Earliest Practical Gatling Gun

How early could Gatling gun like those we know today come in to operation? Its not much of an innovation. More like a new application of old ideas. What it boils down to is that by motorizing a technology from 1860s we now have the highest possible ROF for a normal gun (not considering Metal storm completely different system). I'm not 100% but i think I saw on the History Channel that Gatling himself had ideas for motorizing his gun but it wasn't feasable at the time.

When would motorizin the gun be practical. How would this change events.

I could see them becoming feasable during WW 1 but there wouldnt be much of a need for it, and it would be but on the back burner till WW2.

Once we come to WW2 however the tecnology become available to realy exploit it. How would this influence plane design and ship defense?
 
AFAIR the precision machining of cartridges required to make machine guns really reliable came in the course of the 1890s, so around then. The technology for electric motors exists since the 1870s, but the power required to crank a Gatling at high speed will do bad things to its mechanism when it jams.
 

Markus

Banned
What carlton said, but like you hinted; why build it in the first place? The rate of fire will be insane and there is not target requiring such a ROF.
WW2 does not change that. 20mm guns were replaced by 37/40mm ones not because the former´s ROF was too low, but mainly because they lacked range.

However, a 40mm Gatling would save a lot of space compared to a 40mm quad mount.

IMO no one will look into it before the mid-30 and even than multi barrel "conventional" guns are a much more likely sollution, since they can be implemented with little development.
 
A Gatling was actually motorised in the 1890s and hit c.3,000 rpm IIRC, but at the time no-one could see a need for a gun which wasted ammo at such a prodigious rate.

The problem with a WW2 aircraft Gatling is that fighter guns were generally mounted either in the wings, or in the cowling alongside the engine: in either case, they needed to be slim (which a Gatling certainly isn't). Even in bomber installations the bulky barrel group would have caused problems when turned sideways, because of the huge air drag. The only suitable installation would have been fixed in the fuselage of a twin-engined fighter or attack plane (e.g. the P-38 Lightning or A-20). And it didn't really make sense to adopt a special gun for such limited use - it was easier to just fit a bunch of conventional guns together.
 
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