Theres nothing Mini about “old painless”!! Where did this name come from? What is the official name on the gun; gattling gun, chain gun, minigun… Or is it just an ironic nickname, you know, like that guy Tiny works in the fifth, he’s like 7 feet tall?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minigun
Note that man-portable miniguns as seen in video games, T2, and Predator do not in fact exist.
As for its official name, “minigun” is the official designation, AFAICT.
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Actually, the [url=http://www.montysminiguns.com/Xm214page.htm]XM-214 was a prototype/experimental .223 minigun meant to be used in just that fashion. It proved impractical… but in predator that’s what they used.
In T2, I believe that’s just a normal M134 minigun. If you’ve ever seen one, they’re actually fairly small - smaller than you’d expect.
Why do I only preview 90% of the time?
Actually, the XM-214 was a prototype/experimental .223 minigun meant to be used in just that fashion. It proved impractical… but in predator that’s what they used.
In T2, I believe that’s just a normal M134 minigun. If you’ve ever seen one, they’re actually fairly small - smaller than you’d expect.
Am I the first to think of Pocket Tanks when I saw the word minigun?
Is a Pocket Tank kind of like a Pocket Battleship?
On a number of occasions I’ve had the privilege to stand behind a GE Minigun as it went off. Sounds like a very loud chainsaw.
And yea, it’s smaller than you might imagine. Unless you count the deep cycle car batteries. 
The coolest thing you can do with a Minigun is run a belt full of tracer ammo through it. At night. The glowing path made by the tracer bullets looks continuous, like water from a garden hose. 
Nope. It’s an addictive computer game, you shoot a variety of weapons at the opponents tank, different weapons act and score differently. The minigun is one of the available weapons, it is a short burst of bombs. You can get it free here. I have bought all the weapon packs too, I have a total of 150 in my game.
Looks very much like Scorched Earth.
And note that this weapon is impractical not because it doesn’t work, but because it’s damn heavy and goes through ammo like popcorn. No footsoldier is going to hump this thing through the jungle only to go through 50 pounds of ammo in a few minutes. You’d need a truck full of ammo following you around everywhere. At that point you are much better off to mount the damn thing on the truck where you can get a stable firing platform and don’t have to carry it.
At some point there’s no purpose in increasing the rate of fire of an infantry weapon because the infantryman can’t carry the tonnage of ammo needed. Apparantly that point is reached with modern assault rifles, and soldiers almost never use the full auto setting anyway.
A friend of mine was on the build team for a “Monster Garage” project that didn’t work out as well as Jesse wanted. He took it out into the desert, waited until sunset and then unloaded 3000 rounds of tracer ammo from a 7.62mm minigun (truck mounted) into it. Looks like a laser cannon right out of Star Wars. The car burned.
Kinda like this?
The biggest problem is power consumption. The battery weighs about 40lbs and can be spent in less than a minute of firing. Completely unacceptable for any kind of field operation. OTOH, that was using 70’s technology. We could make a much better battery today.
I think that I may have to change my shorts now 
And I’d swear that I saw my buddy’s failed “Monster Garage” car briefly at the end - looks like the silhouette of an RX7 with something big sticking out of the back.
Incredibly, what you are probably looking at is the standard tracer-every-fifth-round, which is normally what gunners are loading. When the rounds are coming out at 70/second, it would look like a continuous stream of tracers.
Cool video, although I really hate that it’s labelled “Chain gun”, since it’s not. There are actual chain guns - driven by chains, believe it or not - and the minigun is not one of them.
In any case, you’re only actually seeing 1/5th or less of the actual volume of fire in that video. For every round you see, 4 other ones are practically invisible.
Except in the one night shot, with the bright red tracers… the second clip of the video being the first instance. I think that’s either a full tracer belt, or perhaps every other round.
The sound, not covered in these videos, is really impressive too. For whatever reason, movie sound guys never get the sound right. They always do the standard machine gun rat-tat-tat only faster, when it’s really more like… hmmmm… I guess a lower pitched, high-rev chainsaw.