this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Logo uses joystick by liftarn
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Both are 5 seconds.
Irl bcs the truck of ammo you had behind you got depleted.
In game bcs of overheating.
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.
You forgot the weight of the battery for the motor that rotates the barrels. Afaik in the film a wire was run through the actor's pants.
If the gun runs out of bullets in 45 seconds, you could probably get away with pretty small batteries. The main thing it's doing is spinning a barrel, which you could probably do with a hand-held drill. The trick is that you don't want to wait while the barrel spins up, so you want enough power to get it up to full speed very quickly, which means a lot of initial power drawn from the battery, then a lot less to keep the barrels spinning.
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Nice, I wonder how many rounds per second he was shooting. That looked like the force pushing him backwards was similar to the force of gravity pushing him down.
Something that used to be a thing in a lot of games with firearms, but is increasingly minimized or just absent:
To sustain full auto aim at one spot, you would actually have to keep pulling the mouse down, to basically keep fighting the recoil kick.
So, the analogous thing here would be pulling the mouse down whatever the ... arc/degree equivalent of ~9 degrees is, per second.
Given say a 75 horizontal FOV, 16:9 ratio, thats ~42 degrees horizontal, 9/42 = ~ 21% of your total vertical view, or 42% of the 'below the center aimpoint' distsnce, so you'd have to pull the mouse down by almost half the distance of your screen, if that makes sense.
For a 90 FOV it works out to ~18% of the whole screen, ~ 36% if you go by the center to bottom of your view distance.
Nowadays, its much more common to have a very minor actual point of aim change from a shot, and most of the visual recoil effect is conveyed by a kind of oscilating viewpunch, that will pull the camera in a direction, but it will automatically return to the original aimpoint afterward.
(Also you shake the camera, roll it back and forth a bit, rapidly)
Ideally, imo, you use and blend both, but the ratio has very much shifted toward the viewpunch that auto resets, such that a short burst basically requires no 'fighting' it, when ... in real life...
...it depends on the weapon's ergonomics and weight and your level of training with it and the caliber and the barrel length etc etc, but generally speaking...
You do very much have to consciously and physically handle the recoil.
Another thing that would factor especially into weilding a minigun would be basically it 'clipping' on the surrounding environment, hitting walls, door frames, nearby plants, etc.
Theres a reason people don't tend to do room clearing with very long and large weapons.
But very few games even attempt to model this, so, you often get 'meta' weapons that... only are so because this element of reality is totally ignored.
Yeah, that was so annoying. I'm glad they stopped doing it. I don't mind if your accuracy goes down when you go full auto, or your aim point drifts in some random direction, but having to scroll down as you shot just sucked.
That should even be a factor with a regular rifle. Some games simulate that, but most of them do the ultra-simple thing of pretending the gun comes directly out of your nose and never interacts with the environment in any way.
It's not even that realistic. In real life, you need to apply constant pressure downward to keep a machine gun firing level, but not constant movement.
IMO, a realistic way to do it would be that when you fire the game machine gun in full auto, your point of aim gets shifted upward. To return it to where you attempted to aim, you'd then have to move the mouse downward slightly and then hold it there for the duration of the burst. (And the viewpoint/point of aim should suddenly dip back downward when you stop firing.)
Yeah, exactly. Pushing downwards slightly with a thumb stick / joystick might be a reasonable approximation. But, the whole thing you're trying to do is to prevent any movement.
But, I like your idea for the shifting aim point. If they ever try to do one for a mouse again, that would make more sense.
You could do the same with a mouse by making it so if you hold the trigger down, the mouse now acts like a joy con, based from where the mouse / aimpoint was when you began to hold down the trigger.
IE, instead of mouse movements being absolute, it now acts as a mouse to joycon emulator.
Aimpoint/camera rotation is now accelerating by the amount the mouse is moved away from the 'began to hold down trigger' point, as opposed to being 1:1 movement.
With controllers, you could also do the sort of wiimote style, most controllers have spatial awareness via acceleromators these days... but that would reveal to players how weak their arms are, so it wouldn't be very popular, lol.
But, for some reason, thats completely fine and normal and accepted for VR controllers, VR FPS games.
Hell, there's the old glasses that people would get for milsims and sometimes flight sims, for games where your weapon/interaction aimpoint, and your viewpoint, are disconnected and can be moved independently.
You are describing what I described, the viewpunch primarily method, where the camera auto returns to nearly the original aimpoint, in a way that treats every shot after the first as... different.
What I am saying:
Each shot = view angle gets shifted upward by say 2 degrees (+/- range of 0.75) and then left/right -0.5 to 0.5, something like that.
So, for each shot, you feel the recoil and must adjust manually to return to your original point of aim.
Which is actually very realistic, if you've ever shot a gun. Thats... true for timed aimed single shots, not just full auto or bursts.
Your method is basically this, but, the recoil is 0 for every shot after the first.
Which is kind of odd, from a realism perspective.
Typicially you have a crosshair, your 'cone of fire', that expands for each successive shot in rapid progression... that actually expands faster the more shots you fire in a given time frame, and then it usually maxes out at some max innaccuracy level.
But also typically... most games... do... what you are 'suggesting'. That's... the whole thing I am saying is basically 'easy mode'.
It makes sense for joycon users, they already need auto-aim to come anywhere near close to being able compete on par with MK users.
The fairly small number of FPS games that went cross platform and either did not have auto aim or allowed servers to turn it off showed this very quickly, you can see in RDR2 or GTAV online for more recent examples of this (assuming you can find and instance that isn't plauged with hackers...)
If you think that needing to physically account for each full auto, or rapidly repeated single/semi-auto shot... does not require actice physical effort for each shot... I don't think you've ever aimed and a shot a weapon accurately in rapid succession.
I'm one of the seemingly very small amount of people who has both shot real world firearms, and designed entire game systems that simulate firearms.
There's a fairly good chance half the advanced SWEP systems you may have ever encountered in Garry's Mod are... ultimately derivatives of my code, that I wrote almost 20 years ago now.
Pro: you're firing 50-100 rounds per second.
Con: you're firing 50-100 rounds per second.
Microdosing howitzer shells.