A stock Altas of any game-present variant has 28 rear armour, plus 62 internal hp.
A volley of 6MLAS from a JR7-F of that particular build does 5x6=30 damage.
It does this over the course of 1s.
Thus, after 1s has passed, the Atlas is reduced to 0 armour and 60 internal hp and the MLAS are cooling.
After 2s the MLAS are still cooling, and the Atlas has not lost any more hitpoints.
After 3s the MLAS are still cooling, and the Atlas has not lost any more hitpoints. {MAGIC 3s NUMBER!}
After 4s the MLAS have finished cooling and begin to do damage again, 5x6=30 over 1s.
After 5s the MLAS have done a further 30 damage, reducing the internal hp to 30.
After 6s the MLAS are still cooling, and the Atlas has not lost any more hitpoints.
After 7s the MLAS are still cooling, and the Atlas has not lost any more hitpoints.
After 8s the MLAS have finished cooling and begin to do damage again, 5x6=30 over 1s.
After 9s the MLAS have done a further 30 damage, reducing the internal hp to 0.
That's 9s minimum to reduce a stock Atlas to 0 internal core hp. This would be true if heat were 0 for MLAS. If mechs actually die at -1 hp, which there's some evidence for, then it takes another 3.01s to kill it.
This also assumes Fast Fire isn't specced, which reduces the cooldowns by 5% - not enough to break that 3s window by a long shot.
Note that because of the peculiarity of the rear armour points on a stock Atlas in relation to 6MLAS alpha, it would actually take (almost) as long to kill an
unarmoured Atlas, in that it would take the same number of volleys, but die 1/15th of a second into the last volley's duration.
It still would remain unaffected by heat.
Clearly, MGs would be terrifying if they were buffed, and the people telling us this know better than maths does. I mean, I just proved maths was completely wrong about how fast a Jenner can core an Atlas!
Note: And for the record, no a dual-SRM4 build doesn't frontload damage enough to speed up the kill below (or even close to) 3s.
Edited by Gaan Cathal, 08 June 2013 - 12:03 AM.