Absent quality terminal guidance, it would be remarkably inaccurate.
Unless the projectile is rocket propelled, I cant see how a tube that short could possibly accelerate a mass sufficient to send it out 1000 miles.
Need my bs meter.
Can’t help but notice that the tweet is from a Chinese source. What is up with that?
I want one of those...but probably won’t fit in the garage.
And then there’s the homeowner’s association.
Strategic implied something that blows up real good.
Put several of these on a ship and you could change the classic definition of a battleship. I can imagine a three gun battery, 2 forward and 2 aft (total of 12 guns), each with a fire arc of roughly +/- 100 degrees or so from centerline.
Depending on the fire rate, that configuration could drop a whole lot of ordnance on a very small target. And a Battleship could carry a WHOLE lot of rounds.
As a combined arms force, this would also be interesting in an aircraft for theater level ground support.
I suspect that there will need to be a whole lot better fire direction control between services. Down to the point where a Army forward observer (or drone operator or satellite image interpreter) could call on all three services to pound a target.
“It shoots through schools!”
Scramjets do not provide the distance this claims. The only thing I have seen field tests of which does is electromagnetic propulsion, aka railguns.
Artillery is incredible accurate and dropping a full sized 152mm shell (no explosives, just a chunk of metal that size) on top of anything from that distance and height of trajectory would be an event, especially to those in the area.
“Penetrates and disintegrates enemy A2(AntiAccess)/Area Denial defenses” (as in China’s strategy in the South China Sea).
Check.
Combine this with some of the new “sub-caliber” nuclear warheads that we are now developing, and maybe an innovative boost-glide hypersonic artillery shell. Then proliferate these tubes all around the South China Sea, and on all kinds of seagoing vessels.
Suddenly the Chinese “unsinkable aircraft carrier” artificial islands seem like much less of a survivable capability.
What is the point of a long barrel if the munition is self-guided?
Because the projectile is self-propelled it can actually fit the definition of a missile, regardless of the military calling the equipment a cannon. Maybe the only real difference is that the missiles are “fired” from a device as opposed to “launched” from a platform.
Before the Railgun, there was the Combustion Light Gas Gun. It was designed to lob 155mm shells two hundred miles. The self guided projectiles had not been developed at that time, so the accuracy was not sufficient for an inert round. Inconsistent ignition of the gaseous propellant resulted in a significant ranging error, what with an unstable muzzle velocity.
A possibility is that the projectile would be fired using the CLGG system on a trajectory to clear the atmosphere, given an initial muzzle velocity of 2.5 to 4.0 km second. A secondary boost from a laser system supplying energy to a solid propellant block on the projectile base, could provide the additional velocity which would allow extended range.
Or, a really wicked energy-dense internal range extender propellant has been developed.
Why invent the wheel. We have munitions that can be effective to within a few meters at that distance. They are called rockets.
What is the purpose of a new “super gun” in an already expensive arsenal.