MINIGUN UPDATE

BY SCOTT R. GOURLEY

Whether crediting the nomenclature to inventor Richard Jordan Gatling, or using the “minigun” designation, special operations forces around the world continue to employ multi-barrel cannons to deliver firing rates many times those of standard machine guns.

The last few years have witnessed a number of military developments in these weapon systems, ranging from critical component upgrades to entirely new caliber and system designs. Surprisingly, several of these new developments were highlighted during the recent Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show, held in Nevada in mid-January 2022.

M134D

Dillon Aero, for example, focused a spotlight on several recent developments surrounding their popular M134D, an electrically-powered, six-barreled Gatling gun design, firing the 7.62x51mm NATO round, with a fixed firing rate of approximately 3,000 rounds per minute. Primarily used in helicopters, the system also can be adapted to many ground and naval platforms.

Brian Fuller, vice president of business development at Dillon Aero, demonstrates features of the Flex Force ASP gyro-stabilized mount during SHOT Show in January 2022.

Asked about recent enhancements in the M134D design, Brian Fuller, vice president of business development at Dillon Aero, began by pointing to the new battery design on display at SHOT Show. “This is a lithium phosphate battery, which is one of the most stable types of lithium compounds that you can use,” he said. “Many customers still use the [lead acid] Concorde Aircraft Battery to power the gun.”

In comparison to the traditional lead acid battery designs, Fuller said that the new power option features a much smaller form factor with the exact same connectors to facilitate easy mounting.

“I’ve been at the range and we’ve shot 12,000 rounds before this new battery started to slow down,” he said. “So, even though this battery is a smaller form factor, it lasts longer and you get more cycles out of it, because it is more forgiving. By that I mean, when you burn down lead acid batteries, you have to put them on the charger right away. With this new design you can wait a couple of days. The battery won’t develop a ‘memory.’ It’s also got a smart battery management unit in there, which prevents thermal runaway and all of those horror stories that you hear about lithium ion batteries. It’s a very smart battery and just one example of the technology going forward for the M134D.”

Acknowledging that the performance advantages are already prompting some customers to upgrade to the new battery, he said, “Additionally, with this battery system, you can certainly run the gun off of the battery. But if you are in a vehicle or a boat or an aircraft, you can also trickle charge the battery, pulling five amps or less load off of that vehicle system or aircraft system. So you don’t have a large electrical load on the platform itself.”

Another recent M134D advancement involves the new singlemotion blade safing sector that instantly renders the weapon safe.

“You used to have to open up the entire safing sector,” he said. “That would interrupt the cam path, and you could power the gun - spin the gun – but it wouldn’t fire even though it had live rounds in it. But it was a little onerous.”

Acknowledging that the gun on display was inert, he described a new lever design that served to provide something of a mechanical safety to quickly and easily “manually safe” the gun.

The display gun was also mounted in the ASP gyro-stabilized mount from Flex Force. Noting that the company already makes stabilized mounts for a number of different weapon systems, Fuller said, “They asked us to integrate an M134 onto their mount. So our piece of it was to work with them to construct the mounting mechanism. And they’ve been to our range and tested.”

After demonstrating several of the features on the mount, he continued, “We think this has a lot of naval application, whether it’s on small boats or medium-size boats, going up and down on the water. Once you have it on the target it will stay there, despite the motion of the platform.”

In addition to the M134D enhancements, Dillon Aero used the venue to highlight its new developmental design for a three-barreled .50 caliber (12.7x99mm NATO) Gatling gun. Currently designated as the 503D, the new design could be a future competitor in applications that currently utilize the GAU-19 series.

The company characterizes the 503D as “lighter, faster, and smarter than existing .50 cal machine guns,” firing up to 1,500 shots per minute with the ability to adjust precise firing rates based on platform integration.

“One of the design considerations was to make it lighter, more reliable, and less maintenance-intensive,” Fuller said. “That was the goal. And we achieve that by using two drive motors instead of one.”

If you go back to ’05, 5th Special Forces Group actually shipped a whole bunch of these over, mounted them on trucks, and took them over and started doing things with them. Before that, the purchasing system all said: ‘No, no, these are helicopter guns.’ And operators going forward said: ’No, no. It’s a “bullet hose.” And it’s a game changer …

He added, “We’ve been developing our new 503D design for a little over four years. We’ve been undergoing test/fix/test development as we put it through its paces. Of course, Chris Dillon’s goal is that we don’t roll this out until it’s as good as the [M134D] Dillon minigun. And we’re pretty close. They’re testing again [second week in January] and we hope to be in production by the end of the year.”

Dillon has developed a three-barreled .50 caliber (12.7x99mm NATO) Gatling gun, currently designated as the 503D.

Although testing to date has largely focused on brass ammunition, Fuller said that the use of new polymer .50 caliber ammunition would be “very attractive,” because of the weight savings.

“We’ve tested polymer ammo in the [M134D] minigun, and we will test polymer ammo in this 503D,” he said. “The hardest thing to do is that brass first. It’s heaviest. If you make it work with brass, and the polymer round is good, you can progress to that. We like to say we’re ammunition agnostic in whether it’s brass or polymer. The ammo choice is largely a customer choice. We don’t push them one way or the other.”

Asked about any other calibers that might be incorporated into future minigun developments, Fuller emphasized that any efforts along those lines will be “customer driven.” That said, he acknowledged internal development activities on a five-barreled prototype firing the .338 Norma Magnum, acknowledging, “That’s a bad boy.” While the prototype has been developed, some additional efforts are on hold awaiting future user decisions on the .338 Norma Magnum medium machine gun and the specific link that might be selected.

Additionally, he said that the company was monitoring the Army’s upcoming decision on its new 6.8mm Next Generation Squad Weapons, observing that the company could make a 6.8mm version of the minigun “fairly quickly.”

PF556

Another company introducing a number of new minigun developments at SHOT Show 2022 was Profense, LLC. The company entered the 7.62x51mm NATO military minigun arena with its company design in the 2014 time frame and has subsequently expanded its portfolio to include a new 5.56x45mm NATO [with M27 links] minigun design, associated remote weapon stations, and the 2020 introduction of the North Star small arms line.

The Profense Remote Operations Weapon Station (PROWS) on display at the SHOT Show.

Speaking at a company briefing a few days after live-fire range demonstrations of their products, Mark Spicer, business development manager at Profense, referenced his own background as a retired sergeant major with 25 years in the British Army, adding that he joined Profense because of a shared vision with company leadership who wanted to “give back to the people that are still ‘holding the line,’ giving them what they want, rather than what we think we want to sell.”

Spicer highlighted the company’s “third generation” gun designs, explaining, “They are a brushless design with brand-new GCU [gun control unit], which means we can do things that none of our competitors can do. And this comes about because we listen to our clients, we listen to what they ask us to do. And what the GCU allowed us to do was to come up with a variable rate for the gun itself that could be chosen by the operator and changed by operator during the mission. So if we are looking at the PF134A3, our 7.62mm minigun, we can set that rate of fire as low as 800 rounds a minute, or as high as 3,000 rounds a minute. And the reason we did this was because a lot of the SF [Special Forces] operators would tell us they would love to have a minigun on their vehicles, but they can’t carry that much ammunition. So, we said, ‘Well, what if we made it a machine gun until you need it to be minigun?’ Our engineers designed it, proved it, people on the range saw it the other day. And that is now a capability. So now, as an operator, I can run this gun as a machine gun at 800 rounds a minute until I need to destroy the entire planet, in which case what I’m going to do is hit a ‘high rate’ gun button and she spins up to 3,000 rounds a minute. And the second that I let go of it, she comes back down to 800 rounds a minute. Now, if that’s the rate I want for the first part of the mission, that’s great. If I need to change that, because I’ve got different targets as I move forward, then I can change that in a vehicle or on the aircraft right there. And we’re talking about seconds, not minutes, to change the rate of fire on the gun. So I can set a high and low rate anywhere between that range of 800 to 3,000 shots per minute.”

He shifted the spotlight to the company’s PF556, which he asserted to be “currently, the only available 5.56 minigun,” adding, “it is exactly the same design as its big brother, only ‘a little bit angrier.’ Who knew guns had Napoleon syndrome? But this one does. So we’re now talking about a low rate of 1,500 rounds a minute and a higher rate 4,000 rounds a minute, and again, anywhere in between. And the operator can change that any time he wants to during the operation.”

In a separate briefing on the system design, Noel Lasure, a business development manager at Profense/North Star Arms, observed that the company started development of the mini 5.56 “to get with a lot of those Special Forces units because they want something that they can toss on a smaller vehicle.”

Elaborating on the benefits of the third-generation brushless drive and booster motor designs, he explained, “The regular electric motors were drawing up to 100-120 amps. I mean, that was just a crazy amount that they drew. Well, they went to a brushless motor, and they’ve got it down to 50-60. And it’s a much more seamless transition between that high and

The Profense PF556 can be mounted on a number of lightweight platforms.

pAbove: The Profense PF556 can be mounted on a number of lightweight platforms. uRight: The Profense gun control unit allows rapid transition between low and high firing rates.

low firing rates with the brushless and the new GCU as well.”

He continued, “What we’re doing is actually bringing lessons learned into the development process. We know what has been successful in the past. A bullet hose. It’s fantastic. If you go back to ’05, 5th Special Forces Group actually shipped a whole bunch of these over, mounted them on trucks, and started doing things with them. Before that, the purchasing system all said: ‘No, no, these are helicopter guns.’ And operators going forward said: ’No, no. It’s a “bullet hose.” And it’s a game-changer. This really is what we need.’ So we’ve built into our gun control unit little things like user programmable rates of fire. I can actually run it down as low as 800 rounds a minute. So now some place where you were going to allocate an M240 Bravo, I can give you 240 Bravo firing rate, but I can still give you 3,000 rounds a minute on the high side, if you need it – or anywhere in between.”

Another feature of the new GCU is a heads-up display of ammunition status.

“It gives the operator true feedback on what’s left, because the time to find out your gun is empty is not when you’ve decided to ‘go to guns’ on something, hit the trigger, and it goes ‘click.’ That’s a bad day. Now you actually know, OK, that engagement just ended? Do we need to stop now and reload, top off? What do we need to do? And more information is always better. So just like everything else on the battlefield, how can I give more information to the warfighter? And that’s basically what we’re doing with our gun control unit.”

PROWS

Along with the third-generation gun designs, the company has also developed the Profense Remote Operations Weapon Station (PROWS).

“It is currently the smallest, lightest remote weapon station available, with the footprint of 18 inches by 18 inches, and it will take either our 7.62 gun or it will take the 5.56 gun,” Spicer said. “This gives you the ability to have the actual firer under cover. The weapon system will operate on its own. And, as you saw in the range, they can be put on the PROWS lightweight strike vehicle, which makes it a very dangerous gun truck.”

The Profense gun control unit allows rapid transition between low and high firing rates.

He identified a number of system features, ranging from the ability for remote WiFi operation on a tablet computer to prerecording targets.

“The example I always give is, if I’m a recon, and have identified five or six targets that I need to suppress before my guys actually launch the attack, I can pre-record those into the machine itself,” Spicer said. “I can also tell the gun how long I want it to fire at each one of those targets and at what rate I want it to fire. So, if I’ve got a heavy weapon system I want to destroy, I may want to go to the high rate. But if I’ve got guys in a trench, that’s OK with a low rate. I can program that into the system, hit the screen, and the gun will do the rest ... The other thing built into it is, if somebody pops up an RPG that I wasn’t expecting, I just got to hit the screen about where he is and the gun will immediately swing around, and I can get rid of him at the same time. So, it’s a very versatile system. It’s a very deadly system. It’s got a lot of attention for us. And obviously, we want to put it out there to the world.”

Asked about the future, Lasure said that the current portfolio has created a foundation that allows the exploration of additional calibers, including 6.5mm Creedmoor “and others.”

He concluded, “I can tell you right now that we’re looking really, really hard at [the upcoming U.S. Army Next Generation Squad Weapon downselect] that 6.8x51.”