Gatling gun

The gatling gun is a machine gun battery that appears in both The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided and History Civil War: Secret Missions. It is one of the two machine guns that appear in the series with Agar gun.

Features
The gatling gun is considered by many to be one of the first machine guns in history. It has a rotating battery of 10 barrels that is hand cranked. Everytime it is cranked, the battery rotates, and a barrel fires a single shot before the next barrel is loaded up and fires another. This is done so that each barrel does not overheat, and if one barrel jams or breaks apart the user can just take away a barrel and the gun would still keep on firing.

It has a 20-round gravity-fed magazine but can fire over 200 rounds of paper cartridges per minute. With the advent of metallic cartridges the gatling can fire 400-900 rounds per minute. Like a canon, it is driven by wheels and usually takes four crews to operate in real life (although in the game it takes only the player to use, and two persons for NPCs).

In the game, the gatling gun fires unlimited ammo (though rate of fire is faster in the second game than in the first game). A whole mission in Secret Missions was dedicated to the gatling called Dr. Gatling's Secret Weapon.

Real life
In real life, the gatling was designed by a doctor named Richard Gatling in the hopes that a rapid firing gun can decrease the number of troops needed in a battlefield and potentially save lives. In fact, the machine gun was capable of firing more rounds per minute than a whole unit of soldiers. However, during the Civil War the gatling did suffer from some problems, mainly the fact that paper cartridges were that reliable and usually fail to feed.