Machine gun "Vulkan" - electric drive and six deadly trunks

The idea of multi-barrel rapid-fire weapons arose in the XV century and was embodied in some artillery pieces of the time. With obvious advantage, this type of guns did not get accustomed and was, rather, an exotic illustration of the course of design thought, than a real effective system for shooting.

In the 19th century, the inventor R. Gatling from Connecticut, who was engaged in agricultural machinery, and later became a doctor, received a patent for a "revolver-battery rifle". He was a kind person and believed that having received such a terrible weapon, humanity will come to its senses and, fearing numerous victims, will cease to fight at all.

The main innovation in Gatling's polygon was to use the force of gravity to automatically feed cartridges and to extract the cartridges. The naive inventor could not even imagine that his offspring would become a prototype of a super-fast machine gun in the middle and second half of the 20th century.

The development of technical thought after the Korean War led to the emergence of new weapons for aviation. The swift speeds of the MiGs and the Sabers left the pilots too little time for careful aiming, and the number of guns and machine guns could not be very large. The rate of fire was limited by the fact that the trunks overheated. The output from this engineering impasse was the six-barrel machine gun "Vulkan" M61, ripened just in time for a new slaughterhouse, the Vietnam War.

With every decade, the duration of combat contact between opponents is reduced. The one who managed to release more charges and started shooting first, has more chances to survive. Mechanical devices in such an environment simply can not cope, so the Vulcan machine gun is equipped with an electric drive of 26 kW, rotating the barrels, which produce 20 mm shells in turn, as well as the electric ignition system of the capsules. This solution allows you to fire at a speed of up to 2000 rounds per minute, and in the mode of "turbo" - 4200.

The Vulkan machine gun is rather massive and is intended primarily for aviation, although it can also be used in ground-based air defense systems. Initially, it was installed on Starfighters by Lockheed, but later they were equipped with A-10 ground-attack aircraft. As an additional artillery container, it was suspended and under the fuselage of Phantom F-4, after it became clear that with maneuverable air combat one missile could not be dispensed with. Weight 190 kg is not a joke, and it's even without ammunition, which requires a lot at such a rate of fire, so children's toys "Nemf-machine gun" Vulkan ", shooting arrows, with a prototype have little in common.

In service, these weapons are relatively simple, the design is made as practical as possible. To charge a Vulkan machine gun, you need to remove it, but it's easy to do. Problems arose in the 1950s, when exploration work was carried out. A large number of shells create a powerful return, which resulted in difficulties with piloting.

In the USSR, the creation of multi-barreled aviation weapons began a dozen years later than in the United States. The response to the "Vulcan" machine gun was the anti-aircraft automatic guns 6K30GSH, AK-630M-2 and other artillery systems with high fire density. Some improvements in the creation of the initial and working torque, provide certain technical and operational advantages, but the design is based on the same principle of Gatling.