Tag: Billionaire

A new billionaire security SUV vehicle with a nasty Gatling Gun for terrorists. Has been unveiled in the United States. A billionaire, in countries that use the short scale number naming system, is a person with a net worth of at least one billion (1,000,000,000; a thousand million) units of a given currency, usually major currencies such as the United States dollar, the euro, or the pound sterling. Forbes magazine produces a complete global list of known U.S. dollar billionaires every year, and updates the Internet version in real time.[1] The American oil magnate John D. Rockefeller became the world's first confirmed U.S. dollar billionaire in 1916;[2] as of 2015, there are over 1,800 U.S. dollar billionaires worldwide, with a combined wealth of over US$7 trillion.[3]

Current U.S. dollar billionaires[edit]
See also: Forbes list of billionaires
According to the Forbes report released in March 2015, there are currently 1,826 U.S. dollar billionaires worldwide, from 66 countries, with a combined net worth of $7.05 trillion, which is more than the combined GDP of 152 countries.[3][4] The majority of billionaires are male, but there are 197 female billionaires as of 2015.[5] The US has the largest number of billionaires of any country, with 536 as of 2015,[5] with China and Russia home to 213 and 88 billionaires respectively.[3] Among American billionaires, the average age is 66 years;[6] there are 46 billionaires under the age of 40 globally as of 2015.[5]

Statistics[edit]
The table below lists numerous statistics relating to billionaires, including the total number of known billionaires and the net worth of the world's wealthiest individual for each year since 2008. Data for each year is from the annual Forbes list of billionaires, with currency figures given in U.S. dollars.

The M134 Minigun is a 7.62×51 mm NATO, six-barreled machine gun with a high rate of fire (2,000 to 6,000 rounds per minute). It features Gatling-style rotating barrels with an external power source, normally an electric motor. The "Mini" in the name is in comparison to designs that use a similar firing mechanism but larger shells, such as General Electric's earlier 20-millimeter M61 Vulcan, and "gun" for a caliber size smaller than that of a cannon, typically 20 mm and higher.

The Minigun is used by several branches of the U.S. military. Versions are designated M134 and XM196 by the United States Army, and GAU-2/A and GAU-17/A by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy.

"Minigun" refers to a specific model of weapon that General Electric originally produced, but the term "minigun" has popularly come to refer to any externally powered Gatling gun of rifle caliber. The term is also used to refer to guns of similar rates of fire and configuration regardless of power source and caliber.

History[edit]
Background: electrically driven Gatling gun[edit]
The ancestor to the modern minigun was made in the 1860s. Richard Jordan Gatling replaced the hand-cranked mechanism of a rifle-caliber Gatling gun with an electric motor, a relatively new invention at the time. Even after Gatling slowed down the mechanism, the new electric-powered Gatling gun had a theoretical rate of fire of 3,000 rounds per minute, roughly three times the rate of a typical modern, single-barreled machine gun. Gatling's electric-powered design received U.S. Patent #502,185 on July 25, 1893.[1] Despite Gatling's improvements, the Gatling gun fell into disuse after cheaper, lighter-weight, recoil and gas operated machine guns were invented; Gatling himself went bankrupt for a period.[2]

During World War I, several German companies were working on externally powered guns for use in aircraft. Of those, the best-known today is perhaps the Fokker-Leimberger, an externally powered 12-barrel rotary gun using the 7.92x57mm Mauser round; it was claimed to be capable of firing over 7,000 rpm, but suffered from frequent cartridge-case ruptures[3] due to its "nutcracker", rotary split-breech design, which is fairly different from that of a Gatling.[4] None of these German guns went into production during the war, although a competing Siemens prototype (possibly using a different action) which was tried on the Western Front scored a victory in aerial combat.[3] The British also experimented with this type of split-breech during the 1950s, but they were also unsuccessful.[5]

Minigun: 1960s–Vietnam[edit]
In the 1960s, the United States Armed Forces began exploring modern variants of the electric-powered, rotating barrel Gatling-style weapons for use in the Vietnam War. American forces in the Vietnam War, which used helicopters as one of the primary means of transporting soldiers and equipment through the dense jungle, found that the thin-skinned helicopters were very vulnerable to small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attacks when they slowed down to land. Although helicopters had mounted single-barrel machine guns,