Hear The Sweet Sound Of A CIWS Gatling Gun Spraying A Boat

No One’s Getting Close To That Ship.

This video comes to us straight out of the U.S Navy. It features some practice runs of one of their weapons systems, namely, the M61 Vulcan gatling autocannon.

For those of you who don’t know, CIWS stands for “Close In Weapon System.” It’s the ship’s primary defense against missiles, but as you’ll see here, it does work on boats too!

For those of you who are Star Wars fans, this gun is nicknamed “R2D2” because of its shape.

This system is radar guided and is able to track projectiles from miles away. Be it a missile or an incoming hostile plane, the Vulcan can lock on to it and kill it.

With a rate of fire of 4,500 rounds a minute (works out to 75 a second), that amount of lead can drop most things out of the sky.

This video is about 5 minutes long so we’ll quickly go over what you’ll see here. At first, you’ll see a test plane fly by. The cannon automatically reacts with lighting speed, tracking it through the sky.

Then, you’ll see a couple of different test fires from various ships. The night shots about 2 minutes in are especially spectacular.

At about 2.5 minutes, you’ll get to see how it does against a boat. Hope you guys enjoy this as much as we did.