Whats the biggest caliber gatling gun that can be made, assuming we abide by the current laws of physics?The current record holder for the largest caliber gatling gun is the T250 37mm gatling gun used by the T249 Vigilante
The laws of physics don't really put an absolute stop to things until truly ridiculous sizes, what happens instead is that they put more and more strain on the practical and budget side of things until no one can be arsed with it any more. And as you can tell from what weapons have been made, 37mm really is the furthest anyone's been arsed to take it even just for testing, and the most anyone's been arsed to put into actual service is, what, the GAU-8? So that's going to be where you can expect the limit to be for where the brrrrt is worth the headache of making it happen.
>>64703352Probably limited by the practical size of the fixed ammo you're intending to feed the thing.I'd just guess and say that presently, something in the 76X636R, as currently used in the OTO 76/62
>>64703352FOURMILESIXTYBARRELGATLINGLOADEDWITHSMALLPACIFICISLANDSFIRING AT 16000 RPMMUZZLE VELOCITY .99cWould the recoil push Earth into the Sun? Only one way to find out!
>>64703436Even for that you'd be better off with a water cooled barrel. The largest caliber where rotating barrels is plausible is maybe 40mm, but I would argue that even 37mm wasn't reasonable for a gatling cannon, which is why no such weapon was ever adopted.
>>64703436>practical size of the fixed ammoAlso the gun platform/mount. You need to have space, and mass/weight, to store its appetite without takedown, reloadingOP (37 mm T250) or proabably 40 mm is the cost/benefit limit for a gatling.As for rapid-fire air defense AAA cannon, other designs (besides multibarrel) such as chain guns now exist
>>64703482>>6470335230mm seems to be the practical limit for rotary cannons.
>>64703403I was thinking more like a 155mm gatling for area bombardment
>>64703525Bofors did auto 105s for coastal defence, but single barrel.
>>64703403This, you could make a cartridge pretty fucking huge before it collapsing under it's own weight was a problem and if you have the cartridge there is no reason you couldn't feed it into a rotory cannon.As for practical limit I think ~40mm is the largest round worth firing fast enough to justify a gatling gun with ~25mm being the largest we are likely to produced any time soon.
>>64703525Artillery like that doesn't even use cartridges, they have separate propellant charges and can add or subtract them to affect the range of the shell.
>>64703552I'm pretty sure 30mm rotary cannons are more common than 25mm.
>>64703553Except for the swedish 155mm, and some Naval cannons
>>64703565>Can't ToT
>>64703565and the massive Japanese Type 5 AAA cannon ammo
>>64703560I mean new designs, I can see the GAU-22/A being replaced by another 25×137 mm but I can't see anything bigger being addopted that isn't a chain gun or auto cannon.
>>64703587Chainguns are neat.
>>64703352Note scale.
>>64703593Yes they are, nice webm anon.
>>64703525>My body is readyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El2I5UjC_0Q
It's not really about physics as practicality. You can easily make a 40mm gatling gun for example, but going over that quickly gets ugly due to engineering shitfest:- barrel mass skyrockets, i.e. you need much thicker walls and stronger locking surfaces;- rotating inertia explodes, imagine spinning a multi-ton barrel cluster up to useful RPM takes huge power and stresses;- ammo handling becomes the bottleneck, i.e. big rounds are heavy/long, so feeding them reliably at high rate is brutal;- recoil & mount stiffness become dominant, you’re basically bolting an artillery piece to something;- heat management becomes less about “cooling” and more about “your barrels are a furnace”;So technically you make something like a 155mm gatling gun, but it wouldn't be as practical and fast as you might expect.
>>64703573uooh ToT
>>6470335240 mm bofors is doable because the 37mm in your pic used a variant of that cartridge that had been necked down. IIRC there was a 90mm brass-cased tank/aa cartridge. It theoretically could have had a rotary cannon built for it.
>>64703352Stupid question.Engineering a 105mm rotary (or larger) is entirely possible. Doing it is also entirely impractical, which is why nobody does it. You could probably sell that idea to ragheads. They love dumping money into stupid "weapons" shit.
