Because it’s cool?
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Quad-cannons are also cool! 
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To spread out the radiation spectrum of the barrels by Doppler shift of course! By rotating them the radiation of the barrels is shifted slightly, superimposing with the radiation from just before and cancelling each other out. 
Honestly though, I probably could design a water-cooled rotating barrel gun that works in space. If it should be fancy we could make the casing out of transparent aluminium so it looks like a fancy air-cooled version.
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OH YES! Those are cooler.
However, if gatling guns sound right, they’re almost as cool.
I want to hear nothing but the
#BRRRRRRRRRRT
of my gatling guns. In ED they sound like a 4 year old sticking her tongue out and going pbthpthpth.
How about a compromise: Quad-Gatling-Cannons?
I thought up a design right now that would work.
MSP Skills, ACTIVATE!!!
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You could get your BRRRRRRRRRRT with regular cannon so long as you could feed them ammo fast enough and had a fast enough firing mechanism to cope. Maybe a flexible pneumatic feed system and laser-ignition? Will think on this further.
Funny thing is about being picky: With today’s tech to look to, lasers are the only viable weapons for space combat. End of story. The problem with that is they won’t ever miss and can’t be seen other than on the spot they damage (and by them heating any clouds of gas/debris they throw out,) so that’s no fun for most people. It’s just that Gatling weapons are particularly pointless that peeves me.
Hmmm … hrrngss … oh …
Heat … where do you put all that excess heat energy? 99.999% efficient LASERs?
caution. Hot. Jettison after use?
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Patent pending.
Gatling guns are used to destroy the super-thermal-resistant super-cooled mirrors put on a ship for ‘armour’. Also, those mirrors change can change the color of the reflective material, which lessens the effect of the laser. Which also means that space battles would look like disco parties.
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You know, stuff like this is deserving of it’s own thread. Just for lols.
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Reading the books, and enjoying them so far.
The show looks fantastic at first glance, now to find a working proxy…
Between this and the Martian, looks like Hard-SF may finally start to get its rightful place on screen?
(The Expanse is not the hardest, but still enough to cut steel - so hard enough)
edit: So since when is SyFy making shows that are so good?
The Expanse series starts out hard and starts to get soft as the series progresses.
Minor spoiler:
[spoiler]Highly advanced alien technology starts to get heavily involved later on[/spoiler]
I’ve never understood the argument against a Gatling gun. Find me a 20mm cannon that can fire at 4500 rounds per minute that isn’t a Gatling design (let’s assume that we’re excluding the expendable bullet box). For reference, CIWS is such a Gatling design that can attain that rate of fire. It has six barrels in a small area, meaning it can fire six times the rounds before needing cooling.
Of course, ballistic rounds are silly at any significant range, but so are piloted craft.
Yes I’ve been waiting for this show to air. Am going to save up all the episodes in 1080p and watch them back to back after the last one airs.
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I watched this Yesterday. Looks pretty cool. The CGI and zero-g scenes were pretty well made too.
Those first scenes spoiled a little too much though. Maybe I’ll get surprised what that thing was that killed everyone on that ship … but that scene didn’t let a lot of possibilities open. If they reveal it in the first season it doesn’t matter anyway.
Also really cool they made Martians different. That scene really suprised me.
spoiler
I have yet to finish the books, but so far the xenotech doesn’t seem too soft. They are mind-blowingly advanced, but they seem to use (if not always follow) the laws of physics as we know them. In fact, as far as aliens are displayed in SF, they are on the hardest scale IMHO
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The interest of real Gatling guns are for cooling purposes, to avoid overheating a single cannon. But those guns mostly cool down thanks to the ambient air, which is conspicuously absent in space.
In space, you have to use radiation to cool down, and this is dependent on the surface that can radiate away from the ship (hence why real spacecraft have big radiators, comparable in size with solar panels).
It would make more sense for the guns to have, for example, a few radiator fins running its length, or a cooling system plugged in the general ship cooling system - maybe more efficient, but also more complex and prone to failure (like when a piece of shrapnel is sticking out of your cooling pipe).
All in all, Gatling guns in space are inefficient and needlessly complex compared to other system (and the rotation means they are harder to aim around very fast due to gyroscopic inertia, but that’s probably a minor problem).
You could maybe justify them for with some engineering reason, but that’s probably not the kind of guns we will see in space - if we ever see real slug-throwing guns again in space at all.
Then again, ‘maybe justify them’ is good enough to me, because they look pretty badass.
And if we go that way, the lack of radiators and visible fuel tanks await…
It’s the exact same in the book, and while I had a similar reaction, it actually works quite well - would be a surprise if it doesn’t in the show.
Only minor problem I have with the show so far is that they still fall back to this tired old “torture is acceptable to gain information” trope, even through a public organization went to great lengths to test this myth in the name of Science, and prove that it is absolutely, utterly inefficient when used that way.
Come on, people, it is a tool for terror, not information gain! You have fancy futuristic truth serums and mind scanners for that (you do, don’t you?) At least use it properly, not hidden in counter-productively black sites…
On the other hand, that one scene was an effective way to show the difference in physiology between Earthers and Belters.
Sounds interesting, might put this on my watch list
I have all the current audio books cued up ready to go but I really do prefer the visual TV to watch.
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Surely you’ve seen what kind of scientifically backwards people have run for president of the U.S. before? It makes sense that Mars is more advanced than earth if they resort to torture on Earth. (Elon Musk probably took all the brightest minds with him to Mars)
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