Quote Originally Posted by Exarch View Post
Another minor question about shotguns, in the movie The Expendables one of the mercs uses a shotgun with a massive chain-style belt. Aside from the weight and potential for accumulated grime to gum up the feeding mechanisms, is there a reason why this is dumb?

Several reasons, aside from the huge hurdles ever mentioned:

1) Shotgun shells are plastic, not metal. Normal brass gets hot in the breach and when ejected removes some of the heat from the mechanism, acting as kind of a heat sink. Without this, the breach is going to possibly suffer heat management issues, which could cause unreliability, cooking off, or melted ammunition in the breach [!!!!!]. Belt feeding makes it even worse: instead of the weapon firing at a reasonable rate and cooling a bit when reloaded, it's now got a belt-full of ammo, meaning even more heat accumulating at a rapid rate.

2) Shotgun shells aren't a great shape and don't feed particularly well at times. Combining this with a belt feed is just asking for more reliability issues.

3) Sheer weight of ammunition.

4) There are few problems that 200 shotgun shells can solve that 10 can't. People are just as incapacitated when you shoot them with a load of buckshot as they are when you shoot them with ten. Unless one is facing an infinite horde of natives attacking with pointy sticks at 20 feet, a conventional combat shotgun or assault weapon, or LSW/LMG has all the firepower you need.