Gatling Gun 1930's

Historicly, Dr. Gatling developed a motor driven gatling gun in the 1890's. It could fire 3000 rounds per minute, but wasn't developed.

Now, suppose that, in the early 1930's, the design was unearthed by the US Navy, and a 20 mm version is in service on some ships by December 7, 1941.

Japan also gets the technology, stolen from an American plant.

Pearl Harbor is still a catastrophy for the US Navy, of course...good weapons don't make up for surprise attacks, though the Japanese casualties might be heavier.

Does the battleship regain its prominence, since so many more planes get shot down? The 20 mm will get a lot of its victims as the aircraft are on the way out after dropping their loads...but a lot fewer planes from both sides will be making second strikes.

What else changes?
 
If the UK and Russia receive supplies of it through lease lend I can see a whole lot more German planes being lost attacking shipping and during ground attack sorties.

Then it would get fitted into the Mosquito like the Mollins AT gun and you would have a WW2 version of the A10.
 
what would have been amusing is if they had of followed their after war doctrine earlier and put it on thier planes like they have done with their jets.

automated gatling guns on thier planes in ww2 would have allowed them to achieve air surpremacy earlier.
 
If I remember right there were a proliferation of Gatling type guns during the late 19th century. The British and Russians certainly had their own access to blueprints and the Japanese probably have a few in some Imperial Army warehouse somewhere.

The one problem I see is just the gun's potential high rate of fire and the scads of ammunition that would have to be carried.
 
weight...

The weight of ammunition would be a major factor for aircraft, and perhaps impossible for fighters of the time.

Meduim bombers in a ground attack role certainly could carry it.

But...I'm thinking that it could drasticly reduce the impact of aircraft on naval battles. And a dedicated anti-aircraft vehicle could carry one, also. Ammunition weight is less of a problem for ships...you can carry a boatload of ammo.
 
The weight of ammunition would be a major factor for aircraft, and perhaps impossible for fighters of the time.

Meduim bombers in a ground attack role certainly could carry it.

But...I'm thinking that it could drasticly reduce the impact of aircraft on naval battles. And a dedicated anti-aircraft vehicle could carry one, also. Ammunition weight is less of a problem for ships...you can carry a boatload of ammo.

The Mosquito could certainly carry sufficient ammunition, but thinking about it it would hardly have increased the firepower over the conventional four cannon version. We need Tony Williams to tell us if one Gatling 20mm was potentially more efficient than four Hispanos.
 
I'd imagine the feeding system to be a major problem - IIRC the early Hispano 20mm already had somewhat less than stellar reliability because of it's ammo feed ...

Now crank the RoF up to 3000rpm and you've got a major engineering challenge ahead of you, as that feed you're trying to develop has to work even when subjected to high accelerations. Also, a Gatling gun has a slight startup "lag" while it's spinning up whereas a normal cannon will start firing at it's maximum RoF.
 
The weight of ammunition would be a major factor for aircraft, and perhaps impossible for fighters of the time.

Meduim bombers in a ground attack role certainly could carry it.

But...I'm thinking that it could drasticly reduce the impact of aircraft on naval battles. And a dedicated anti-aircraft vehicle could carry one, also. Ammunition weight is less of a problem for ships...you can carry a boatload of ammo.

What comes to mind is the old story about the US Civil War Union General that turned down use of the repeating rifle because he feared the wastage of ammunition by the troops. Or something like that.

When mounted on a ship how big is the gun and ensembly? How many men does it take to man? How quickly does it traverse? How it the gun fed? Can it follow a target easily? Etc. etc.

Perhaps there is a primitive phalenx gun system tied into radar.
 
What comes to mind is the old story about the US Civil War Union General that turned down use of the repeating rifle because he feared the wastage of ammunition by the troops. Or something like that.

I had heard that that idea prevailed into WWII, when most of the countries could have made fully automatic weapons for their soldiers, but hesitated because they didn't have the capacity to produce enough ammunition.

I also remember reading that the Germans favored machine guns more than the other countries. As in, a German squad would have a few light machineguns supported by rifles, whereas most other countries' squads would have riflemen supported by a light machinegun.
 
Casualties would have gone up, but not dramatically so, I think.

After all, Germany had the 20mm Flakvierling, which was capable of firing at just under 2,000 rpm. It was an excellent weapon, but didn't stop Allied fighter-bombers dominating the German Army in 1944/5.

The main problem with AA was aiming in the right place to hit the target. Most of the time, a Gatling gun would simply be missing the target with a lot more ammo...
 
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