Both are 5 seconds.
Irl bcs the truck of ammo you had behind you got depleted.
In game bcs of overheating.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Someone on Reddit actually did the math on this 5 years ago.
The scene in Predator where someone holds down the trigger and fires continuously for 45 seconds is actually vaguely possible.
The gun weighs 39 kg or 85 lbs, so it's possible for a soldier to carry it, especially the soldiers in Predator who are shown to be much, much stronger than the average soldier. The ammo used in 45 seconds would weigh 25 kg, so it's still vaguely possible that the soldier could carry it along with the weapon. The volume of ammo wouldn't be that much of an issue. It's under 1000 rounds for 45 seconds of fire, which would fit in a backpack-sized box.
Another big issue is the recoil. On earth, someone experiences 9.8 newtons per kg of mass. We don't know how much Bill Duke weighs, because he's just an actor, but since Jesse Ventura used to be a "wrestler", we know his billed weight of 111 kg in his wrestling days. So, without any gear on he'd be experiencing 1088 N of force from gravity. Add the weight of the minigun and its ammo that's 175 kg, or 1715N.
The recoil generated by the gun is based purely on the rounds it fires. An online calculator puts the recoil impulse at 13.4 Ns of impulse per bullet. From that reddit post, they figured out the minigun in that scene had been slightly slowed down from the normal 2000 rounds per minute (33.3 rounds per second) to only about 20 rounds per second. But, even then, that means the gun would be generating 268N of force. So, just to avoid being moved, someone would have to lean atan(268/1715) = 8.8 or about 10 degrees forward. That may not sound like a lot, but when you're already carrying the equivalent of another person from the weight of the minigun and its ammo, that's a lot of extra force to deal with.
In many games, you can move normally while carrying a minigun, but as soon as you start firing it you slow to a crawl. They actually got that part right. It would be hard to move freely while this thing is shoving you back with such force.
Their math was wrong. 45 seconds of sustained fire would require a belt far larger than any one man could carry. It wouldn't even be logical in a vehicle turret.
20 rounds per second, 45 seconds is 900 rounds. Each round is 25g, so 900 rounds is about 25 kg. I don't see the issue.
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Pro: you're firing 50-100 rounds per second.
Con: you're firing 50-100 rounds per second.
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Bringing back the trauma of Breath of the Wild where melee weapons break after a few hits.
In real life they're mounted to vehicles.
AFAIK, you can thank the 1987 movie Predator for the idea that someone could walk around with a minigun as a personal weapon
Now I'm going to have to go watch that movie again. Not only was it so influential that it introduced the idea of miniguns as human-portable weapons to games, it's the source of this meme and what's not to love about a movie with Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers.
So many games and movies ignore both the weight of the ammunition required to fire one of those things for more than 3 seconds, and the weight of the batteries required to spin the barrels. You would need more than even a power-suit, you would need some kind of frame on self powered wheels... a "vehicle" of some kind.
Technically, it could be done. Someone did the math from the scene in the movie Predator. He could carry a weapon that heavy, including the ammo and batteries. It would be about 40kg for the gun and 25kg for the ammo. That's very high, but not absurd, as long as he's carrying almost nothing else. It could fire for 45s without running dry. And if you limited it to reasonable bursts of say 3s, that ammo would last a while.
It's not practical, but it's possible.
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Reminds me of the weapons in Breath of the Wild. You can easily break several in a single fight.
TIL, that rotary machines guns spin to cool down.
It's more that using multiple barrels keeps any one barrel from heating up too quickly, and it's easier to have multiple barrels than entire firing assemblies.
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Uh, what did you think the rotary barrels were for?
...more barrel = more bullet? 🥴
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It's the same for weapon ranges. Assault rifles have an effective range of more than 300m IRL, but it's commonly less than 100m in video games
Yeah also, real life, you’re not shooting 300 m very often. Your rifle may be capable of it, you’re not. With any real effect anyway.
Source: former infantryman
Is it a matter of stopping power or of precision?
Precision. It’s really hard to see anything at 300m with the eyes. You can’t shoot what you can’t see. You very rarely have clear sight lines out that far, and even when you do, it’s hard to put anything on a human sized target that far.
At 300 m the naked eye sees a person as about the size of a grain of rice.
It’s not impossible. I used to bullseye Womp Rats in my T-16 back home.
Never said it’s impossible. You just won’t do it. A standard (American army) infantryman has a red dot. Non magnified. With adrenaline, moving targets, trying to not die, you will not be effective at that range.
You can use overwhelming volume to suppress, but, realistically, you’re going to close the distance. In a straight up infantry on infantry engagement anyway, which is a rarity.
Edit: just realized the Star Wars reference lmfao my bad
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It's a matter of skill. Carlos hathcock used a .50 machine gun to snipe people in Vietnam. I hit individual targets at 500m with a 249 on a single shot with iron sights.
Range data isn’t a flex, pog.
What'd you get on your asvab? Drool? In asymmetric warfare being a window licker doesn't mean you saw much more than anyone else unless they never left the fob.
- At the end of the day, I’m not in here telling you how to do intel, don’t tell me how to do what I did.
Uh huh. Sure.
To your point about ASVABs, that’s the exact reason an average infantryman isn’t effective. I wasn’t sure some people could tie their own shoes, let alone handle a rifle.
Wrong. I easily shot 500m on a 249 single shot on iron sights.
Yeah? Of course, a 249 is a different beast. I’m talking about the average infantryman, M4, red dot. Sure, it’s not the hardest shots in the world, the average infantryman, just isn’t very combat effective there.
Edit: stationed at Gordon tells me you’re not infantry.
Shotguns are also nerfed in games with respect to their effective range.
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There isn't a video game minigun in existence that will bankrupt you in seconds either, you just gotta suspend your disbelief and enjoy the fantasy
Except for maybe bloodborne. The most fantastical minigun but you become bankrupt in multiple lifetimes attempting to acquire it
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If you have a minigun and not enough enemies on screen not to need it running constantly, you're doing it wrong.
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Tbf even the gau-8 used by the A-10 warthog only has 18 seconds of brrrrrrt. So if anything carryable could last 5 seconds, you'd basically be out of ammo anyways. It's a way of making it "realistic" without limiting you to the point of making it worthless. Which in reality, in any extended engagement, a ground mini-gun is absolutely worthless. No one person by themselves could use that gun effectively against more than ~10-15 people and only in VERY specific situations. Only in a kamikaze rush would it be of any value. I'd take 3 marksmen with bolt action rifles and iron sights over one dude on foot with a mini-gun all day, every day.
Mini-guns are very, very good in specific applications, but absolutely worthless in others. But it's fun in a video game to weird. It'd be unrealistic and OP to carry with enough ammo to make it useful outside of fallout power armor, or a full mech.
I guess that if I was trying to make realistic game, I would give the player multiple lives. Each mission, there is a large number of friendly troops trying to advance through each area. Whenever the player dies, they swap into one of the surviving soldiers. The game is over if the troops run dry. This allows us to have each and every weapon on the field be fully effective for both sides.
There are a lot of difficulties with this, since traditional game design doesn't account for a massive number of characters. It would probably be best to make a mod for Arma III and playtest the concept with D-Day and other operations.
It would be kinda like the isometric Army Men games or Cannon Fodder, but from a FPS perspective.
This is sort of how Battlefield, Battlefront, and Helldivers 2 work, but you play as an incoming reinforcement, not someone already on the field.
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"Realism" and "Man portable minigun without support battery and backpack"
To make the gun light enough for your character to handle it the barrels are made of aluminium foil.
For real. Complaining about the realism of a trope sparked by a T-800 ripping the minigun off of a helicopter due to superhuman strength is more than a little silly.
Ohp. Actually, it looks like Castle Wolfenstein did it first. Still, silly.
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