I think 30 mm was the upper end of multi-barrel weapons, It would be easier to have one barrel and a revolver magazine. The thing with the avenger, was that it was supposed to stop the warthog in mid-air as it was making a firing pass, so a heavier caliber gatling would have a corresponding recoil.
The gatling was also supposed to put a shit load of bullets into a conical pattern, so that a supersonic airplane would get at least some loving. Short of a lazer system, no I dont think its possible.
Just increasing the scale of the parts proportionally doesn’t work out very well.
The big problem is the matter of inertia. Say you want to move a fifty-pound projectile from the magazine to the chamber. How much energy do you have to expend to set the munition into motion? How much more to get it to up to a speed where it could fire more than few RPMs? And once you have accelerated the munition to this speed, how fast is it going when it collides with the inside of the chamber? I’d be amazed to see a machine that can accomplish this and also withstand the stresses involved, not to mention damage to the munition itself.
Then there’s the issue of heat. If the GAU-8 were to fire at full speed for more than few seconds it would just melt. Bigger munitions equals more force equals more heat. How long could such a weapon fire before overheating?
The next generation guns will be magnetic rail which would not have the same problems with heat from the explosion that drives it. This is what the Navy is working on now.
That’s actually the opposite of what’s going on. The number one challenge is designing a barrel with a useful life of thousands of rounds. The early prototypes (as in, just a couple years ago) were like in the single digits to tens of rounds fired before the barrel was simply ruined. Railguns make barrel life MORE of an issue, not less.
It might help understanding to realize that what’s going on in a railgun is nearly indistinguishable from the projectile being arc-welded to the rails.
Not a chance, but it would be cool if you could. The main problem (besides the ridiculous recoil) would be the fact that loading the battleship guns in that picture of the Iowa class firing it’s main guns was a multi-stage process. You had to load the shell (which required a hydraulic loader) then put in the bagged charges and use a hydraulic rammer. The shells weighed over 2000 lbs each and could go out to ranges over 40k yards and muzzle velocities of over 2500 ft/sec.
But it WOULD be really cool to see fire (for the first couple shots until it tore itself apart or put the ship carrying it on the bottom of the ocean).
It occurred to me; you take the operating concept of the A-10 Warthog
And supersize it…take a cargo bird like a Hercules or Starlifter…or even a generic jetliner, and engineer a proportionally enlarged rotary cannon firing 57 mm artillery.
WHY?
Such a plane would be seen as a non-combat asset (from someone with binoculars as it flew past at altitude)…until it came within range of a Big Navy ship (battleship, destroyer, aircraft carrier).
A couple hundred baseball-sized holes punched into your ship in the course of a few seconds is significant damage, yes?
The point of huge numbers of rounds per minute isn’t to increase the firepower on target (you could do that just by making the shells bigger) but to throw out enough projectiles that you can be sure of at least some of them hitting a moving target. That’s been the province of either ground-to-air or air-to-ground fire. Some self-loading cannon larger than the 30mm have reasonably high rates of fire, especially naval guns intended for anti-missile defense. French 100 mm naval guns typically can maintain about 70+rounds a minute.
ETA: No ship in a hostile zone is going to let any unauthorized aircraft come within range, supposedly “harmless” or not. In general a ship is a large enough and compartmentalized enough target that peppering it with holes isn’t going to accomplish a lot; you want a few big holes that could disable or sink the ship.
I thought a railgun was like a very precise maglev device, which accelerates a round very quickly, while arc welding is electrocuting the hell out of a piece of metal so it melts?
The main problem (besides the ridiculous recoil) would be the fact that loading the battleship guns in that picture of the Iowa class firing it’s main guns was a multi-stage process. You had to load the shell (which required a hydraulic loader) then put in the bagged charges and use a hydraulic rammer. The shells weighed over 2000 lbs each and could go out to ranges over 40k yards and muzzle velocities of over 2500 ft/sec.
