Helo's from Hell
Tags: attack helicopter minigun russia usa f-18 war iraq airbus a380 fly sky f-16 air combat aviation soldier gun battle troop
Length: 1:26
Description: A minigun is a multibarreled machine gun with a high rate of fire (several thousand rounds per minute), employing Gatling-style rotating barrels. More technically, a minigun is an externally powered Gatling gun of rifle caliber, though the term is sometimes used more generally to refer to guns of similar rates of fire and configuration regardless of power source. Although the term was originally specific to a particular weapon produced by General Electric, it has since been applied to a number of other weapons, many of which were derived from that design. The "mini" of the name is in comparison to designs that use a similar firing mechanism but 20 mm or larger shells, such as General Electric's earlier M61 Vulcan.In the 1960s, the US military began exploring modern variants of the electric-powered, rotating barrel Gatling gun-style weapons for use in the Vietnam War. The US forces in Vietnam, which used helicopters as one of the primary means of transporting soldiers and equipment through the dense jungle, found that the thin-skinned helicopters were very vulnerable to small arms fire and Rocket-Propelled Grenade attacks when they slowed down to land. Although helicopters had mounted single-barrel machine guns, using single-barrel machine guns to repel attackers hidden in the dense jungle foliage often led to barrels overheating or cartridge jams.
In order to develop a weapon with a more reliable, higher rate of fire, General Electric designers scaled down the rotating-barrel 20 mm M61 Vulcan cannon for 7.62 x 51 mm NATO ammunition. The resulting weapon, designated XM134 and known popularly as the Minigun, could fire up to 6,000 rounds per minute without overheating. The Minigun was mounted on OH-6 Cayuse and OH-58 Kiowa side pods, in the turret and wing pods on AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters, on door, pylon and pod mounts on UH-1 "Huey" Iroquois transport helicopters, and on many other helicopters and aircraft.The minigun's multibarrel design helps prevent overheating, but also serves other functions. Multiple barrels allow for a greater capacity for a high firing rate, since the parallel processes of firing/extraction/loading taking place in all barrels simultaneously. Thus, as one barrel fires, two others are in different stages of shell extraction and another three are being loaded. The minigun is composed of multiple closed-bolt rifle barrels arranged in a circular housing. The barrels are rotated by an external power source: usually electric, pneumatic, or hydraulic. Other rotating-barrel cannons are powered by the gas pressure or recoil energy of fired cartridges. A gas-operated variant, designated the XM133, was also developed, but was not put into production.
Several larger aircraft were outfitted with miniguns, specifically for close air support, including famous gunship airplanes like the Douglas AC-47 ("Spooky" a.k.a. "Puff the Magic Dragon", converted Douglas C-47s), AC-119 Gunship ("Shadow" and "Stinger", converted Fairchild "Flying Boxcars"), and the original AC-130 "Spectre" Gunship (converted C-130 Hercules cargo planes), the H-53 (MH-53 Pave Low), and the common H-60 family of helicopters (UH-60 Black Hawk/HH-60 Pave Hawk) transport helicopters - a replacement for the aforementioned UH-1 Iroquois. More rarely, the minigun was mounted on Vietnam-era tanks.
Author: zeoul001
Source: YouTube
