Re:Centrifugal Machine Guns
by wiggler00m on Sunday December 08, 2019 @09:31PM
(#21739968)
It wasn’t until World War One that the concept began to be considered again. In June 1918, Major Edward T. Moore and Saul Singer filed a patent for a centrifugal machine gun powered by an electrical motor (US #1,332,992). The motor spooled up the centrifugal barrel assembly to rotate extremely quickly and impart centrifugal force on projectiles. According to Julian Hatcher the gun could fire steel ball bearing projectiles at approximately 1,200 feet per second. Fire was controlled by a stop pin in the ammunition feed tube. Moore claimed the weapon could fire a projectile 1.5 miles with enough force to kill a man. He also suggested the weapon’s rate of fire approached 2,000 rounds per minute. It appears that Moore’s gun may have been tested in 1918 but Hatcher described its accuracy as ‘extremely poor’.
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Modern bullets are not spheres because spherical projectiles don't want to fly straight, especially when you impart a bunch of spin on them first.
Re:Centrifugal Machine Guns
by notduncansmith on Sunday December 08, 2019 @11:51PM
(#21740472)
It's true that the spin from a centrifugal gun is unlikely to make bullets fly straight, although ironically "impart a bunch of spin on them" is also one of the foremost techniques for making bullets fly straight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifling
> In firearms, rifling refers to the helical groovings that are machined into the internal (bore) surface of a gun's barrel, for the purpose of exerting torque and thus imparting a spin to a projectile around its longitudinal axis during shooting. This spin serves to gyroscopically stabilize the projectile by conservation of angular momentum, improving its aerodynamic stability and accuracy over smoothbore designs.
Relating to spinning spherical projectiles, some airsoft guns impart backspin on the spherical plastic pellets they fire to flatten their trajectory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop-up_(airsoft)
It's called the Magnus effect [1]. I learned about it from my wife, who learned about it when she did a tennis instructor course.
I imagine such a weapon would be more of a suppressing fire tool than something intended to shoot accurately.
You still need some accuracy for supressing fire. Especially in the vertical direction. You might wanna keep a horizontal line saturated with lead, but vertical dispersion of targets is usually much lower.