Posted on 07/22/2019 12:23:27 PM PDT by BenLurkin
FYI: Latest on the railgun, which is likely about to go on its first shipboard deployment - please note that many of your concerns have been addressed: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/fire-us-navys-railgun-may-soon-see-testing-real-warship-59567
I would point out that the Marines only wanted the increased range because the Navy had put all the battleships out to pasture and they needed the longer range fire support. Also, the LRLAP projectile the AGS was to fire was originally to be a joint project with the *Army*.
What’s really embarrassing is that the Russians currently have their various albeit more specialized counterparts to the LRLAP actually already working and issued. The 2A88 152mm gun mounted on the 2S35 Koalitsiya-SV has a *demonstrated* range of up to 80 kilometers using precision guided rounds and up to 40km for conventional munitions. For comparison, our 155mm M109A6 has a range of 24km for most rounds and a 30km range with assisted/base bleed rounds. Even with the special M982 Excalibur rounds it has a maximum range of 40km.
Yes, but air friction at Mach 7 eats projectiles, just like it does meteors. They also don't stay at Mach 7 very long and when they decelerate below Mach 1, as they inevitably will, they are just a thrown brick and an unguided one at that.
"Muzzle flash, counterbattery radar and acoustic gunfire locators will do just fine to locate existing gun systems, so that’s a wash at worst."
Not really - the electronic pulse travels much, much further - so the ship firing a Rail Gun will be announce where they are to a much wider audience.
"The EMP issue causing havoc with surrounding systems was resolved some time ago."
Really? how about radios, radar, shipboard computers - is everybody in a Faraday cage? You didn't mention terminal guidance motors and electronics - because a thrown brick at a hundred miles has an awful lot of ballistic variables to account for. The further you shoot, the bigger the CEP.
See my comment about an unshielded camera. Digital motion video cameras are notoriously sensitive to electrical field interference to the point where they crash/freeze/stop working/have problems in the presence of a field much weaker than an unshielded railgun. The Navy is using unshielded commercial cameras to record test firing of the railgun at close quarters since 2012. Remember, you can shield the railgun instead of all the surrounding equipment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiUDdAGCht0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTjj-DhtgYo
The current state of the railgun is that it can fire a bit less than 5 rounds per minute and even unshielded commercial electronics can be used around them.
Also worth noting - the Turks and Chinese have apparently working railguns and the Chinese have even proceeded to sea trials.
We have developed 52 caliber gun tubes for the M777 and the M109A7 but again greater range absolutely requires guided munitions and Quarter-Million Dollars a Pop rounds.
When I was doing this stuff, we designed our own system in-house at Picatinny Arsenal, built it a Rock Island, and tested it at Yuma - and our direction was greater automation, faster rates of fire, high ballistic precision, and fire on the move. I guess we'll see where the technology takes us.
Unfortunately, for obvious reasons - especially with the Chinese and Turks evident progress with railguns - you’re not likely to see anything more detailed on an officially condoned article. However, you have but to look at the private citizens’ railgun development (and there’s a LOT of them) to see that they’ve encountered the same problems on a smaller scale and worked around them, all using unclassified publicly available gear.
Articles that may be of interest:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7175261
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221491471600026X
https://content.iospress.com/articles/international-journal-of-applied-electromagnetics-and-mechanics/jae160060
Also, check out the hundreds of videos on Youtube about building personal railguns.
Crap, you’re going to get me to build one of those puppies!
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