The legacy media knows nothing of the military, Exhibit 43,270,449:
Next month a new high-explosive munition will be fired in Singapore and then tested again by the U.S. Army, heralding what may be a sea change in weaponry: a gun that can fire 240,000 rounds per minute.
That's compared to 60 rounds per minute in a standard military machine gun.
They included (wrongly) the 60 rpm for machine guns for comparison purposes. Here's another comparison:
According to Moore's Law, processor speed doubles every 18 months. It would take 18 years to achieve the same speedup in processors that the report was claiming for machine guns. I guess computers aren't advancing as fast as we all thought....
I can't imagine someone writing that statement and not being skeptical that either the starting point of 60 or the ending point of 240000 is wrong.
Of course there's the common sense argument that any movie you've seen with machine guns firing is faster than "kachunk Mississippi kachuck Mississippi kachunk...."
A parsec is a measure of distance not time.It stands for parallel seconds where seconds is a measure of arc.
...which is exactly my point. When George Lucas wrote that line for Han Solo ("... made the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs"), either Lucas didn't know what a parsec was or he was trying to make Solo out to be an ignorant blowhard that couldn't even brag properly.
I remember someone commenting on the parsec thing and asking Lucas about it. Lucas responded that it was a mistake. I personally find trying to divine the intent of the creator a useless proposition. Parsec is in the movie. If you really want an in-movie explanation for it, recall that Solo is a scoundrel an not above a con. If you don't like that, make something up with space = time and less space = less time. Whatever. :)
All the same, am I wrong to think that 240,000 rounds per minutes is a FAST rate of fire?