I agree, I noticed this in the Editor. I put a group of OPFOR on the ground and opened fire with several long bursts, and only killed one of them.

However, another time I tried it, I killed 8 of them. I think the minigun spread is a bit too high, but I haven't looked at the damage each bullet does, I assumed it was hit=12 like other 7.62s.

I agree. I think its because the guns are 100% accurate, as in they shoot at what you point them at, there is no bullet spread.

Yeah, I've noticed it is quite hard to hit people, and I think it is the excessive spread on them.

I wish the miniguns would look / sound , and do damage like in this video >>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juUJdzFFORs

if you look at 00:18 you can see what appears to be fixed miniguns shooting dead straight compared to side gunners. though diffcult to shoot this is how it is and i dont think it should be changed to make it easier over realism

The way that this needs to be fixed is that the 2000 and 4000 rpm firemodes need to be returned. Right now it behaves like 2000, though it doesn't say if it is or not. 2000 rpm is less accurate than 4000 rpm, though I can't find any concrete evidence to back this up. It was this way in Arma II, though.

So, is the spread of bullets unrealistic perhaps? If a bullet miss a target, it misses its target.

The miniguns have a far too slow rate of fire. Either BIS increases the rate of fire or the bullets should be handled like shotgun rounds. (well, at least the impact/splash)

The miniguns do have way to much spread. This issue needs to be resolved. When you can't hit a man from 30 meters away with a weapon effective past 300 something is wrong.

I like the idea of having the two firemodes back, and different spread on both of them, though as J2ackson said, if it defeats the realism, maybe it shouldn't be worked in.

I found the guns somewhat.. Highly accurate, atleast sticking to the crosshair-location ? Now if I could just actually make the crosshair slide over the enemies, well all'd be swell, but that's just me being a lousy littlebird pilot

My impression was that the minigun was very inaccurate with a large bullet spread. I suspect that one should be able to use this miniguns against targets 500+ meters away with great accuracy.

Either get this right or forget about the whole game, I have no interest in fake "balacing" issues in a game, as if bullet spread now were to become an object for tweaking at the whim of the devs.

They have probably increased the dispersion in order to make up for poor A.I. aiming. Generally, the A.I. has had troubles elevating their weapons to counter bullet-drop over distance.

What could solve the issue (as well as wider dispersion and huge ROF increase) is a small amount of splash damage per shot? The video that Mestari shows has each shot causing huge dust clouds with shrapnel flying all over. A stream of bullets impacting 1-3m away would likely still cause injury to infantry, I'd wager. In the very least it would make the gun less reliant on pinpoint accuracy, which you frankly cannot get when trying to point a helicopter at an infantryman a few hundred meters away.

Could use a bit less spread and really need the fire modes back. Somewhere halfway between Arma3 and Arma2 seems like a good choice.

the helicopters move too fast horizontally, that's why

And brighter tracers during dusk/day/dawn. Very very hard to see where you shoot atm during those times as the impact dust also is pretty small.

From 0:12: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juUJdzFFORs

Having witnessed firsthand an AH-6 Little Bird conducting CAS, the damage and devastation of the miniguns are very poorly modeled in their current state. I believe this to be primarily a problem of RPM. The spread seems to be alright, but the number of rounds hitting the target area should be much denser. Generally when we call them in, we MAY get 3 good gun runs if we're very lucky. And this is firing in short bursts of maybe 10 seconds maximum duration. I do not believe that the guns are EVER used in the LOW RPM mode due to the Little Bird not being a very stable firing platform and the usual need for complete destruction of the target area when performing the CAS mission.

Purely as a sidenote, most of the difficulty with the guns has to do with their difficulty being aimed. They are usually zeroed around 300m (to give you an idea of how close the pilots get to the target). And the aiming and impact point are different on each individual AH-6. Unlike the MH-60 DAP, with it's sophisticated targeting systems and tracking miniguns, the AH-6 pilots use a grease pencil on their canopy to mark their aimpoint.

Encountered this yesterday as well - the spread seems to be too high, even when you shoot in a group of people from close range you will barely hit anyone at all

To increase a machinegun's use as an area of effect weapon the variability in the vector of a ricochet needs to be increased. The more uneven the surface, the larger the variability. Hard Metl surfaces should pose a risk of direct bounce-back.

This has been fixed in the dev branch.

As far as I know, pretty much no shots are actually registering and I can prove this by the fact that I have seen 4 rounds hit an Opfor soldiers head for close range and they did not die.

I also definitely agree that both RPM's need to be added back in!

They are way too accurate right now.

I had no problems getting lots of kills with the Alpha dispersion.

Now you need to be a sniper to kill anything

Ohhh yess.. they've went from one extreme to another ;). OC-30 had spot on miniguns, now they are too accurate. Similar situation with little bird.

weapons shall have a bigger spreading

One 7.62 round doesnt kill people, not even unarmored civilians. They visually wince when hit but can do so 2-5 times before actually dying. This is just crazy. ONE bullet should kill them.

Way too accurate now on release version. In very early Alpha versions they were almost perfect, you could have MH-9 flying over you firing with miniguns and bullets hitting around you on ground very well in scary way and easily being hit.

Now it is from 500m range you have 30cm pinpoint accuracy what is useless as you dont' hit anything and you can not give support. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juUJdzFFORs

In mounted machineguns/miniguns you want spread so the pilot can actually hit targets better than just trying to fly whole aircraft as accurately as people fire rifles.

I believe that each weapon pod on a helo's weapon pylon can be individually zeroed, so... a possible solution is to make one of the machinegun pods a small fraction of a degree different in its horizontal and vertical zero than the other. You can also do the same with the unguided rocket pods to increase the area of effect. Otherwise, there is almost no point in having more than one pod if both are unrealistically and exactly alike in their zero.

This still needs to be addressed. The dispersion on the miniguns is still way too tight. The dispersion on all variants of the M134 should come in around 6mils, which means that at a distance of 300 meters the shots of each gun should be landing in an area 1.8m in diameter.

This is strongly connected to this:
http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=12268

You cant hit s*** with the little bird because the aim is not centered. AT NO DISTANCE AT ALL.

You need to aim 2mm left and right of your reticle then you will hit and kill the enemys.

However I agree that the spread and RPM should be increased.

On a side note: All the damage stats seem to be f**ckd up.

You cant kill a soldier with a headshot of a rifle any more. (pistols allways needed like 4 bullets to the head. Congrats BIS)

But what also bugs me is that the little birds miniguns destroys buildings! In no time!

The minigun is more effective at taking out houses than the rocket pods.

What are they doing at BIS????

^the miniguns take out buildings? I haven't seen that myself, but I haven't tried it, since I never would have expected it.

That may be related to this: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=16159

I would really like to get that changed... 6.5mm bullets should not go through an armored MRAP, or completely through buildings, etc.

@Goose, You can take down a building with the minigun. I've tried it when I crash landed a UH-80 once, the MROT was stuck on a house and I just leveled the house with the minigun so I could take of again.

As for the rate of fire, I'm not sure if what I'm saying is correct. But I believe that the Orka has a rpm of 4000 and the pawnee a rpm of 2000 per gun.

The Orka has only one minigun and the pawnee has two, so the amount of rounds being fired should be the same.

To get on topic here, I to find it hard to hit people with the miniguns, they really are accurate. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, especialy at close range (say 50-200m). they should be accurate at close range, but at long range (say 500-600m) I do have the feeling that they are to accurate.