LordNothing, on 30 April 2017 - 01:26 PM, said:
it depends little on calibur. many guns configurations exist in all caliburs. gatling guns from 5.65mm microguns, all the way up to 35mm behemoths (and larger guns are likely possible but thats good enough to get through most modern armors) and gasts in a wider range. chainguns from the lowliest belt fed machine gun all the way to high calibur naval guns. large artilliary type pieces usually just a bolt action (same as a rifle but bigger) with an auto loader thrown in (replacing the soldier who had to load the gun manually), but those are seldom used in direct fire operations and need not have a high firing rate.
could you use a gatling gun configuration for your autocannons? sure. but with the firing rates the guns operate at, this would be unnecessarily redundant. before they started using gatling guns on aircraft they experimented with revolvers. a gatling style drum loader but with a single static barrel. but because there was a lot of stop and go on the feed system it jammed a lot and the barrels would wear out faster and had to be frequently replaced. the drum would have to come to a complete stop before it could be fired and this would also limit the firing rate. this to me sounds like what the uacs in battletech are using. after that they went to a gatling guns proper, the gun, drum and ammo feed were all synchronized into one fluid motion, and this greatly reduced jamming. the interval between barrel servicing was increased by a factor of how many barrels the gun had. they ran cooler which further increased their service life. so if a uac was actually configured as a gatling gun, it simply wouldnt jam and would fire a lot faster and would in fact be a rac.
Just quoting an Autocannon entry which has depending on the manufacturer and caliber. (Perhaps a catchall, as X manufacturer may have multi-barrel and single-barrel ACs within the same damage class? Who knows.)
Keep in mind that part of what classifies a weapon as 2, 5, etc. is how much damage it can deliver within a set amount of time. If you assume 5 seconds, then whether it is aWhirlwind/5 120mm AC/5 delivering 3 shells at 1 shell per second and spends another two cooling off and changing cassettes (magazine; aka reloading another 3 shell "
Round"), or a belt-fed Armstrong J11 80mm AC/5 delivering 6 shells at a shell and three quarters per second before opening its port to cool and eject a cassette, or a belt fed 40mm Pontiac Light firing 20 shells at 6 shells per second before it becomes too dangerous to keep it up and it needs to cool... you still have an AC/5.
An AC/5 of say 30mm, where if it is using the same shells as the Blackjack's GM Whirlwind/L, it has to churn out 10 shells just to make 2 damage, and so that's 20 shells to make 4 and 25 shells to make 5 damage. The fun caveat is the that it doesn't matter if it's all fired in a single second or spread across many seconds, the weapon just wouldn't be able to handle firing twice that without some potentially severe reprecussions.
A great candidate for an Ac/20 with a multi-barrel setup would be the Pontiac 100. Depending on whether we're talking about the Victor's version of 30mm or the Yen Lo Wang version of 40mm, there's some descrepencies but lets go with the Victor version. It fires 100 shells within "the blink of an eye." I assume this to be one second. Typically this thing spends as many as 9 seconds just 'cooling'. In actuality, it takes 3 seconds to reload through the primary feed. However the arm must remain stationary for these 3 seconds or else that feed can jam. It then possesses a secondary feed in which a reload can take as many as 6 seconds. This second feed ejects the new cassette out of a port in the right torso's chest which the left hand grabs and then manually inserts into the Pontiac 100 through a secondary feed in the top-rear side of the weapon (the right arm extends perfectly straight first). However, this doesn't make it a rotary cannon, nor does it make it an ultra. Considering the extremely low caliber of the weapon and the firing rate, I believe the safe assumption is that its barrels are shelded under a large armor sheath that simply looks like a much larger barrel. The "rule of cool" at work when trying to explain the huge differences between the artwork and the lore.
The difference between a standard AC and an Ultra varies depending on the manufacturer, but most commonly it's either a secondary cassette feed or simply being able to better handle firing at twice the rate (known as "Ultra mode"). I say better handling it because under the TacOps rule "Rapid-fire autocannons", you can double the rate of standard autocannons at extremely high risk of both jamming and/or exploding. Some ultras (specifically the Ebon Jaguar's Ultra/20) simply have twin non-rotating barrels which are technically two guns feeding through the same source. Part of BT's old "rule of cool" as Bishop Steiner once put it. The Stone Rhino is another great example of the polar opposite, where a single barrel fed from two different sources, introducing us to a 30 ton "Gauss Rifle" of standard damage per slug that could fire twice in a single turn.)
Edits:
1) Correction regarding Armstrong J11; it is an auto-fire type but cassette fed and fires 6 shells, not 10.
Added Pontiac Light (since I took out my big notepad of AC variants to double check).
Sources; Gm Whirlwind/5:
Thunder ridge &
Wolves on the border, BattleTechnology, Sarna
Pontiac Light:
Illusions of Victory on a Striker mech.
Armstrong J11:
Thunder Ridge -- Note: Within the same chapter it changes 3 times between 80mm and 90mm, suspect typo. 80mm is more common and thus the one I accept.
2) Added a paragraph with the Victor's Pontiac 100 (Source:
Heir to the Dragon)
Corrected name of Blackjack's GM Whirlwind/L from Whirlwind/2.
Note: Used the
Threads of ambition version. Binding Force claims it is 32mm and burst fire.
Edited by Koniving, 30 April 2017 - 03:52 PM.
3
They still don't. Which setting is it?
