Don't know how much ammo the US military actually uses. If it's not a state secret, there is probably a Wikipedia page, but I haven't found it. So I came up with my own way of guess-timating. I don't know how much bearing it has on reality, but I would bet that I am within an order of magnitude.
The US military has a bunch of guns. Some are carried by people, some are carried by ships, land vehicles or aircraft. Many only fire a single shot on command, but the electric Gatling gun, aka the minigun, fires a zillion rounds every time you touch the go button. Miniguns only get fired occasionally, but there are a bunch of them. I expect the US military has somewhere North of a thousand of them.
So how many bullets could a minigun fire if you fired it continuously for a solid year? Taking the low end of rate of fire (2,000 rounds per minute), that comes to just over one billion rounds. That is five semi-truck loads of ammo a day. Ammo piled nine inches high over the entire floor of a 40 foot semi.
No comments:
Post a Comment