Navy Electromagnetic Rail Gun Fires GPS Controlled Bullets at 5,600 mph

Gadizmo ^ | 2 August 2012 | R.J. Huneke

[moonshot925]

What navy would not want a two-foot-long GPS-guided bullet that can be fired from a gargantuan cannon built right into a warship?

Did you know that we already have bullets that can strike an enemy thirty miles away?

This new government project hopes to utilize the current artillery and rail guns aboard US warships, with just a minor tweaking: fast (5,600 mph), GPS-controlled, twenty plus pound bullets that can travel potentially hundreds of miles and strike with pinpoint accuracy.

Announced on July 19, the new program is called Hyper Velocity Projectile, and plans to build on such successes as the 5” Mark 45 Mod guns that already reach farther than 30 miles.

Missiles could very well be going the extinct way of the dinosaurs, as these colossal bullets will be much cheaper and safer to produce in massive quantities.

[thackney]

This will change deer hunting forever.

And eliminate steaks providing only cooked sausage and ground venison.

[paratrooper82]

“. . . and start firing them at Beijing,Moscow,Tehran,Pakistan,Caracas,Berkeley and DC.”

Not necessarily in that order!

[null and void]

This is about 0.00008% of light speed.

[moonshot925]

The new Zumwalt class DDG has an integrated power system that is capable of generating 78 MW, 10 times more than the Arleigh Burke which is only capable of generating 7.5 MW.

I wonder if the Zumwalt could handle a railgun in a future upgrade?

[GraceG]

Navy?

The Airforce has had this for YEARS!

Well since season 4-5....

[WKUHilltopper]

Rail gun? I’d be just as happy with the bug “shotgun” as indicated on the same website.

http://gadizmo.com/bug-a-salt-turns-extermination-into-a-sport.php

[Izzy Dunne]

Is this covered by CCW?

[theBuckwheat]

About a year ago, I was the guest of an official of a major university. Near his desk was a nicely mounted piece of one inch metal plate, about 10 inches square with a 5 inch hole blasted out of the middle. He said this was one plate out of a stack of a dozen or so that had been hit with an slug shot from one of their experimental electromagnetic cannons. He declined to give more details.

[MrEdd]

Not that it won’t kill drones too, the point is that they will be harder to kill than manned jets, and.much cheaper. Plus, the pilot doesn’t die with a drone.

The exponentially best aerial defense against rail guns will be to avoid detection. Manned jets are just too big.

[sima_yi]

Of course hitting them might be a little tricky.

I wonder. They would have radar, laser, and GPS aiming and tracking capability, plus advance knowledge of exactly how far the satelite is and exactly what direction and how fast it is moving. Also, satelites can not take evasive action.

[EEGator]

If we devote every cent from the next 711 FReepathons we can have it!

[BwanaNdege]

In Vietnam I used to drift off to sleep listening to the sound of long range artillery (155mm, 8” ???) whispering way overhead. When something started coming down, the old ears said to the sleeping brain, “Wake up everybody, INCOMING!”

You can definitely hear artillery shells passing overhead.

[EEGator]

Oops, make that 2841 FReepathons.

[albionin]

You’re probably right. Computers could handle it. But any misses would turn into nasty navigational hazards for any E.T’s visiting the system.

[BwanaNdege]

When I was a kid I’d load sand in the bore of my Daisy pump BB gun, sit on the front porch & shoot flies. Eventually, I worked up to hitting them with BBs instead.

However, the sand didn’t leave dings in the porch boards, so I went back to sand.

[Red Badger]

But they weren’t passing overhead at 3 times the speed of sound............

[BwanaNdege]

IIRC, they used to experiment with plastic slugs in these rail guns.

[ryan71]

“When this is fieldable, it changes the ballance between air and ground units.”
- How so?

“This has been in the works for a long time, and is a primary driving force behind the push for the development of small, harder to detect and kill unmanned drones.”
- What do drones have to do with this? Surely, you're not thinking we can arm airborne drones with this?

[BwanaNdege]

Sonic boom is sonic boom. I’d guess Mach 3 ia a louder boom than Mach 1.7.

M114 155mm Howitzer - Muzzle velocity 563 m/s (1,847 ft/s) (Mach 1.69)

8 in Gun M1 - Muzzle velocity 866 m/s, Mach 2.6

[Vineyard]

I am making a desk ornament for my son ....it is a test projectile slug that was fired from one of those EM rail guns - fired at NSWC Dahlgren in Virginia. He acquired the test slug when he was doing an internship as part of a “super Senior thesis project” while attending USNA. My son gave me the the slug when he completed the internship - but I figured I would make it into a nice desk ornament for him in the future. When completed, it will be a nice ornamental paper holder that is as intriquing as the metal plates with the hole in it!! (The slug is a small aluminum billet that weighs about 4 lbs....and has some interesting deformations. It was fired into a sand-pit to absorb/dissapate the kinetic energy.)

Rail guns sound great, but there are many big technology hurdles remain to be solved before a suitable rail gun will be put into operation! The “ALL ELECTRIC” ship basically means that your power generation is electric first, and then you have electric motors connected to the propellors (instead of the turbines - through reduction gears, driving the propellor.) The ship might be making flank bell - and then temporarily shift power from the shaft to the EM rail gun energy bank - it might take 10 seconds to charge the energy storage bank - then power is switched back to propulsion. [sounds very Trekkie - charge phasor banks, shift power from life support to shields ....etc.!!]