Kurt
Junior Member
Re: »Ø¸´: Chinese Gatling guns / miniguns
Typical error of civilians in military affairs. They look at the devastating capabilities of weapons and forget that you must localize and target your enemy. This demands sensors and communication, all open to unknown impacts of low observeability (called stealth) technology and electronic warfare. So I honestly don't know if China can defend her airspace against all enemy incursions, that doesn't mean they have no control of their airspace.
In the India-Pakistan confrontation for example both sides claim that they are capabale to penetrate into enemy airspace for about half an hour without being forced to exit by the build-up of the enemy response.
The problem of penetrating airspace is in my opinion not if you can do it, because you can, but if the effort is worth the losses. This in turn depends on the select targets.
Btw. there's a simple means to bomb anything in too good defended airspace, cruise missiles and UAVs. Especially the Chinese development of very low observeability UAV (black sword) can give them a penetrating edge against the best protected US positions. The US will likely engineer something similar if convinced of the benefits.
Concerning a machine cannon with armour penetrating capabilites, why not upgrade the Q5 or build something as cheap as an A10? However, I'm not a fan of the Gatling gun because I favour the Soviet approach of using Gast guns to achieve the same firepower (Gatling guns are slow to speed up and you have mostly short fire bursts).
However, I would modify the Gast gun into a redundant 4 barreled design with 2 barrels firing at the same time, replace the copper cartridges with plastic that can be emitted with the next bullet through the barrel and I would make ignition electric. That all serves to speed up the rate of fire and reduce the weight of munitions. The result? Well, you can downscale and economize the close air support aircraft.
Concerning accuracy, Gatling guns are at a disadvantage because they rotate and can't be as well mechanically aligned as Gast guns (if you scrap the accuracy diminishing idea of a moveable turret). In prt the Gatling can make up with gyroscopic centration, but looking at the powers involved, that's not much and just in theory, you can use the same gyroscopic effect on a GAST gun, might look strange, but would defeat the Gatling in rate of fire.
One final improvement for select few high fire-rate machine cannons, reduce the barrel friction by using a magnetic rifling, you win quite a lot of gunpowder energy, have less trouble with heated barrels and can use more aerodynamic bullets, providing less energy loss over range.
Typical error of civilians in military affairs. They look at the devastating capabilities of weapons and forget that you must localize and target your enemy. This demands sensors and communication, all open to unknown impacts of low observeability (called stealth) technology and electronic warfare. So I honestly don't know if China can defend her airspace against all enemy incursions, that doesn't mean they have no control of their airspace.
In the India-Pakistan confrontation for example both sides claim that they are capabale to penetrate into enemy airspace for about half an hour without being forced to exit by the build-up of the enemy response.
The problem of penetrating airspace is in my opinion not if you can do it, because you can, but if the effort is worth the losses. This in turn depends on the select targets.
Btw. there's a simple means to bomb anything in too good defended airspace, cruise missiles and UAVs. Especially the Chinese development of very low observeability UAV (black sword) can give them a penetrating edge against the best protected US positions. The US will likely engineer something similar if convinced of the benefits.
Concerning a machine cannon with armour penetrating capabilites, why not upgrade the Q5 or build something as cheap as an A10? However, I'm not a fan of the Gatling gun because I favour the Soviet approach of using Gast guns to achieve the same firepower (Gatling guns are slow to speed up and you have mostly short fire bursts).
However, I would modify the Gast gun into a redundant 4 barreled design with 2 barrels firing at the same time, replace the copper cartridges with plastic that can be emitted with the next bullet through the barrel and I would make ignition electric. That all serves to speed up the rate of fire and reduce the weight of munitions. The result? Well, you can downscale and economize the close air support aircraft.
Concerning accuracy, Gatling guns are at a disadvantage because they rotate and can't be as well mechanically aligned as Gast guns (if you scrap the accuracy diminishing idea of a moveable turret). In prt the Gatling can make up with gyroscopic centration, but looking at the powers involved, that's not much and just in theory, you can use the same gyroscopic effect on a GAST gun, might look strange, but would defeat the Gatling in rate of fire.
One final improvement for select few high fire-rate machine cannons, reduce the barrel friction by using a magnetic rifling, you win quite a lot of gunpowder energy, have less trouble with heated barrels and can use more aerodynamic bullets, providing less energy loss over range.
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