In March 1956, an assembly of over 200 journalists, government officials, and spectators converged at Edwards Air Force Base for the Air Force’s grand reveal of the Lockheed F-104A Starfighter.

While the aircraft boasted slender wings and a blistering top speed of 1,500 miles per hour, it was a peculiar, unexplained bump on the front left side of the fuselage that captured the crowd's intrigue.

Months prior, an announcement from a high-ranking ordnance official had rippled through military circles, hinting at a new machine gun with a firing rate of thousands of rounds per minute.

This rumor, seemingly beyond the bounds of contemporary technology, bordered on the fantastical, especially in an era where the pinnacle of weaponry barely breached the 1,000 rounds per minute mark.

So when the weapon responsible for the bump, the M61 Vulcan, was finally introduced, with 6,000 rounds per minute, it shocked the military world. Even more shocking was that while this might have seemed like cutting-edge mid-century technology, the weapon was actually an iteration of a nearly 100-year-old Civil-war era gun.