Heavy weapons: Difference between revisions

{{Quotebox|align=center|width=550px|quote=I am Heavy Weapons Guy, and ''this''... is my weapon. She weighs 150 kilograms and fires 200-dollar custom-tooled cartridges at 10,000 rounds per minute. It costs ''400,000 dollars'' to fire this weapon... for ''12 seconds''.|source=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY5qJHZCz2I}}

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What could be simpler than metal rods, maybe with fins for stability, [[wp:Kinetic bombardment|dropped precisely from a satellite]] orbiting Earth at 7,000mph (that's 9km/s, or Mach 10)? But what metal to use that can withstand this heat? Easy: tungsten. Melting point of 6,192°F (3,422°C). Boiling point is so high that it would stay liquid on the surface of the Sun. This has never been tried, so we don't know what it would look like when deployed. Obviously you wouldn't see the rods, only the result of their impact; could you see a plasma trail left behind in the atmosphere? Has the power of a railgun, or more, with the advantage that you don't have to deploy the weapon on or near the battlefield. No insanely high electrical consumption. Of course, there's that minor initial cost of orbital installation....

A [[wp:Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle|multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle]] (MIRV) seems like a harmless-sounding name for what looks like (and is) death raining down from above. The invention of MIRV pretty much guaranteed [[wp:Mutual assured destruction|mutual assured destruction]] during the Cold War since it's almost impossible to defend against all the incoming warheads. Breathtaking/scary pictures [https://web.archive.org/web/20140606052220/http://blog.markloiseau.com/2012/05/mirv-reentry-pictures/ here].

Gatling guns, AKA chainguns, vulcan guns, and miniguns ("If ''that'''s a minigun, I wonder what a ''maxi''gun is!") are often featured in video games (DOOM, Serious Sam, Gunman chronicles, etc., etc.). They use multiple barrels combined with a single loading and firing mechanism, which allows every barrel to cool down between two of the barrel's firing cycles. The firing rate is roughly that of a single barrel times the number of barrels, the limiting factor being the cooling rate.