Vulcan weapon. M61A1 Vulcan aircraft gun (USA)

Work on the creation of a multi-barreled machine gun began in the 40s of the twentieth century. This type of weapon, with a high rate of fire and high fire density, was developed as a weapon for tactical jet fighters of the US Air Force.

The prototype for the creation of the first sample of the six-barreled M61 Vulcan was the German twelve-barreled Fokker-Leimberger aircraft machine gun, the design of which was based on the Gatling revolver-battery design. Using this scheme, a well-balanced design of a multi-barreled machine gun with a block of rotating barrels was created, and all the necessary operations were performed in one revolution of the block.

The Vulcan M61 was developed in 1949 and adopted by the American Air Force in 1956. The first aircraft to have a six-barrel M61 Vulcan machine gun mounted into its fuselage was the F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber.

Design features of the M61 Vulcan gun

The M61 Vulcan is a six-barreled aircraft machine gun (cannon) with an air-cooled barrel and ammunition with a 20 x 102 mm cartridge with an electric capsule ignition type.

The ammunition supply system for the six-barreled Vulcan machine gun is without a link, from a cylindrical magazine with a capacity of 1000 rounds. The machine gun and the magazine are connected by two conveyor feeds, in which the spent cartridges are returned back to the magazine using a return conveyor.

Conveyor belts are placed in elastic guide sleeves with a total length of 4.6 meters.

The entire array of cartridges in the magazine moves along its axis, but only the central guide rotor, made in the shape of a spiral, rotates, between the turns of which the ammunition is located. When firing, two cartridges are synchronizedly removed from the magazine, and two spent cartridges are placed into it on the opposite side, which are then placed in the conveyor.

The firing mechanism has external circuit drive with a power of 14.7 kW. This type of drive does not require the installation of a gas regulator and is not afraid of misfires.

The ammunition load can be: caliber, fragmentation, armor-piercing incendiary, fragmentation incendiary, sub-caliber.

Video: shooting from a Vulcan machine gun

Suspended aircraft installations for the M61 gun

At the beginning of the 1960s the company General Electric it was decided to create special suspended containers (suspended cannon mounts) to accommodate the six-barreled 20 mm M61 Vulcan. It was supposed to use them for firing at ground targets with a range of no > 700 m, and equip them with subsonic and supersonic attack aircraft and fighters. In 1963-1964, two variations of the PPU entered service with the US Air Force - SUU-16/A and SUU-23/A.

The design of the suspended cannon installations of both models has the same overall body dimensions (length - 5.05 m, diameter - 0.56 m) and unified 762-mm suspension units, allowing such a machine gun to be installed in the PPU on a wide variety of models of combat aircraft. A characteristic feature of the SUU-23/A installation is the presence of a visor above the receiver block.

The SUU-16/A PPU uses an aircraft turbine powered by an incoming air flow as a mechanical drive for spinning and accelerating the barrel block of the Vulcan machine gun. The full ammunition load consists of 1200 shells, the loaded weight is 785 kg, the unloaded weight is 484 kg.

The drive of the SUU-23/A installation for accelerating the barrels is an electric starter, the ammunition load consists of 1200 shells, the loaded weight is 780 kg, the weight without equipment is 489 kg.

The machine gun in the hanging container is fixed and fixed motionless. An on-board fire adjustment system or a visual shooting sight is used as a sight when shooting. Extraction of spent cartridges during firing occurs outside, over the side of the installation.

Main tactical and technical characteristics of the Vulcan M61

• The total length of the gun is 1875 mm.
• Barrel length - 1524 mm.
• The mass of the M61 Vulcan cannon is 120 kg, with the feed system kit (without cartridges) - 190 kg.
• Rate of fire - 6000 rounds/min. Instances with a firing rate of 4000 rounds/min were produced.
• The initial speed of caliber/sub-caliber projectiles is 1030/1100 m/s.
• Muzzle power - 5.3 MW.
• The time to reach the maximum rate of fire is 0.2 - 0.3 seconds.
• Vitality - about 50 thousand shots.

The Vulcan M61 rapid-fire submachine gun is currently installed on fighters - Eagle (F-15), Corsair (F-104, A-7D, F-105D), Tomcat (F-14A, A- 7E), "Phantom" (F-4F).

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Today we are reviewing another Hollywood bestseller - the six-barreled Gatling machine gun M-134 or “Magic Dragon”. In general, this machine gun has many names, it is called “Jolly Sam” and “Meat Grinder”, but the most suitable nickname is still “Magic Dragon”, received by the machine gun not only for its characteristic “roar” but also for its strong fiery flash when firing.

The first order for this type of weapon for infantry came in 1959 from the US armed forces, since machine guns of that time did not allow creating a high density of fire at distances over 500 meters. General Electric, which already has considerable experience in creating systems of this kind, is taking on the task of fulfilling the order. In nineteen sixty, the company began developing the first prototype of a multi-barrel machine gun system with a caliber of 7.62 millimeters. The basis was the six-barreled 20-mm M-61 Vulcan air cannon, which was also previously created by this company for the US Air Force.

Initially, the order specified a caliber of 12.5 millimeters, but the recoil with a power of more than 500 kgf at 6000 rounds per minute brought the idea to naught. The first tests are carried out in Vietnam on the AC-47 Spooky fire support aircraft (the predecessor of the Finger of God - the Lockheed AC-130 aircraft). The machine gun turned out to be so good that a couple of months later it was accepted into service and began to be installed en masse on the UH-1 Iroquois and AH-1 Cobra.

The ability to switch the rate of fire and its light weight made it possible to install the M-124 even in a double-gun; when firing, this led to the target being fired at being covered with lead. These machine guns terrified the North Vietnamese rebels for a very long time, when firing from them the “green stuff” was simply mowed down for a hundred or two meters. By the seventies, more than 10,000 machine guns had been produced, the lion's share of which went into service with transport and attack helicopters, as well as with light vessels and ships as a means of combating low-flying targets and boats.

For some time, M-134 machine guns were installed on vehicles, but if the vehicle’s engine failed, the machine gun would operate for no more than three minutes until it was completely discharged. By the mid-seventies, “The Magic Dragon” became popular among the civilian population, especially in “armed” states like Texas, it sold more than a thousand copies. The machine gun was used on an infantry bipod with a box for a thousand rounds; firing required a constant 24-volt power source and consumed about three thousand kilowatts per hour at six thousand per minute.

For the defense of stationary structures it was acceptable, but as an offensive weapon it was useless. The weight of the machine gun itself is about 30 kilograms with battery, and the weight of the ammunition load of 1,500 rounds is almost 60 kilograms, this amount of ammunition is enough for a minute of battle. The optimal ammunition load is 4,500 rounds (weighing 136 kg) or 10,000 rounds (290 kilograms).

The operation of the machine gun mechanisms is extremely interesting: the M-134 uses automation with an external drive of the mechanisms from a DC electric motor. Through three gears and a worm shaft, an electric motor drives a block of six barrels. The cycle of loading, firing and unloading is divided into several operations performed at various points of connection between the barrel block and the receiver.

When the barrel moves up in a circle, the spent cartridge case is extracted and ejected. The barrel is locked by turning the bolt cylinder; the movement of the bolts is controlled by a closed curved groove on the inner surface of the machine gun casing, along which the rollers located on each bolt move. Feeding is produced in two ways: the first is using a mechanism without a link feed of cartridges or using a tape.

To control the rate of fire, an electronic fire control unit is used, which has a rate of fire switch, a fuse, a button to start rotating the barrel block and a fire button located on the handle. Modern version The M134D machine gun has only two firing options - 2000 and 4000 rounds per minute. Recoil when firing is directed only back, no barrel toss or pull to the side.

The machine gun also has diopter sights, which, in general, are not needed when using tracer cartridges in a belt for correction, when firing from a machine gun there is a pronounced tracer trail, more like a stream of fire.

I would like to note that the M-134 machine gun has never been used in films; the enormous weight and very strong recoil simply knocks a person off his feet when trying to fire from the hip. For the filming of some cult films (Predator, Terminator, The Matrix), an experimental XM214 machine gun with a caliber of 5.45 millimeters and a recoil of 100 kilograms was used. Despite its relatively small dimensions and “weak” recoil, its rate of fire of 10,000 rounds per minute was simply not acceptable for the army, and the machine gun did not go into production, although it was actively advertised until the nineties of the last century.

/Alexander Martynov, specially for Army Herald/

The idea of ​​a multi-barreled rapid fire weapons originated in the 15th century and was embodied in some samples of that time. Despite its obvious advantages, this type of guns did not catch on and was, rather, an exotic illustration of the development of design ideas than a real one. effective system for shooting.

In the 19th century, inventor R. Gatling from Connecticut, who worked on agricultural machinery and later became a doctor, received a patent for a “revolving battery gun.” He was a kind man and believed that, having received so much terrible weapon, humanity will come to its senses and, fearing the numerous victims, will stop fighting altogether.

The main innovation in the Gatling gun was the use of gravity to automatically feed cartridges and extract cartridges. The naive inventor could not have imagined that his brainchild would become the prototype of a super-fast-firing machine gun in the middle and second half of the 20th century.

The development of technical thought after the Korean War led to the emergence of new weapons for aviation. The rapid speeds of the MiGs and Sabers left the pilots too little time for careful aiming, and the number of cannons and machine guns could not be very large. The rate of fire was limited by the fact that the barrels overheated. The way out of this engineering impasse was the six-barreled Vulcan M61 machine gun, which arrived just in time for a new massacre, the Vietnam War.

With each passing decade, the duration of combat contact between opponents is decreasing. The one who managed to fire more charges and started shooting first has a better chance of surviving. Mechanical devices they simply cannot cope in such an environment, so the Vulcan machine gun is equipped with an electric drive with a power of 26 kW, which rotates the barrels that fire 20-mm projectiles in turn, as well as an electric system for igniting the capsules. This solution allows firing at a speed of up to 2000 rounds per minute, and in “turbo” mode - 4200.

The Vulcan machine gun is quite massive and is intended primarily for aviation, although it can also be used in ground systems Air defense. Initially it was installed on Lockheed Starfighters, but later they began to equip it on A-10 attack aircraft. It was also suspended under the fuselage of the Phantom F-4 as an additional artillery container, after it became clear that missiles alone could not be used in maneuverable air combat. The weight of 190 kg is no joke, and this is without ammunition, which at such a rate of fire requires a considerable amount, so children's toys, the Vulcan nerf machine gun, which shoots arrows, have little in common with the prototype.

This weapon is relatively easy to maintain; the design is made as practical as possible. To load the Vulcan machine gun, you need to remove it, but this is easy to do. Problems arose in the 50s, when survey work was carried out. A large number of shells create powerful recoil, which results in difficulties with piloting.

In the USSR, the creation of multi-barreled aircraft weapons began a good ten years later than in the United States. The answer to the Vulcan machine gun was the 6K30GSh, AK-630M-2 and other anti-aircraft automatic guns artillery installations with high fire density. Some improvements in the creation of initial and operating torques provide certain technical and operational advantages, but the design is still based on the same Gatling principle.

7.62-mm six-barrel aviation machine gun M134 “Minigun” (in the US Air Force it has the designationGAU-2 B/ A) was developed in the early 1960s by General Electric. During its creation, a number of unconventional solutions were used that had not previously been used in the practice of designing small arms.

Firstly, to achieve a high rate of fire, a multi-barrel weapon design with a rotating block of barrels was used, which is used only in aircraft guns and rapid-fire anti-aircraft guns. In a classic single-barreled weapon, the rate of fire is 1500 – 2000 rounds per minute. In this case, the barrel becomes very hot and quickly fails. In addition, it is necessary to reload the weapon in a very short period of time, which requires high speeds of movement of the automation parts and leads to a decrease in the survivability of the system. In multi-barreled weapons, the reloading operations of each barrel are combined in time (a shot is fired from one barrel, a spent cartridge is removed from another, a cartridge is sent to the third, and so on), which makes it possible to keep the interval between shots to a minimum and at the same time prevents the barrels from overheating.

Secondly, to drive the automation mechanisms, the principle of using energy from an external source was chosen. With this scheme, the bolt frame is driven not by the energy of the shot, as in traditional automatic engines (with the recoil of the bolt, barrel or removal of powder gases), but with the help of an external drive. The main advantage of such a system is the high survivability of the weapon, due to the smooth movement of the moving parts of the automation. In addition, there is practically no problem of ammunition discharging during strong impacts of automatic components, which occur in high-temperature weapons. In the 1930s, the developers of the ShKAS rapid-firing machine gun encountered this problem, as a result of which a 7.62-mm cartridge with a reinforced design was created and adopted specifically for it.

Another advantage of an external drive is the simplification of the design of the weapon itself, which lacks return springs, a gas regulator and a number of other mechanisms. In externally driven weapons, it is much easier to regulate the rate of fire, which is extremely important for aircraft weapons, which often have two firing modes - both with a low rate (for firing at ground targets) and with a high rate (for combating air targets). And finally, the advantage of a circuit driven by an external source is that if it misfires, the cartridge is automatically removed by the bolt and ejected from the weapon. However, it is impossible to instantly open fire from such a weapon, since it always takes some time to spin up the barrel block and reach the required rotation speed. Another drawback is that a special device is needed to prevent a shot when the bolt is not completely locked.

The idea of ​​creating multi-barrel systems is far from new. Their first samples appeared even before the invention of automatic weapons. First, double-barreled, three-barreled, four-barreled guns and pistols appeared, and in the middle of the 19th century, the so-called grapeshots were created - firearms obtained by placing several barrels on one carriage. The number of grapeshot barrels varied from 5 to 25, and their rate of fire reached an unprecedented figure at that time - 200 rounds per minute. The most famous are Gatling guns, named after the American inventor Richard Jordan Gatling. By the way, today in the USA all types of firearms made according to a multi-barrel design with a rotating block of barrels are called Gatling guns.

After the end of World War II, the rate of fire of the best examples of aviation single-barrel machine guns reached 1200 rounds per minute (Browning M2). The main way to increase the firepower of aviation was to increase the number of firing points, which reached 6–8 on fighters. To arm the bombers, bulky dual installations were used, which were a pair of two conventional machine guns (DA-2, MG81z). Appearance in post-war period high-speed jet aviation required the creation of small arms and cannon weapons systems with a higher rate of fire.

In June 1946, the American company General Electric began work on the Vulcan project. By 1959, several prototypes of the T45 multi-barrel gun had been created for ammunition of various calibers: 60, 20 and 27 mm. After careful testing, a 20 mm caliber sample was selected for further development and designated T171. In 1956, the T171 was put into service ground forces and the US Air Force under the name M61 "Vulcan".

The gun was a sample of an automatic weapon driven by an external source. To unwind a block of 6 barrels and drive the automation mechanisms, a hydraulic drive or compressed air was used. Thanks to this design scheme, the maximum rate of fire from the cannon reached 7200 rounds per minute. A mechanism was provided to regulate the rate of fire from 4,000 to 6,000 rounds per minute. The powder charge in the ammunition was ignited by an electric primer.

Somewhat later, the Vulcan cannon was modernized - a linkless ammunition supply system appeared. A 30 mm version of the 6-barrel gun was also developed under the designation M67, but it was not further developed. The fate of the M61 turned out to be more successful; the gun soon became (and still serves) the main model of aviation cannon armament of the US Air Force and many other countries.

Versions of the gun were developed for towed anti-aircraft (M167) and self-propelled (M163) installations, as well as a ship version of the Vulcan-Phalanx to combat low-flying aircraft and anti-ship missiles. To equip helicopters, General Electric has developed lightweight versions of the M195 and M197 guns. The last of them had three rather than six barrels, as a result the rate of fire was halved - to 3000 rounds per minute. The followers of the Vulcan were the heavy 30-mm seven-barreled gun GAU-8/A "Avenger" and its lightweight five-barrel 25-mm version GAU-12/U "Equalizer", intended for arming the A-10 Thunderbolt attack aircraft and fighters, respectively. AV-8 Harrier vertical take-off bombers.

Despite the success of the Vulcan cannon, it was of little use for arming light helicopters, which became increasingly large quantities enter service with the US Army during vietnam war. Therefore, initially the Americans included in the helicopter armament system either slightly modified versions of the conventional 7.62-mm M60 infantry machine gun, or light 20-mm M24A1 aircraft cannons and 12.7-mm Browning M2 heavy machine guns. However, neither infantry machine guns nor conventional cannon and machine gun installations made it possible to obtain the density of fire required for aircraft weapons.

Therefore, in the early 1960s, the General Electric company proposed fundamentally new sample aircraft machine gun using the Gatling principle. The six-barreled Minigun was developed based on the proven design of the M61 cannon and looked very much like its smaller copy. The rotating block of barrels was driven by an external electric drive, powered by three 12-volt batteries. The ammunition used was a standard 7.62 mm NATO screw cartridge (7.62×51).

The rate of fire from a machine gun could be variable and usually ranged from 2000 to 4000–6000 rounds per minute, but if necessary could be reduced to 300 rounds per minute.

Production of the M134 Minigun began in 1962 at the General Electric plant in Burlington, where the Vulcan gun was also produced.

Structurally, the M134 machine gun consists of a barrel block, a receiver, a rotor block and a bolt block. Six 7.62 mm barrels are inserted into a rotary block, and each of them is locked by rotating 180 degrees. The barrels are connected to each other by special clips that protect them from displacement and are also designed to reduce vibration of the barrels when firing. The receiver is a one-piece casting, inside of which there is a rotating rotor unit. It also houses the receiver, mounting pins and control handle. On the inner surface of the receiver there is an elliptical groove into which the bolt rollers fit.

The rotor block is the main element of the weapon. It is mounted in the receiver using ball bearings. The front of the rotor block holds six barrels. In the side parts of the rotor there are six grooves into which six gates are placed. Each groove has an S-shaped cutout, which is intended for cocking the firing pin and firing a shot. The barrel bore is locked by turning the bolt head. The role of the extractor is played by the combat larva and the bolt stem.

The drummer is spring-loaded and has a special protrusion that interacts with an S-shaped cutout on the rotor block. The valves, in addition to translational movement along the grooves of the rotor block, rotate together with the rotor.

The machine gun mechanisms operate as follows. Pressing the trigger button on the left side of the control handle causes the rotor block with barrels to rotate in a counterclockwise direction (as viewed from the breech of the weapon). As soon as the rotor begins to spin, the roller of each bolt is driven by an elliptical groove on the inner surface of the receiver. As a result, the shutters move along the grooves of the rotor block, alternately capturing the cartridge from the feed fingers of the receiver. Then, under the action of the roller, the bolt sends the cartridge into the chamber. The bolt head, interacting with a groove in the bolt, rotates and locks the barrel. The firing pin is cocked under the action of the S-shaped groove and, in the extreme forward position of the bolt, is released, firing a shot.

The shot is fired from the barrel, which is in a position corresponding to the 12 o'clock position on the clock hand.

The elliptical groove in the receiver has a special profile that does not allow unlocking until the bullet leaves the barrel and the pressure in the barrel reaches a safe value. After this, the bolt roller, moving in the groove of the receiver, returns the bolt back, unlocking the barrel. When moving backwards, the shutter removes spent cartridge case, which is reflected from the receiver. When the rotor unit rotates 360 degrees, the automation cycle repeats.

The machine gun's ammunition capacity is usually 1,500–4,000 rounds connected by a link belt. If the length of the hanging tape is long enough, an additional drive is installed to supply cartridges to the weapon. It is possible to use a linkless ammunition supply scheme.

Helicopter weapon systems using the M134 were extremely varied. The “Minigun” could be installed in the opening of the helicopter’s sliding side door, and on remote-controlled triangular installations (in the bow, as on the AH-1 “Hugh Cobra”, or on the side pylons, as on the UH-1 “Huey”), and in fixed hanging containers. The M134 was equipped with multi-purpose UH-1, UH-60, light reconnaissance OH-6 Keyus, OH-58A Kiowa and fire support helicopters AN-1, AN-56, ASN-47. During the Vietnam War, there were known cases when Minigun in field conditions converted into easel weapons.

In the US Air Force, the 7.62-mm Minigun machine gun was used to arm light attack aircraft such as the A-1 Skyraider and A-37 Dragonfly, intended for counter-insurgency operations. In addition, it was equipped with fire support aircraft special purpose"Ganship", which are converted military transport aircraft (S-47, S-119, S-130), equipped with a whole artillery battery, including a 105 mm infantry howitzer, a 40 mm cannon, 20 mm Vulcan and Minigun cannons. Firing from the Gunship's on-board weapons is carried out not as usual - along the course of the aircraft, but perpendicular to the direction of flight ().

In 1970–1971 a small-caliber modification of the Minigun was created chambered for a 5.56 mm caliber cartridge. The XM214 machine gun also had an external electric drive, which provided a rate of fire of 2000–3000 rounds per minute and resembled a smaller copy of the M134. However, this sample did not turn out to be as successful as its prototype, and was not further developed.

The Minigun design with a rotating block of barrels was used to create machine gun modules for more than large caliber. In the mid-1980s, General Electric developed a new aircraft multi-barreled machine gun caliber 12.7 mm, designated Gecal-50. The machine gun is designed in two versions: six-barreled (basic) and three-barrel. The maximum rate of fire is 4000 rounds per minute with link feed and 8000 with linkless feed. Shooting is carried out with standard 12.7 mm American and NATO cartridges with high-explosive fragmentation incendiary, armor-piercing incendiary and practical bullets. Unlike the Minigun, the Gecal-50 is used not only to arm helicopters, but also ground combat vehicles.

To the USSR for replacement heavy machine gun A-12.7, which has been the only model since the early 1950s small arms helicopters (Mi-4, Mi-6, Mi-8 and Mi-24A), designers TsKIB SOO B.A. Borzov and P.G. Yakushev created a new multi-barreled machine gun. The sample, designated YakB-12.7, entered service in 1975 ().

The YakB-12.7, like the Minigun, had a rotating block of four barrels, providing a rate of fire of 4000–45000 rounds per minute. Special two-bullet cartridges 1SL and 1SLT were developed for the machine gun, but conventional 12.7 mm ammunition with B-32 and BZT-44 bullets can also be used for firing. The YakB-12.7 could be installed in the NSPU-24 bow mobile installations of Mi-24B, V and D combat helicopters, as well as in the GUV-8700 suspended installations (Mi-24, Ka-50 and Ka-52).

Today, machine guns have given way on board combat helicopters to automatic cannons of 25–30 mm caliber, often unified with the cannon armament of infantry fighting vehicles. This is due to the fact that in order to destroy enemy armored vehicles on the battlefield, fire support helicopters required more powerful weapons than machine gun mounts. In action tactics army aviation new concepts appeared: “aerial combat between helicopters”, “aerial combat between a helicopter and an airplane”, which also required an increase in the firepower of helicopters.

However, it is too early to talk about the demise of aircraft machine gun weapons. There are several areas combat use multi-barreled aircraft machine guns, where they have no competition.

Firstly, it is the armament of special forces aviation intended for reconnaissance, sabotage, search and rescue and anti-terrorism operations. A light multi-barreled machine gun of 7.62–12.7 mm caliber is an ideal and highly effective tool for combating unprotected enemy personnel and for self-defense tasks. Since operations of this kind are often carried out behind enemy lines, the interchangeability of ammunition for aircraft and infantry weapons is also important.

The second task is self-defense. For this purpose, transport-landing, multi-purpose, reconnaissance, search and rescue helicopters are armed with machine guns, for which fire support is not the main task. Multi-barreled machine guns can be used not only in aviation, but also on ground vehicles ( anti-aircraft system"Avenger" with a 12.7-mm Gecal-50 machine gun), as well as for the protection of ships and vessels.

And finally, a multi-barreled machine gun can be successfully used for installation on light training and combat trainer aircraft carrying a limited combat load. By the way, many developing countries who are unable to purchase modern expensive combat aircraft, are showing great interest in purchasing such aircraft. Equipped with light weapons, they are used as fighters and attack aircraft.

Comparative performance characteristics M61A1 cannon and M134 Minigun machine gun

Characteristic	М81А1 "Volcano"	M134 "Minigun"
Year of adoption
Caliber, mm
Number of trunks
Initial velocity of the projectile (bullet), m/s
Projectile (bullet) mass, g
Muzzle energy, kJ
Mass of a second salvo, kg/s
Rate of fire, rpm
Specific power, kW/kg
Weight, kg
Vitality (number of shots)

FROM THE EDITORIAL OF THE MAGAZINE

An inexperienced reader may have the opinion that Russia lags behind the West in the development of multi-barreled rapid-fire small arms. However, this is not the case. Back in 1937, the Kovrov Arms Plant launched serial production of 7.62-mm single-barreled Savin-Norov machine guns, firing 3,000 rounds per minute. The single-barrel 7.62 mm machine gun, developed by designer Yurchenko and produced at the same plant in a small series, had a rate of fire of 3600 rounds per minute.

In World War II German army An MG-42 infantry machine gun was used, the rate of fire of which was 1,400 rounds per minute. The 7.62-mm ShKAS aircraft machine gun, which was then in service with the Red Army, allowed it to fire 1,600 rounds per minute. The popularity of this machine gun was facilitated by the assertiveness of its authors and the personal sympathy of Stalin and Voroshilov for them. In fact, the ShKAS machine gun is not the best rapid fire machine gun those times. According to the automation scheme, this is the most common, but forced to the limit sample. Its rate of fire was limited by the problem of “unloading”*. Unlike the ShKAS, the Savin-Norov and Yurchenko machine guns were designed taking into account a high rate of fire, and the problem of “unloading” practically did not concern them.

By the beginning of World War II, 7.62 mm aircraft weapons were considered ineffective. On Soviet fighters of that era, automatic guns of 23, 37 and 45 mm calibers were installed. The aircraft of the German Luftwaffe were armed with three types of powerful 30-mm cannons. American Cobra fighters - 37 mm automatic cannon.

Multi-barreled weapons, characterized by a rotating block of barrels, were created in the middle of the 19th century by the American Gatling. As time passes weapon the Gatling type was revived by Soviet designers in the mid-thirties, in particular by Kovrov gunsmith I.I. Slostin. In 1936, a 7.62-mm machine gun was created with an eight-barreled barrel block, which was rotated by gases removed from the barrels. The rate of fire of the Slostin machine gun reached 5000 rounds per minute.

At the same time, Tula designer M.N. Blum developed a machine gun with a block of 12 barrels. Soviet models of multi-barreled weapons were distinguished by the fact that instead of an external manual or electric drive, they were driven by powder gases vented from the bores. Then this direction was abandoned by our designers, since the military showed no interest in it.

In the second half of the fifties, the NIISPVA (Research Institute of Small and Cannon Weapons of Aviation) received an American open magazine with a short message about a certain experimental American model of 20 mm weapons. It was also reported there that when firing in bursts, individual shots are completely indistinguishable. This information was regarded as a foreign attempt to revive the Gatling system at a modern level. Soviet gunsmiths - designer Vasily Petrovich Gryazev and scientist Arkady Grigorievich Shipunov, then twenty-six-year-old leading engineers, and now academicians and professors, began to create a domestic analogue. At the same time, they theoretically substantiated that such a gas-operated weapon would be much lighter than an American electric weapon. Practice has proven the validity of this assumption.

A captured American Vulcan air gun (20 mm) arrived from Vietnam. We were convinced from experience that in comparison with our more powerful six-barreled AO-19 (23 mm), the American Vulcan looked like a bulky crocodile.

V.P. Gryazev and A.G. Shipunov developed new models of 23-mm and 30-mm multi-barreled guns, creating various versions of them - aviation, sea and land transportable.

Only one helicopter-mounted four-barreled electric machine gun was created in the USSR for the 7.62 mm rifle cartridge - GShG-7.62. Its sole designer is the youth friend of the author of this expert assessment, Evgeniy Borisovich Glagolev, the leading designer of the Tula KBP.

Military customers never showed any interest in creating an infantry version of such a weapon.

The record development of weapons with a rotating barrel block belongs to the senior engineer of NII-61 Yu.G. Zhuravlev. His mock-up of a 30-mm air cannon driven by a six-barrel jet engine showed a rate of fire of 16 thousand rounds per minute! True, the barrel block could not withstand this regime. The centrifugal force of the spinning block tore it apart already on the 20th shot.

Along with this, I would like to note that the opinion of the magazine’s editors does not entirely coincide with the opinion of the author of the article.

Expert consultant Dmitry Shiryaev

* “Uncartridgement” – dismantling or deformation of a cartridge as a result of impacts and inertial overloads when it moves within the weapon.

Aircraft cannon GSh-6-23 remains unsurpassed for more than 40 years

“You lower the nose of the car a little, carefully turn it towards the target so that it is easily caught in the sight mark. You press the trigger for a split second and it feels as if the plane is being shaken by a giant, but you can clearly see how a fiery tornado is flying towards the ground. At this moment, you won’t envy the enemy who is there, even if it’s a conditional one,” a pilot of the Russian Air Force shared with the Military-Industrial Courier his impressions of the use of the six-barreled GSh-6-23 aircraft cannon.

The GSh-6-23M, 23 mm caliber with a rate of fire of 10,000 rounds per minute, was developed by two great Russian gunsmith designers Arkady Shipunov and Vasily Gryazev back in the early 70s. Since the adoption of the “six-barreled general gun” into service in 1974, it has been carried by the legendary Su-24 front-line bombers and the equally famous supersonic heavy interceptors Mig-31.

From “cardbox” to “Vulcan”

In the mid-50s, when the first homing ones, such as the American AIM-9 Sidewinder, began to enter service with fighter aircraft, aviation experts began to talk about the fact that machine guns and cannons on combat aircraft would have to be abandoned in the near future. In many ways, such conclusions were based on the experience of the past Korean War, where for the first time they fought en masse jet fighters. On the one hand, these were Soviet MiG-15s, on the other, American F-86 Sabers, F9F Panthers, etc. The MiGs, armed with three guns, often lacked the rate of fire, and the Sabers lacked the firing range, sometimes also the power of the six 12.7 mm machine guns they had.

“The idea of ​​Shipunov and Gryazev provided a much more compact placement of the gun and ammunition, which is especially important for aircraft, where designers fight for every centimeter”

It is noteworthy that the newest American carrier-based fighter at that time, the F-4B Phantom-2, had only missile weapons, including the ultra-modern medium-range AIM-7 Sparrow. The F-4C guns adapted for the needs of the US Air Force were also not installed. True, in Vietnam, the Phantoms were initially opposed by the Soviet MiG-17s, which had only cannon armament, in which the Vietnamese pilots sought to conduct close-in air combat in order to avoid being hit by guided missiles.

In “dog fights,” as such battles are called in Western aviation slang, the American aces were not always helped and those considered at that time best rockets AIM-9 short-range with thermal homing head. Therefore, the command of the Air Force, as well as Navy and Corps aviation Marine Corps It was necessary to urgently develop new tactics to combat Vietnamese fighters, first of all, to equip the Phantoms with suspended gun containers with 20-mm six-barreled M61 Vulcan aircraft guns. And soon the F-4E fighter entered the US Air Force. One of the main differences of the new model was the standard six-barrel Vulcan installed in the bow.

A number of recently published studies on the air war in Vietnam argue that the decision to arm the Phantom 2 with a cannon mount was not driven by the need to combat Vietnamese MiGs, but by the desire to make the fighter more suitable for attacking ground targets. For an impartial assessment, it is worth turning to the numbers. According to the Pentagon, during the entire war in Southeast Asia, from 39 to 45 Vietnamese fighters, including supersonic MiG-19 and MiG-21, were shot down by the cannon armament of American fighters. And in total, according to the calculations of American military historians, North Vietnam lost 131 MiGs, so that aircraft guns account for 35–40 percent of the total number of vehicles shot down by US pilots.

Be that as it may, it was with the advent of the F-4E Phantom-2 that cannon armament, rejected in the late 50s, began to return to the arsenal of fighters, fighter-bombers, reconnaissance aircraft and other vehicles.

One of the most popular in the arsenal of the Western Air Forces was the already mentioned M61 Vulcan. It is noteworthy that the American fifth-generation fighter F-22 Lightning is also armed with this six-barreled gun, albeit a specially modernized one.

The American company General Electric, which developed and produced Vulcan, had never before worked on small arms models. Moreover, the company's core business has always been electrical equipment. But immediately after World War II, the American Air Force opened a promising topic for the creation of aircraft cannons and machine guns, the rate of fire of which should have been at least 4000 rounds per minute, while the samples were required to have sufficient range and high accuracy when striking air targets.

In traditional small arms designs, implementing such customer requests was quite problematic. Here we had to choose: either high accuracy, firing range and accuracy, or rate of fire. As one of the solution options, the developers proposed adapting to modern requirements the so-called Gatling gun, which was used in the USA during their Civil War. This design was based on the design of a 10-barrel rotating block developed by Dr. Richard Gatling back in 1862.

Surprisingly, despite the participation of eminent weapons developers and manufacturers in the competition, the victory went to General Electric. When implementing the Gatling scheme, it became clear that the most important part of the new installation was the external electric drive that rotates the block of barrels, and with its extensive experience, General Electric did a better job of developing it than its competitors.

In June 1946, the company, having defended the project before a special commission of the US Air Force, received a contract to implement its scheme in hardware. This was already the second stage in the creation of new aviation shooting systems, in which Colt and Browning were also supposed to take part.

During research, testing and development work, the company had to experiment with the number of trunks (in different time it varied from 10 to 6), as well as with calibers (15.4 mm, 20 mm and 27 mm). As a result, the military was offered a six-barrel aircraft gun of 20 millimeter caliber, with a maximum rate of fire of 6,000 rounds per minute, firing 110-gram shells at a speed of over 1,030 meters per second.

A number of Western researchers claim that the choice in favor of the 20 mm caliber was due to the requirement of the customer, the US Air Force, that arose in the early 50s, who considered that the gun should be quite universal, equally suitable for conducting aimed fire at both air and ground goals.

27-mm shells were well suited for firing on the ground, but when used, the rate of fire dropped sharply and recoil increased, and later tests showed the relatively low accuracy of a gun of this caliber when firing at aerial targets.

15.4 mm shells had too little power against the intended enemy on the ground, but a cannon with such ammunition provided a good rate of fire, albeit with insufficient range for air combat. So the developers from General Electric settled on a compromise caliber.

The six barrels of the M61 Vulcan cannon, adopted in 1956, together with the bolts, were concentrically assembled into a single block located in a common casing, rotating clockwise. In one revolution, each barrel was sequentially reloaded, and a shot was fired from the barrel located at the top at that moment. The entire system operated using an external electric drive with a power of 26 kW.

True, the military was not entirely satisfied with the fact that the mass of the gun ended up being almost 115 kilograms. The struggle to reduce weight continued for many years, and as a result of the introduction of new materials, the M61A2 model installed on the F-22 Raptor weighs just over 90 kilograms.

It is noteworthy that currently in the English-language literature all shooting systems with a rotating barrel block are called Gatling-gun - “Gatling gun (gun).

In the USSR, work on the creation of multi-barrel aircraft guns was going on even before the Great Patriotic War. True, they ended in vain. To the idea of ​​a system with barrels combined into one block, which would be rotated by an electric motor, Soviet gunsmiths came at the same time as the American designers, but here we were unsuccessful.

In 1959, Arkady Shipunov and Vasily Gryazev, who worked at the Klimovsky Research Institute-61, joined the work. As it turned out, the work had to start virtually from scratch. The designers had information that the Vulcan was being created in the USA, but at the same time not only those used by the Americans technical solutions, and the tactical and technical characteristics of the new Western system remained secret.

True, Arkady Shipunov himself later admitted that even if he and Vasily Gryazev had become aware of American technical solutions, they would still hardly have been able to apply them in the USSR. As already mentioned, the designers of General Electric connected an external electric drive with a power of 26 kW to the Vulcan, while Soviet aircraft manufacturers could only offer, as Vasily Gryazev himself put it, “24 volts and not a gram more.” Therefore, it was necessary to create a system that would not operate from an external source, but using the internal energy of the shot.

It is noteworthy that similar schemes were proposed at one time by other American companies participating in the competition to create a promising aircraft gun. True, Western designers were unable to implement such a solution. In contrast, Arkady Shipunov and Vasily Gryazev created a so-called gas exhaust engine, which, according to the second member of the tandem, worked like an internal combustion engine - it took part of the powder gas from the barrels when fired.

But, despite the elegant solution, another problem arose: how to fire the first shot, because the gas exhaust engine, and therefore the gun mechanism itself, is not yet working. For the initial impulse, a starter was required, after which, from the first shot, the gun would operate on its own gas. Subsequently, two starter options were proposed: pneumatic and pyrotechnic (with a special squib).

In his memoirs, Arkady Shipunov recalls that even at the beginning of work on a new aircraft gun, he was able to see one of the few photographs of the American Vulcan being prepared for testing, where he was struck by the fact that a belt loaded with ammunition was spreading along the floor, ceiling and walls of the compartment, but was not consolidated into a single cartridge box. Later it became clear that with a rate of fire of 6000 rounds per minute, a void forms in the cartridge box in a matter of seconds and the tape begins to “walk.” In this case, the ammunition falls out, and the tape itself breaks. Shipunov and Gryazev developed a special pneumatic tape pull-up that does not allow the tape to move. Unlike the American solution, this idea provided a much more compact placement of the gun and ammunition, which is especially important for aircraft, where designers fight for every centimeter.

On target, but not right away

Despite the fact that the product, which received the AO-19 index, was practically ready, in Soviet Air Force Oh, there was no place for it, since the military themselves believed that small arms were a relic of the past, and the future belonged to missiles. Shortly before the Air Force rejected the new gun, Vasily Gryazev was transferred to another enterprise. It would seem that the AO-19, despite all the unique technical solutions, will remain unclaimed.

But in 1966, after summarizing the experience of the North Vietnamese and American Air Forces in the USSR, it was decided to resume work on the creation of promising aircraft guns. True, by that time almost all enterprises and design bureaus that had previously worked on this topic had already reoriented themselves to other areas. Moreover, there were no people willing to return to this line of work in the military-industrial sector!

Surprisingly, despite all the difficulties, Arkady Shipunov, who by this time headed TsKB-14, decided to revive the cannon theme at his enterprise. After the Military-Industrial Commission approved this decision, its management agreed to return Vasily Gryazev, as well as several other specialists who took part in the work on the “AO-19 product,” to the Tula enterprise.

As Arkady Shipunov recalled, the problem of resuming work on cannon aircraft weapons arose not only in the USSR, but also in the West. In fact, at that time, the only multi-barreled gun in the world was the American one - the Vulcan.

It is worth noting that, despite the rejection of the “AO-19 object” by the Air Force, the product was of interest to the Navy, for which several gun systems were developed.

By the beginning of the 70s, KBP offered two six-barreled guns: the 30-mm AO-18, which used the AO-18 cartridge, and the AO-19, chambered for 23-mm AM-23 ammunition. It is noteworthy that the products differed not only in the projectiles used, but also in the starters for preliminary acceleration of the barrel block. The AO-18 had a pneumatic one, and the AO-19 had a pyrotechnic one with 10 squibs.

Initially, representatives of the Air Force, who considered the new gun as armament for promising fighters and fighter-bombers, placed increased demands on the AO-19 for firing ammunition - at least 500 shells in one burst. I had to seriously work on the survivability of the gun. The most loaded part, the gas rod, was made of special heat-resistant materials. The design has been changed. Reworked gas engine, where the so-called floating pistons were installed.

Preliminary tests have shown that the modified AO-19 can show much best characteristics than originally stated. As a result of the work carried out at the KBP, the 23-mm cannon was able to fire at a rate of fire of 10–12 thousand rounds per minute. And the mass of the AO-19 after all the modifications was just over 70 kilograms.

For comparison: the American Vulcan, which had been modified by this time, received the index M61A1, weighed 136 kilograms, fired 6000 rounds per minute, the salvo was almost 2.5 times smaller than that of the AO-19, while American aircraft designers also needed to place on board The aircraft also has a 25-kilowatt external electric drive.

And even on the M61A2, which is on board the fifth-generation fighter F-22, American designers, with the smaller caliber and rate of fire of their guns, were unable to achieve the unique indicators in weight and compactness, like the gun developed by Vasily Gryazev and Arkady Shipunov.

Birth of a legend

The first customer of the new AO-19 gun was the Sukhoi Experimental Design Bureau, which at that time was headed by Pavel Osipovich himself. Sukhoi planned that the new gun would become armament for the T-6, a promising front-line bomber with variable wing geometry, which they were then developing, which later became the legendary Su-24.

The time frame for work on the new vehicle was quite tight: the T-6, which made its first flight on January 17, 1970, in the summer of 1973, was already ready for transfer to military testers. When fine-tuning the AO-19 to the requirements of aircraft manufacturers, certain difficulties arose. The gun, which fired well on the test bench, could not fire more than 150 shots - the barrels overheated and needed to be cooled, which often took about 10–15 minutes, depending on the ambient temperature.

Another problem was that the gun did not want, as the designers of the Tula Instrument Engineering Design Bureau joked, “to stop shooting.” After releasing the launch button, the AO-19 managed to spontaneously fire three or four projectiles. But within the allotted time, all the shortcomings and technical problems were eliminated, and the T-6 was presented to the Air Force GLITs for testing with a gun fully integrated into the new front-line bomber.

During the tests that began in Akhtubinsk, the product, which by that time had received the GSh index (Gryazev - Shipunov) -6-23, was shot at various targets. During control application the latest system In less than one second, the pilot was able to completely cover all targets, firing about 200 shells!

Pavel Sukhoi was so satisfied with the GSh-6-23 that, along with the standard Su-24 ammunition, the so-called SPPU-6 suspended gun containers with movable GSh-6-23M gun mounts, capable of deflecting horizontally and vertically by 45 degrees, were included . It was assumed that with such weapons, and in total it was planned to place two such installations on the front-line bomber, it would be able to completely disable the runway in one pass, as well as destroy a column of motorized infantry in combat vehicles up to one kilometer long.

Developed at the Dzerzhinets plant, SPPU-6 became one of the largest mobile cannon installations. Its length exceeded five meters, and its mass with ammunition of 400 shells was 525 kilograms. Tests have shown that when firing new installation There was at least one shell hit for every linear meter.

It is noteworthy that immediately after Sukhoi, the Mikoyan Design Bureau became interested in the cannon, which intended to use the GSh-6-23 on the latest supersonic interceptor MiG-31. Despite its large size, aircraft manufacturers required a fairly small-sized gun with a high rate of fire, since the MiG-31 was supposed to destroy supersonic targets. KBP helped Mikoyan by developing a unique lightweight conveyor-free linkless feeding system, thanks to which the weight of the gun was reduced by several more kilograms and gained additional centimeters of space on board the interceptor.

Developed by outstanding gunsmiths Arkady Shipunov and Vasily Gryazev, the GSh-6-23 automatic aircraft gun still remains in service with the Russian Air Force. Moreover, in many ways its characteristics, despite its more than 40-year service life, remain unique.