the projectile down the bore of a weapon. Again as I understand it this does not happen in a rail gun.

So why gatlings? Sure for near future games they maek a lot of sense, just as they do today. But farther out, when we have powerplants that can move these things, railguns seem to make a lot more sense. Or even directed energy weapons like lasers( although they have thier own set of potentialy fatal drawbacks) grasers plasma or fusion guns all seem to ofer great advances in damage potential. of course fusion and plasma likely have thier own cooling problems, and may well have a low rate of fire.

So why do we like gatlings so much? I think about half of the sci-fi models i am working on have them. certainly they are one of the more common weapons. Is the cool factor just that high?

owen

I guess it is the rule of cool.

I agree with you though, it does seem strange that rotary cannons proliferate the sci-fi world too much.

Metal Storm weapons would be a more appropriate future weapon…

I think a lot of it comes down to this:

Visual familiarity.

If there were a lot of cool films with rail guns we would see more of them in sci-fi games I reckon.

Plus, when you see a mini/gatling gun you know what to expect.
When you see a gun you don't recognise, what does it do?
How to you stat it?

Yup its simply the cool look factor as far as im concerned, funny thing is just last night i was watching a episode of Future weapons and they highlighted a state of the art Swedish single barreled navel gun that had the same high rate of fire power as a Gatling might have but was able to change its munitions types just before the shells actually hit there targets, from tracer to over head shrapnel splash to full on armour piercing all with in a split second all from a single barreled gun that has the fire ratio of a Gatling gun / Rotary auto canon.

Just argued metalstorm last month, but hey on TMP rearguing is a way of life.

The only way to have ore bullets in a metal storm is to either make the barrels longer, or add more barrels.Bullet for bullet they are heavier than gatlings, and they are way worse at dispersing heat. Plus there is the little problem of bsicly having to send the back to the factory to reload them. Probably that can be moved down to division support eventualy, but not for a long time.

Dont think of metal storm as a gun, because that is not what it was designed to be. It is a MINE. A long ranged on, true, but not meant as a mobile weapon system. Sort of like a claymore you can aim. I have seen all sorts of claims for metalstorm. Almost all of them are by gamers of one dtripe or another that have added to the basic system, giving it capabilities the engineers that designed it had never dreamed of.

Due to the weight, a gatling is a better weapon for a mobile unit like a mech.

And, a gunpowder power weapon is still not a good bet when rail guns are running around.

Owen

Heat reasons. And the kewlness

Nice bit of trivia, if we assume that they shoot the Minigun for 42 seconds in the film at a rate of 4000 shots per minute, they wasted about 75kg of 7.62mm ammo. Ventura's character would have close to 100 kg of ammmo on him (the weapon is fired in the attack of the guerilla camp). Add the weight of the gun and the backpack containing the ammo and batteries, bringing it closer to 150-200 kg of "portable" fun.

And you get a little over a minute of shooting for that.

The CURRENT Metal Storm is a mine.

In the future, all of the problems could have been ironed out and it could feasibly become a support weapon… we are talking sci-fi after all.

Alternatively, what about flechette launchers or shuriken catapault weapons?

Quick, lets argue about the 'right way' of playing 'pretend'.

Angel-- Just like when someone asks a technical question about a SF game. Everyone start waving their hands and try not to slap Einstein, right? ; )

I think railguns aren't really designed to have high rates of fire… I don't see anything inherent to the idea that would make them have a higher rate of fire than a regular gun. Unless the bullets are stacked like in Metal Storm (which IMO is a pretty silly idea except as a niche thing… has no advantages over conventional weapons in a firefight and several major disadvantages, some of them just engineering issues, others inherent to the concept… which is for a niche weapon), which wouldn't really work with a rail gun anyway, the next bullet still needs to be brought into firing position, the same way a conventional weapon does it.

Railguns and coilguns also overheat very easily, so thats not a bonus.

So gatlings are so common in SF because:
1) They provide a high rate of fire. Loading such a weapon is no different than loading a railgun.
2) Multiple barrels prevents the overheating problems with one barrel weapons (conventional OR rail guns… or lasers, for that matter… switching lenses may be a way to prevent burning your own lens out, but then the issue is getting the lens to quickly switch while staying accurate/effective).
3) Visual cue. You know what a railgun is and how it fights, so if a model tank has one you know what its abilities are, approximately.
4) What's preventing you from imagining a GATLING RAILGUN? Too much awesome? ; )

Really with a railgun you have even more reasons to be a gatling… you have more overheating problems! Engineering may be difficult but I'm sure it could be arranged.

"Quick, lets argue about the 'right way' of playing 'pretend'."

BAZINGA! LOL, AB.

Actually, I sounded too harsh on Metal Storm.

I do think it could be used in a "conventional' weapon's place with some engineering. I just don't think it offers many advantages in that role, and it causes a logistical nightmare with that rate of fire.

Why Gatlings ? Why Not !!!!

Whats better than gatlings?

Twin-triple gatlings of course!!

You're always going to have heat/charging issues with weapon systems. One trade off is RoF vs weight, I.E. lighter barrels weigh less but heat up faster.

Another is friction, even with no gunpowder in a type of electronically propelled weapon the action of the rifled projectile against the barrel is going to cause heat.

Then there's energy weapons which may use a gatling design because it takes x amount of time to charge from each shot.

Finally there's heat build up in energy weapons too, so the glaser works on the principle that cycling through multiple lensing barrels gives the optics time to cool between shots for a higher RoF.

Ammunition becomes less and less of a factor with higher tech, as the projectile weapons get to the point where only the bullet itself is needed, while energy weapons get more powerful powerpacks. So gatling weapons actually become MORE prevalent instead of less since RoF begins to outweigh ammo supply.

I get the kewl factor (same as giant stompy robots). These things will keep getting made because they sell well. End of story.

But I'd love to see manufacturers at least make half an effort to cater for all the ammunition and the power supply.

Look, the one on the end there is the actual penetrator. strip away everything you need for a modern firearm to work, add a small sabot for the rifling, and you can get the same whap of this 7.62mm NATO round in a projectile that will fit 6-7 rounds in the space you used to use to store one.

Every ballistic weapon in CAV is a railgun type weapon, regardless of number of barrels.

Rule of Cool. That is all.

What Psyckosama said! just cool looking

Electromagnetic, linear accelerators with a frictionless sabot casing would work in gatling form and wouldn't generate as much heat… but the power required would be quite high… maybe powered by dylithium crystals or something…

I think that the rule of cool is the real reason though.

Cooler looking than a rail gun…

Gatling cannons ARE kewl.
My personal geek-issue with them is two fold:
1)TOO many: like anything else, no matter how 'cool', over proliferation cheapens the thing and turns it into a tired cliche. Oh well, sometimes cliches are cool too…
2) In 'sci-fi',man portable gatling cannons can be justified in a number of ways… in reality, however, the concept of man portable gatling cannons (along with the requisite ammunition load) is rather absurd… So shoot all the SCI-FI infantry gatling cannons/ chain guns/ miniguns you want, but please don't try and argue how this is a 'realistic' possibility. You know, giant robot space-fighters with laser swords and gatling cannons….

Who was arguing the reality of anything? Seems most are pushing for what looks neat and feels science fiction-y to them.

"Why gatlings?"

Because it's delightful to hear these brothers sing their smooth country tunes, like "All the Gold in California."

Oh, sorry, Gatlings.

Here is a point that everybody seems to have missed. Would rail guns be more suseptible to Electro Magnetic Pulse than a gatling gun? I can remember a very old game of War Hammer 40k I played where my (Win at any cost) opponet showed up with Hay wire Grenades and cleaned my clock so much so they were imediatly banned from our games from then on. If such weapons are available in the system your using maybe railguns are not such a good idea.

cos they look cool.

Even our revered Hammer's Slammers had a form of Gatling in the tri-barrels for the reason of heat dissipation. Granted the ammo was a essentially a prepackaged explosively formed penetrator in a convenient disc-shaped form, so storing and transporting large amounts of it wasn't an issue.

Rail/coil guns could benefit by using multiple banks of capacitors in sequenced charge/discharge cycles. I suppose the same would be true for lasers.

"Here is a point that everybody seems to have missed. Would rail guns be more suseptible to Electro Magnetic Pulse than a gatling gun? I can remember a very old game of War Hammer 40k I played where my (Win at any cost) opponet showed up with Hay wire Grenades and cleaned my clock so much so they were imediatly banned from our games from then on. If such weapons are available in the system your using maybe railguns are not such a good idea."

In short, no. Both are powered and there fore will die on EMP. As will the tank or mech that is carrying them. Unless we fogure out how to harden them against EMP and still be mobile. While Railguns need more power than gatlings, gatlngs still require significant amounts of power to work. When they where filming prediter they had to be careful to hide the extension cord it took to power the minigun.

EMP is no respector of electronics. Anything it hits can go down. Most things it hits woll go down in fact.

Of course making an EMP effeect in something as small as a grenade is pretty fr out there at this time as well.

Owen

IDK, the problem with knowing about the current state of EMP weapons (and electronic/cyber warfare, on a related note) is that its all highly confidential.

Generally, the science seems to suggest that we probably have non nuclear "tactical scale" EMP weapons right now.

A cursory internet search:
link
seems to suggest it would be cheap/easy to make "EMP grenade" type weapons even for nonmilitary forces.

This probably means that EMP (and hardening against them) will be an important part of future warfare.

Cyberwarfare will probably also be important, and if we ever have auto-hacking AI at a tactical level it could mean hacking is a part of tactical combat.

All of these things are just more toys for gamers to use, of course, and our hypothetical scenarios involving such weaponry are unlikely to be realistic… but at least we can kinda point to something realistic as a justification.

Seems to me, if you can provide the power to keep the railgun switched on, it'll fire as quickly as you can feed the ammo into the magazine.

Of course, you'll probably need a fusion reactor to power it, but that's probably already needed for the Grav propulsion unit as well, so may not be an issue.

Given that the projectiles don't actually touch the guides, overheating of them, or a barrel may not be an issue either.

If it is a concern, perhaps new ceramic/honeycomb materials will help to dissipate them, like is done with the space shuttle's tiles. I recall seeing some amazing video footage of a guy holding one side of a tile with his bare hands, while the other side was superheated to glowing yellow, and white, with a blowtorch.

The side he was holding remained nice and cool.

Obviously, a light-saber could parry any incoming fire from a gatling-cannon…

Why gatlings?

Well I asked Why twin linked?

Pretty much the same answers, "It Looks Kewl"

Beyond that ask your average little boy to draw a war machine, and then count the number of barrels… More is better, revolving/moving bits are pleasing.

Besides it give a lot of people an outlet to exercise their inner Orc.