Call of Duty - How Games Get Miniguns Wrong - Loadout
Six barrels means six times the action whenever a game or movie needs to dial up the action another notch. The raw power of the brass-spitting minigun is there, whether it's mounted on a helicopter or fired by a T-800 terminator. Mini by name but not by nature. The minigun is a must-have for any action movie blockbuster set piece or for a larger-than-life action hero, but the minigun actually owes its creation to a man who thought he could put an end to wars entirely.
So wrong i'm here at the Royal Armouries museum in the UK to unravel its legacy. So what exactly is a minigun, and how did something that's pretty far from miniature and has such a peculiar name become well known in pop culture? The word is used as a rather generic term to describe any number of spinning multi-borrowed machine guns.
The gun on the back of a halo warthog, the minigun, one of the heavy weapons carried by Fallout's brotherhood of steel, the minigun. The spinning barrels, 46 from Wolfenstein, The new order sure as hell looks like a minigun. Even when games change the name, the term "mini gun" still fits in the mind of the player.
In reality, however, the term "minigun" actually refers to a specific weapon, the m134, because, in relative terms, it's a mini version of the m61, a vulcan cannon firing 7.62 mm ammo rather than the much larger 20 millimeter caliber rounds. Another term you might have heard is "gatling gun," and it's for this 19th century firearm.
The ideas leading to today's fearsome minigun started to gain traction, but before we delve into the invention of Richard Jordan Gatling, we must go even further back into history to the 14th century. It is here that we see the birth of multi-barrel firearms. In 1339, Edward II of England fielded the first known multi-barrelled firearm against France during the Hundred Years' War.
This invention was called the rebaldaquin. It is also known as an infernal machine or organ gun. This piece of siege engineering was made up of smaller cannons laid side by side on a flat horizontal platform with the idea of firing a widespread volley of shots across the battlefield. It was expensive, took forever to reload, and wasn't nearly as popular as traditional canons during the adoption of gunpowder, but the idea did spark an interest in volley guns or multi-barrelled firearms that would emerge again and again throughout history, albeit with mixed success, with firearms like the impractical puckle gun of the 1700s, the flintlock handheld knock gun of the British navy, or the Belgian mitch reluce of the 19th century.
The idea of rapid-fire weaponry or multi-barrelled guns was a concept weapon designers kept revisiting, but would not find success in, until Richard Jordan Gatling's most famous invention, the original Gatling gun, was invented in 1861. It was operated by a hand crank mechanism that revolved at six barrels around a central shaft with barrels being fed a single cartridge from a top mounted magazine, and firing once per full rotation, this design meant that the weapon could be fired at a much higher rate and the cycling of the barrels meant that they would not overheat quickly, ensuring continued fire.
Interestingly, Gates believed that inventing this weapon was a humanitarian act rather than one of destruction. He had briefly practiced medicine during his life and, during the civil war, had frequently visited the trains bringing in the deceased and wounded troops from army camps and battlefields.
He learned that only 3 out of 18 soldiers were dying of their bullet wounds, but the rest were passing away due to fever, pneumonia, or other illnesses contracted at military camps. He reasoned that if there was a weapon that fired more bullets, then fewer men would be required to fight wars, and consequently, there would be fewer men to contract illnesses or battlefield wounds and injuries.
There was also the hope that such a fearsome weapon would tend to discourage war altogether. Julia Keller, author of Mr. Gatter's Terrible Marvel, said he truly thought it would end up shortening war or perhaps even eliminating it. Despite developments by the turn of the century, the gatling guns started to be replaced in service by new weapons utilizing advancements in gas and recall operations, namely Hiram Steven Maxi's maxim gun.
With this, the idea of a weapon utilizing rotating barrels largely fell into disuse. That was until after World War II, when the United States military started to consider new potential weapons to be mounted on their aircraft. For this purpose, General Electric would develop the m61, a 20-millimeter aircraft cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second while utilizing its six spinning barrels.
The minigun was born, developed during the Vietnam War to mount on the side of helicopters. It was an alternative to single-barreled machine guns, which were prone to jamming or overheating. The smaller size also allowed for mounting on ground vehicles, and the smaller caliber allowed for larger ammunition reserves.
The m134 and its variants are still in wide use, being fielded by over 40 nations' armed forces to this day. It's surprising how similar that thing is to the '1862'. Guns designed by Richard Gatling have a cluster of rotating barrels, which gives you a higher rate of fire and cooling, both of which are very important, and spinning with the barrels is this cluster of breeches, as well as breech block mechanisms and a cam, and it allows one bolt to be forward and firing as the next one is firing and extracting, and each bolt is doing a different bit of the process as it goes around.
I mentioned this because that's exactly how the vulcan works, and therefore, that's exactly how the minigun works. The key difference There is electrical power, so the vulcan, powered by the aircraft's on-board electrical system, is quite a powerful one for obvious reasons. The mini gun, powered by a large battery, was a gatling gun on a U.S.
Navy ship experimentally. It was electrically powered and I believe it was 1890, so none of this technology is new and it's over 100 years old, but there's nothing better for basically putting up a curtain of lead, whether that's defeating an incoming missile, or trying to kill an extraterrestrial predator in the jungle.
Iconic in the arms of Bill Duke, churning up greenery and undergrowth while trying to hit a cloaked alien hunter, this scene from Predator may be one of the most iconic scenes in action movie history and is certainly one of the most recognizable shots from the minigun's time on the silver screen, but I'm sure you'll be absolutely shocked to learn that its depiction in Predator isn't exactly.
