Quote:People call something a 'Chain Gun' without knowing what a real chain gun is. I'm fairly sure it started with those jailbirds Carmack and Romero. Their damned games claimed the multi-barreled personal or vehicle-mounted weapon was a chaingun.

To clarify, a chaingun is a chain-fed single-barreled cannon, usually in the range of 12.7mm to 30mm, mounted on vehicles from Attack Helicopters (Apache) to Infantry Fighting Vehicles (Bradley). For those who actually know these vehicles, they should recall that they have single-barreled projectile weapons.

However, the multi-barreled weapons are uniformly referred to as Gatling Guns, due to the inventor of the original rotary-barrel weapon, Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling. This includes the A-10 'Warthog's massive 30mm, 7-barreled GAU-8 Avenger.

The 'Personal' mutli-barreled gun is technically not very practical. In fact, it's downright unwieldy. The generic term for any Gatling gun that uses the smaller calibers (for instance, 12.7mm/.50BMG) is 'Minigun' (often the kind of multi-barreled weapon used on aircraft). However, the only 'Minigun' type that has ever been wieldable by a single man is a type that uses 5.56mm only known as the XM214.

Presumably, guns of 30mm and larger that are also multibarrel may also be called Autocannons. I'm fairly sure the Avenger has often been called such- because, quite frankly, it's a tank-busting cannon that fires ridiculously fast. That sounds like an Autocannon to me. However, an Autocannon does not necessarily require rotary barrels, and could just be a very large variant of a chaingun or similar single-barreled weapon with a rapid reloading mechanism.

(EDIT: For those who remember StarLancer, they had three forms of 'multi-barrel' (or something like it) weapons. There were the Collapser Guns, there were the Gatling Lasers, and there were the Gatling Plasma Cannons. Not chainguns, but gatlings)