Gatling Gun
From Airsoft Community Wiki
Introduction
The Gatling Gun was a hand-cranked manual machine gun designed by Richard Gatling in the mid nineteenth century. The gun was capable of firing bursts of automatic fire owing to its rotating barrel assembly, each with its own individual breech and firing mechanism, gravity-fed from a single magazine or drum hopper. After the second world war experiments were undertaken to motorise old gatling guns to provide high rates of fire for the new breed of fast jet powered aircraft. The eventual result was the 20mm Vulcan Cannon. The cyclic mechanism used in the Gatling Gun was the original forerunner of the type used in the modern Minigun (so called as it is a scaled down version of the bigger Vulcan mechanism)
The unique nature and operation of the Gatling gun and its many appearances in popular television and cinema (The Last Samurai, The War Wagon) has resulted in what can best be described as a "Gatling Gun fixation" amongst young, naive Airsofters, also known as noobs. Despite the almost total impracticality of a skirmish-capable Airsoft Gatling gun owing to size, weight, mechanical complexity, the purchase of accurate specifications, ammunition expenditure, gas sus supply and the considerable cost of manufacture, it has become internet forum law that a thread concerning an individual's quest to buy/create an Airsoft Gatling will appear at least once every year on ASCUK. ("I want an Airsoft Gatling Gun!" etc.) The blatantly unattainable nature of such a project often results in a stream of light-hearted derision from other Airsofters, who are able to spot a pipe dream when they see one, whereas the ambitions of certain individuals are rendered blind by youthful exuberance.
Airsoft versions.
A close relative to the Gatling gun , the minigun , is available from the States to those with more money than sense ! This version is made by Piper's Precision Products in the USA. It uses a motor and AEG size battery pack to operate the barrels and high pressure air or CO2 tanks to fire the bullet balls. Ammo is stored in the rear of the receiver. Later versions feature hop-up units and can be tuned for UK power limits.
http://www.montysminiguns.com/AirSoftPage.htm http://www.xcalibertactical.com/
There are two other M134 airsoft replicas, made by the Classic Airsoft companies Asahi Firearms and Toytec in the mid 1990s. The Asahi gun is similar to the Pipers as it uses gas to propel the ammo and medium sized batteries to spin the barrels. Its ammo supply is inside the fake motor housing. Mechanically very complicated, rumoured to have more moving parts than the real thing.
The Toytec gun is an all-electric system using six AEG-style pistons for each barrel that are pulled back and let go in sequence as the barrel assembly rotates. It does not need a gas supply but requires a much bigger motor and a sealed lead acid battery pack. It also needs a heavy duty switch to control the motor. It feeds from a 200 round magazine that plugs into the feeder/delinker. Some of these guns were made as short-barrel versions. Toytec sometimes make dummy models for collectors and the recently released Creation M134 is though to be based on or copied from a Toytec model.
Both of these guns require special hardened ammunition as normal ammo will break up in their aggressive loading systems. They all command prices well in excess of £1000 as they are collectors items. They are not as accurate, powerful or reliable as many modern airsoft guns dispite being ten times more expenisve to buy and maintain. This is why they are not considered practical for skirmishing.
The Piper's gun uses a more passive mechanism and does not need special munitions and uses a much more rugged system than the Japanese guns. It can sustain rates of fire of 75 rounds per second. The price of this performance is extreme ammuntion consumption (3300 round bag of excels = 44 seconds of firing time) and gas usage.
Building from scratch.
Making a gatling-type airsoft gun from scratch is a huge undertaking. It requires the use of a huge range of metalworking equipment right up to medium sized machine tools like lathes and mills. Purchasing tooling and materials and the time taken to design such a gun would drive up the cost to be comparable to buying a Pipers's version. If in the end it did function perfectly it would still have the general drawbacks of being bulky, heavy and using ammuntion very quickly. Anyone researching such a project should be familiar with how the real guns operate as well as being confident with the mechanisms found in all modern airsoft guns.
