Gatling Guns

Boshin_Modern_Art_Gatling_Guns Image

Basic Unit Statistics (can be modified by difficulty level, arts, skills, traits and retainers)

Recruitment Cost 1400
Upkeep Cost 320
Melee Attack 4 11%
Charge Bonus 9 18%
Bonus vs Cavalry 0 0%
Range 250 38%
Accuracy 20 20%
Reloading Skill 75 75%
Ammunition 500 625%
Melee Defence 4 11%
Armour 1 6%
Morale 4 8%

Strengths & Weaknesses

  • Very fast rate of fire.
  • Average accuracy.
  • Weak in melee.
  • Average morale.

Description

Industrial machinery, applied to the battlefield business of killing.

Gatling guns are a form of artillery, although they are only really useful against men. The guns have an exceptionally high rate of fire, good range, and do terrible slaughter. Accuracy is adequate, although this would be considered far too good by anyone being targeted! With numerically small crews, Gatling guns are weak in close combat, but this is not their role. They should be used to deliver devastating fire support. Dr Richard J Gatling invented his mechanical masterpiece as a way of making war less horrible. He genuinely felt that if he could bring superior firepower to the battlefield, there would be a lessened need for soldiers to go into harm's way. Instead, he gave armies a new way to kill on a massive scale. The Gatling gun was not an automatic weapon. The user had to crank the gun, so that as each barrels rotated, it was loaded, fired and the spent cartridge extracted, the equivalent of having several rifles fired one after another. Unlike a machine gun, however, it handled stoppages and misfires as a matter of course: a defective cartridge would simply be pulled from a breech and a fresh one loaded as the barrels went around. Electrically-powered Gatling guns are still in use today. The GAU-8/A Avenger in the nose of the USAF's Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft is a truly formidable weapon. Occasionally, smaller "mini-guns" also feature as exceptionally macho weapons for the noisier kind of Hollywood action hero.