I guess if holding the trigger down for 5 straight minutes is going to be an absolute survival necessity in any war, WWI might be it. But it still sound unusual. 2 minutes does seem more realistic for whatever confrontation in nomansland, although if that happens often, having to stop and change barrels would really matter.
The thermal mass of steel is about 490 joules per kilogram per degree Celsius/Kelvin, for reference, while water gets 4181 at 25C. That means for the same capacity to absorb heat, you’d need to carry about 8.5 kilograms of gun barrels for every one kilogram of piss. Water cooling is so fast it’s usually treated as instant, so thermal conductivity hardly matters. Steel can get a lot hotter than water before it changes phases, that’s true, but at some point your barrel is going to have thermal expansion and heat softening problems, as well.
I guess if holding the trigger down for 5 straight minutes is going to be an absolute survival necessity in any war, WWI might be it. But it still sound unusual. 2 minutes does seem more realistic for whatever confrontation in nomansland, although if that happens often, having to stop and change barrels would really matter.
The thermal mass of steel is about 490 joules per kilogram per degree Celsius/Kelvin, for reference, while water gets 4181 at 25C. That means for the same capacity to absorb heat, you’d need to carry about 8.5 kilograms of gun barrels for every one kilogram of piss. Water cooling is so fast it’s usually treated as instant, so thermal conductivity hardly matters. Steel can get a lot hotter than water before it changes phases, that’s true, but at some point your barrel is going to have thermal expansion and heat softening problems, as well.