THE MINIGUN:
The most Bad-Ass machine gun that i've ever come across, it packs a mean punch and makes swiss cheese out of anything that gets in its way.
It is a 7.62 mm, multi-barrel machine gun with a high rate of fire (over 3,000 rounds per minute), employing Gatling-style rotating barrels with an external power source. In popular culture, the term "minigun" has come to refer to any externally-powered Gatling gun of rifle caliber.
The original Gatling gun was a field weapon, which used multiple rotating barrels turned by a hand crank, and firing loose (no links or belt) metal cartridge ammunition using a gravity feed system from a hopper. The Gatling gun's innovation lay neither in the rotating mechanism nor the use of multiple barrels to limit overheating; rather, the innovation was the gravity feed reloading mechanism, which allowed unskilled operators to achieve a relatively high rate of fire of 200 rounds per minute.
The ancestor to the modern minigun was made in the 1860s. The Gatling gun (1861) was one of the most well known rapid-fire weapons to be used by the Union forces of the Civil War. Contrary to popular belief, the Gatling gun was not the first true machine gun. While it allowed for a high volume of fire, it used an external force to reload and fire the gun, and as a result, was not truly an automatic weapon. Richard J. Gatling replaced the hand cranked mechanism of a rifle-caliber Gatling gun with an electric motor, a relatively new invention at the time.
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