General > Discussion
regarding gatling/minigun
Aiki-Knight:
If you're making the bullets small, and slowing down the rate of fire, I just don't see the point of making a more complicated weapon to do what a machine gun already does well. A gatling gun would be hard to fire prone, or from cover. Casting aside the impossibility of it, you'd have to stand up and hold it still to fire. You have to understand that real soldiers don't stand in the middle of a battlefield in one place, holding a hip-mounted weapon and blasting away. Any decent shooter with a rifle would take him out. Real soldiers fire from cover, and need to be able to maneuver the weapons to take pot-shots through windows, around corners, between branches, etc. It would really be almost impossible for such a gun to be used. Even a "rocket launcher", which is admittedly a cumbersome weapon, can be used from some cover, although it's only used when needed. A machine gun allows a soldier to go prone fast, get up fast, and duck around fast. A gatling gun just wouldn't.
If you want lots of rounds, the devs could more easily give the current machine gun the 200-round box clip for the M249, and work with that. That clip's been around for a couple of decades. It would weight a fair amount, and so other agents would have to carry some, if you wanted to deploy many hundreds of rounds. Wouldn't that satisfy the need?
Nevasith:
--- Quote ---Gattling cannons are one of my many points of interest, so I studied them a bit.
--- End quote ---
That is why you do not listen- you do not put any useful arguments for minigun. Nanotech? How do you expect a nanotech to solve MG problems?
The machinegun we have now is like M249 which weights aroun 6kg, declared effective range of 800m, and theoretical ability of firing 500 rounds per minute(source wikipedia)
There is also available a little bit heavier version-~7kg which has a range of 1km and theoreticly can fire 1150 rounds per minut if rps is all that matters for you.
There are some things NO nanotech will EVER change. You can make rounds smaller but what you get would be a needle gun which has not enough power to stop anything as it would just pass through (For EX. Ortonok doesnt have ordinary blood) or the bullet would just break on armor.
--- Quote ---Really? Name another weapon that can put that much led in the air? well....I'm waiting.
--- End quote ---
Medieval canon
The point is not which weapon puts most led in the air- its not the only measure of weapon usefulness. Read what Aiki wrote.
--- Quote ---A caseless round is roughly 1/3 the volume of a normal one. So you could fit 3 times more bullets in the same ammo pack used in the microgun. 10 kg isn't much, b.t.w.
--- End quote ---
Add to it weight of the gun itself, the need for additional ammo, inability of taking a sidearm...
--- Quote ---Dunno where you got that figure...Even assuming it's true we're talikng about 5 minutes of constant fire, right? You should be trough all 3000 rounds by then
--- End quote ---
.
No he wasnt. The weapon could jam after few shots. And than you need to hide for 5 minuts to unjam the gun- sound too long if you ask me, but if the engine jams there could be bigger problem
Winter:
--- Quote from: TrashMan on June 14, 2008, 02:20:51 am ---What? D I have to do all the work here.. I mentioned articles and weapons and technologies. Geez, use google search, you can find articles that will back up my claims.
--- End quote ---
Well, no. Like I said, they just contain more vague theory and irrelevance.
--- Quote ---If you got power armor it can be carried by one.
Note that the microgun CAN be carried and operated by one person.
38 kg - that is total weight of the whole system, gattling gun + backpack with 1000 round.
I expect that by 2080 you can get that down to 30, if not more.
--- End quote ---
Which is still far too much for an effective urban conflict weapon. Hell, the SPW version of the Minimi, which is the sort of thing PHALANX would use, is only 5.75kg fully loaded with 200 rounds. And if you think any military force would give a troop ruinously expensive powered armour solely so that they can fire an oversized and clumsy machine gun that's useless in exactly the areas where PHALANX will be operating the most, cancelling out all the inherent speed and mobility advantages of a powersuit, you are wrong.
--- Quote ---A caseless round is roughly 1/3 the volume of a normal one. So you could fit 3 times more bullets in the same ammo pack used in the microgun. 10 kg isn't much, b.t.w.
--- End quote ---
Exaggeration. A 4.73mm caseless round, like the one I used in my example, is around 40% the size of a 5.56mm round. 40% of an ammo backpack so large and unworkable that they never even tried it on still leaves you with something larger than the original 1000-round pack which was also considered so large and weighty that it was unfit for purpose. The 4.73mm pack would actually end up heavier because of the greater number of rounds in it.
--- Quote ---Easy, power armor can dig itself into place - lock legs in a wide stance for stabiltiy, increase support for the spine and soft swivel movement for the hip.
And like I said, there are way to reduce recoil to some extent. The two things combines should be more then enough.
--- End quote ---
Again you say this without any facts or figures to back you up. And you forget that heavy recoil thrown at any human being at the speed a minigun does means accuracy gets thrown out the window. This is a massive no-no for modern militaries where accuracy has become everything.
--- Quote ---If you ever bothered to check upon what I said, you'd notice that every technology I mentioned has alleardy been implemented somewhere or is being implemented.
--- End quote ---
Most of it is either entirely theoretical or has no bearing on your argument. That little article you posted about the recoil-decreasing mechanism, for example, has little relevance because it would have far more of an effect on single-barrel rifles and machine guns, thereby making the machine gun even more preferable over any kind of minigun.
--- Quote ---Are you telling me you can shoot for minutes with other weapons without running out of ammo at some point? And who said you can't reload a minigun? You just need another agent who will carry another backpack,..and, you know...sidearms?
--- End quote ---
You cannot, CAN NOT, hold a position against a superior hostile force with nothing but sidearms while you're switching backpacks and relinking your bloody minigun. Never mind the fact that extra backpacks are again 10kg of load on top of (possibly even in place of) their other equipment.
--- Quote ---Really? Name another weapon that can put that much led in the air? well....I'm waiting.
--- End quote ---
Name one situation, even one, where you could possibly need that much lead in the air. There's nothing a minigun can do that can't be handled by a machine gun or other weapon that a squad is already likely to be equipped with.
--- Quote ---Dunno where you got that figure...Even assuming it's true we're talikng about 5 minutes of constant fire, right? You should be trough all 3000 rounds by then.
--- End quote ---
I read it during my research into why infantry miniguns are an unworkable concept. You can look it up too. And that's 5 minutes for the very recent modern version.
--- Quote ---It takes a bit longer, but not that long. How difficult you think it is to attach a new chain?
--- End quote ---
How long do you think it takes to bring up another backpack, take it off, put it on and relink the chain? Never mind the fact that sanity prohibits bringing more than 3000 goddamned rounds to an engagement on the backs of infantrymen.
Really, just think of a squad of infantry being told to seek and destroy a specific target in a densely-populated system of narrow Iraqi alleys, without harming any civilians or causing lots of damage. What would you have them do with a minigunner? Make him stand and wait outside while the rest of the team carry out the mission? He can't really go in there without banging his oversized weapon into everything, and he certainly won't be able to fire it. And this is the situation that PHALANX is in all the time, constant close-in work sweeping buildings and UFOs. There is essentially no open-ground combat where a minigun, even if it could be made workable, would be remotely useful.
(Facts: The Microgun itself is over 1 metre long projecting out from the hip, as opposed to a modern bullpup assault rifle or LMG (usually between .75 and .8 metres) used in a shoulder-back shooting stance or lowered with the stock at the shoulder and muzzle pointing at the floor.)
--- Quote ---unrealistic? :ounworkable? incontrovertible data? :D
Where do you get this stuff?
Are we even living in the same universe?
What's next? You're gonna tell me the moon is made of cheese?
--- End quote ---
Why not? That's what you've been telling everyone here. Positive thinking is not an alternative for practical solutions, and there are no practical solutions that will fix all the things that make the minigun such a terrible infantry weapon.
--- Quote ---Gattling cannons are one of my many points of interest, so I studied them a bit. I also aced physics classes and I has a project director from CERN as my teacher. We covered antimatter, quantum physics, nanotechnology...he even invited experts from the field, guy working in the labs to show us some stuff. Some of the prototpye tech is so far out there...Here's a tip - watch out for nanotech. It's the next big thing!
--- End quote ---
Wow, all that education, and you still have no idea about the military uses of miniguns and why they're not applicable to infantry?
--- Quote ---Erm..where was I? Oh yea - so don't think me some raving fool who doesn't know what the hell he's taking about. I guess we have a different view about a subject, but I'll be damn if I agree with you on that, when everything I know tells me otherwise.
--- End quote ---
Well, everything I knows tells me you're wrong, and I've told you why. Your technical solutions are dodgy and you completely ignore the tactical implications of using a minigun in tightly-packed densely-populated urban areas, especially for an organisation whose main purpose is to save and defend civilians.
Simply put, we're not putting an implausible weapon into a plausible game. It would run counter to all the difficult design choices and hard work we've put in so far and it would cheapen the game as a whole.
Regards,
Winter
Falion:
Trashman, please check your PM inbox if you haven't already.
Fal
TrashMan:
Hehe...I can answers some of your concernes right here.
You don't need to worry about it. There is no hatchet between me and Winter to bury. I don't let things like this get to me personally - it's not a big deal for me, I discuss it for it's own merit. So you don't need to worry about me throwing a fit and leaving :D
I've never abandoned a project for such simple reasons - the only time I did was because the project died (coders leaving or something similar). No worries.
don't tell me I come over as that confrontational? :o
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