Posted on 03/27/2017 8:55:09 PM PDT by MtnClimber
he US Navy recently released footage of its first testfire of an electromagnetic railgun at their new terminal at Office of Naval Research and Naval Surface Warfare Center.
Railguns use 20 to 32 mega joules of electromagnetic energy to fire projectiles at seven to nine times the speed of sound, according to a Congressional Research Service report on the weapons.
Because they fire with electricity alone — not chemical explosives like conventional ammunition — railguns can potentially operate much cheaper and fire much much faster than weapons currently used by the Navy.
The Navy has long sought the technology as a potential game-changer for surface warfare, as China, Russia, and the US all race towards building hypersonic weapons that no ship can currently defend against. The newest classes of Navy ships, like the Zumwalt and Ford carriers, have been planned with outsized power generators in anticipation of the revolutionary weapon.
Despite looking like a typical cannon blast, the railgun only emits fire and sparks from metal components that become molten during the firing process that forces the components to fire at mind boggling speeds.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
“Site wants me to turn off my addblocker or I can’t continue?”
use the builtin “reader view” icon of firefox to bypass all of that nonsense; works on most sites with those kinds of popups.
That is really very interesting!
So his rail set up is in a helix form, which he states actually applies a rifling effect to the projectile.
And it appears on the nighttime experiment that the plasma actually pierced the steel, which I have to say blows my mind, because basically do not even know what plasma actually is :O
Energized gas? Incredible!
Glad the cameraman survived the ricochet. Dude’s phased plasma rifle 40 watt range seemed exceptionally powerful :O
Let me know when they are actually on ships...........
We need carriers even if just for drones that can deliver firepower for now. They can be much smaller because you can catch a drone in a net and launch it at 20 g’s or more. Much smaller deck requirements. You don’t have to worry about popping the meat bag inside. Longer term firepower will come from tungsten rods dropped from orbit. The rods from God concept.
I think that’s was a test slug in the laboratory version.
I recall seeing a demo booth of an electromagnetic railgun project at the Carlisle Barracks technology show maybe 20-25 years ago. The Colonel manning the booth said he never really appreciated the power contained chemical propellants until they tried to replace them with electricity. He said they had the power plant down to the size of a tractor-trailer.
Chemical propellant has an incredible energy density but there is an upper limit to how fast it can burn and not blow up a gun barrel, and this limits the projectile velocity and the life span of the tube. I’m guessing that there is little to no pressure inside of the railgun tube other than the shock front in front of the projectile.
The future of warfare is swarm bots and it scares the crap out of me.
Sort of reminiscent of the Replicators on the Sci Fi series Stargate SG-1.
that’s why we need to be on the forefront of that technology and manufacturing
I think every Nimitz-class carrier since “Reagan” has anticipated the need for greater electrical power generation for future weapons and/or EMALs.
“Because they fire with electricity alone — not chemical explosives like conventional ammunition — railguns can potentially operate much cheaper and fire much much faster than weapons currently used by the Navy”
Partially true... the rounds are NOT inexpensive. But the technology is impressive.
It really depends how you utilize the aircraft carrier. They are great for open ocean work, but there hasn’t been a battle between aircraft carrier battlegroups since 1945. So like the last battleships they become platforms for land-attack. But there’s a problem here as well. As far back as WW2 it was generally considered “not a good idea” to push a carrier to within 300 miles of an enemy coastline guarded by a 1st rate airforce. Put it all together and it’s understandable why Congress is reluctant to maintain the number of carriers we previously had. The number has slipped from 15 to 12 to 11 since I was in high school.
My reading of history is that — believe it or not — Congress does a pretty good job of forcing the services to buy into new classes of weaponry while reducing reliance on older stuff. It’s not pretty — like watching sausages being made — but the results are there.
From what I’ve read the limiting-factor on railgun technology is the life of the rails themselves. They have to remain parallel to a very high degree. What happens when the things heat up? Uh-huh.
Thought experiment: your going through the Straits of Hormuz on the USS Ford. The Iranians decide that this is a good day to die and fire off a cloud of anti-ship missiles. Your railguns engage. How confident are you — the surface weapons officer — in the ability of t
he railguns to pick-off the incoming missiles before the rails overheat?
It’s the difference between a conceptual weapon and an operational one.
Thanks, good look at the rail gun.
Yah. 37 ads on one page is a bit too much!
Later
Line of sight weapons are no threat to a CVBG.
Why don’t you stick to playing with toy battleships in your bathtub.
Kewl!
Every entity on the planet has an electromagnetic signature. A big carrier in open sea has an electromagnetic signature which of course varies depending on the level of activity. However it can never really go silent. Satellites are designed to detect and specifically locate those “signatures”. The next war will be fought initially in space. Unless those satellites are removed, the location of big ships and their targeting by a junior rating with a console in a fortified bunker will bring about their destruction. Sorry but the technology has outpaced imaginations. Its simply not ethical to put five thousand young sailors on a deployed carrier.
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