Well obviously, you should cool it with the other bullets, then. Maybe you could even collect the spent ones for that. /s
If directly using air is fast enough, sure, that’s a better option. I mean, in a water cooled gun, the water/steam itself gets cooled in the air, or on surrounding surfaces. It’s just an intermediary to increase effective surface area.
Not actually knowing much about the history of this, just the science, it seems likely that a barrel replacement was expected to be a rare event, because the rate of fire and heat per shot was low enough for whatever other engineering features to handle it, at least most of the time.
Roughly speaking you’d need to change the barrel every ~1000 rounds, and WW1 MGs shoot at ~200 rounds per minute, so you’d need to swap the barrel once every 5 minutes of continuous shooting. It could be half of that tho, depending on the barrel and the gun.
Well obviously, you should cool it with the other bullets, then. Maybe you could even collect the spent ones for that. /s
If directly using air is fast enough, sure, that’s a better option. I mean, in a water cooled gun, the water/steam itself gets cooled in the air, or on surrounding surfaces. It’s just an intermediary to increase effective surface area.
Not actually knowing much about the history of this, just the science, it seems likely that a barrel replacement was expected to be a rare event, because the rate of fire and heat per shot was low enough for whatever other engineering features to handle it, at least most of the time.
Roughly speaking you’d need to change the barrel every ~1000 rounds, and WW1 MGs shoot at ~200 rounds per minute, so you’d need to swap the barrel once every 5 minutes of continuous shooting. It could be half of that tho, depending on the barrel and the gun.