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When I type enough the button to submit just dissapears. Lets see if I can post this first and edit it...

In what order do twin linked weapons usually fire? IRL AA gun tend to fire one barrel after another, but that is because its an AA gun and rate of fire is pretty important. Also, the guns just look like they would work that way.

What about Hydras? Their guns are so far apart and its hard to tell how they work. I imagine the top left barrel starts and it goes clockwise from there. Bur then theres thing like the quad guns on the shoulder of the new titans, where the pair of barrels on each side are connected to each other making it look as if both barrels on one side fire at the same time, followed bythe pair on the other side

But then there are your heavy bolters. All art shows all barrels firing all the time when it comes to twin linked weapons and in the case of heavy bolters, they fire fast enough and I find it simply easier to imagine that they would fire at the same time. At the same time, Im pretty sure twin machine guns irl also fire in succession, one after the other. So I dont even know...

Probably the worst case is the Macharius. In just about every game I played, a tank with twin cannons do not fire the same time... but the macharius' guns are so close to each other that Im pretty sure theyre connected somehow. I cant see the macharius NOT firing at the same time but when I imagine its guns firing in unison it just seems... odd?

Im also wondering about things like the wyvern, twin autocannons, reaper autocannons and everything else really. It seems like heavy bolters or stubbers and lascannons fire together while anything bigger with a slower rof dont. The problem is, how fast do Imperial autocannons even fire? I highly doubt it compares to russian AA autocannons. There is also the problem of which order a gun's barrels fire if they dont fire at the same time.

Im asking because I simply want to understand how these guns work. Some are so common it should be common knowledge, but with GWs inconsictancy regarding everything and art work where gun always fire in unison contradicting irl examples, I sometimes find it hard to tell.

I'd imagine Hydra being just oversized German 20mm Flakvierling 38.

Logically, it is better to have one weapon firing with a delay to lower the recoil.

Macharius's guns are both in one gun mount, but I'm sure they are both operated individually. Firing both at once will result in some serious recoil and possible damage.

But to summon this thread, 40k and logic are not the best friends and with the vast amount of artists, writers and such, consistency and, more importantly, knowledge of how physics and guns work IRL is hard to keep it all together. So, if you see something like two guns firing both at once, just think that the author made it that way because it looks/sounds cooler, despite it being total BS IRL.

The Imperium is not THAT backward to not to know how to shoot a gun so it won't damage itself or its mount/bearer. There are still some exceptions, though.

I'm not suggesting your question is silly, the answer is just unknowable. its is like the sound effects of 40k weapons- it changes from video game to video game, from novel to novel.

If you want to think this deeply about it, you may need your own headcanon, or extrapolate from real world tech.

M45 Quadmount wrote:The M45 is operated by two loaders and one gunner. The mount is capable of traversing a full 360 degrees around, with an angle elevation between -10 and +90 degrees. Traverse and elevation are electrically driven, powered by two rechargeable 6-volt batteries. All four guns could be fired at once, but standard practice was to alternate between firing the upper and lower pair of guns, allowing one pair to cool while the other was in use. This allowed for longer periods of action as overheating of the gun barrels was lessened.

Depends on the weapon. For most solid projectile weapons, I'd guess they're firing one after another in a regular pattern.

Energy weapons, I'd imagine fire at the same time.

Alien weapons may not follow these rules (Dark Eldar twin-linked weapons, like the Talos, fire at the same time).