Second, "cook-off" has nothing to do with the purpose of a gatling design which is to maintain a high ROF and reduce barrel overheating beyond what could be accomplished with a single barrel. You shouldn't have an issue with cook-off unless you're discussing the differences between cased vs. caseless ammunition which is a completely different concept here.
If the entire weapon is heating up because it's passively cooled, the entire local ammo pool would be at risk of cook off, caseless or not.
You still don't seem to understand the main advantage of a gatling weapon which is that each barrel only fires for a fraction of the total ROF and the barrel assembly will therefore take much longer to heat up than a single-barreled weapon. How is this still not clear?
A six-barreled gatling autocannon has each barrel only experiencing 1/6 of the total heat buildup for the same ROF as a single-barrelled weapon. That is an advantage regardless of the environment the weapon is being used in.
You aren't taking into account how slow radiative cooling is.
After a fairly short period of firing, that watercooled barrel will be much cooler than any of the six barrels in your radiatively cooled rotary cannon, because any reasonable water cooling system would remove heat at a rate far, far, beyond radiation times six.
It's pure heat production vs. heat capacity vs. heat dissipation rate.
Production is tied to ROF. Capacity is tied to the mass of the barrels. Rate is dependent on means and mechanism of cooling.
If we assume the first two are the same, then you are left with how much heat you can remove with water vs. how much heat you can remove with nothing. I can remove a
huge amount of heat with some copper tube and a good water pump. Not so much with a couple square meters of metal in a vacuum. Even if the gatling weapon has more total barrel mass, that won't mean much for sustained fire...with next to zero cooling, it will reach saturation very quickly.
Except that it doesn't, because real-world gatling autocannons (and even simply the dual-barrel, recoil-operated GSh-23) easily outperform comparable liquid-cooled single-barrel weapons.
Your anecdotal weapons aren't used in space.
They are used on Earth, which has a thick cool layer of air over it, that allows for the cooling from the forced convection of a rotating barrel assembly to dwarf that of radiation by multiple orders of magnitude.
If I have not fired my multicannons at all and drain the weapon capacitor by using other weapons I should still be able to fire my multicannons if it were simply "cooling". My mutlicannons should still fire regardless of the amount of WEP capacitor energy, I should just see more heat build-up. The only way the weapons could not physically fire as a result of a drained WEP capacitor is if there is literally no power being supplied to the barrel assembly and feed mechanism.
The weapons aren't cooling, the coolant is. The ship will not allow you to fire any weapons if the coolant is above a certain temperature, because that could result in damage to the weapons, or the coolant loop (which all weapons share).
The weapons still have access to their full power allotment, otherwise the module would shut off.
If you're adding an externally-powered action and feed mechanism to a single-barreled weapon, then you might as well add the additional barrels needed to turn it into a gatling weapon given the massive advantages in ROF that you get by adding the additional barrels. The weight penalty is not a significant issue compared to the ROF advantage otherwise we would not have 6-barreled and 7-barrelled gatling autocannon designs in use today.
Revolver cannon, are a thing, as are other mechanisms for powered firing and extraction of single barrel weapons.
And, as I've repeatedly tried to convey, the ROF advantage from multiple barrels is going to vanish with sustained fire if you don't have any means of removing heat from them.
Gatling guns can sustain high ROF in the real world because we have air too cool the barrels with.
You're mostly correct about the advantages of multi-barrel weapons on Earth, but if we had a contest between my watercooled single barrel weapon and your gatling gun in a vacuum, with the same rounds at the same ROF, your weapon would soon have all six (or whatever) of it's barrels glowing white hot while mine was still cold enough to touch.
I find it fun that we're talking about "realistic operation" of guns in space, in a game where most mechanics are pure handwavium. If those guns were even remotely realistic, our ships would be spinning nonsensically every time one of them was fired. Recoil is nonexistant here. And some of the guns are really VERY high caliber, around 300-450mm for C4 cannons, while multicannons are firing 100-150mm shells. It would be pretty comical, if you think about it: that's like seeing a gatling howitzer by today's standards. Just imagine the recoil generated by those guns... in a 1000 Ton hull floating in space. Our largest battleships sported hulls in the 60.000 ton range, and they where shaken by those cannons. I can see the captain of a Federal Corvette puking every time those cannons fired... lol
Any reasonable figures used for the mass and momentum of the projectiles our weapons fire in ED will show that the recoil is very small and very manageable.
If half the mass of a Huge cannon is ammo, then each shell is less than 80kg. The muzzle velocity is also low at only ~800m/s. This is a tiny amount of momentum relative to the smallest ship that can mount it (the FDL) and is rightly imperceptible when combined with the recoil compensation of the weapon and some counter thrust.
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