Posted on 05/27/2016 10:28:47 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
DAHLGREN, Va.A warning siren bellowed through the concrete bunker of a top-secret Naval facility where U.S. military engineers prepared to demonstrate a weapon for which there is little defense.
Officials huddled at a video screen for a first look at a deadly new supergun that can fire a 25-pound projectile through seven steel plates and leave a 5-inch hole.
The weapon is called a railgun and requires neither gunpowder nor explosive. It is powered by electromagnetic rails that accelerate a hardened projectile to staggering velocitya battlefield meteorite with the power to one day transform military strategy, say supporters, and keep the U.S. ahead of advancing Russian and Chinese weaponry.
In conventional guns, a bullet loses velocity from the moment the gunpowder ignites and sends it flying. The railgun projectile instead gains speed as it travels the length of a 32-foot barrel, exiting the muzzle at 4,500 miles an hour, or more than a mile a second.
This is going to change the way we fight, said U.S. Navy Adm. Mat Winter, the head of the Office of Naval Research.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
I highly recommend this video. It’s short, but it’s a good view.
I highly recommend this video. It’s short, but it’s a good view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_yUNm8Tl9o
Anytime you have a projectile screaming in at extremely high speedskilometers per secondthe sheer kinetic energy of that projectile is awesome, Mr. Work said. There are not a lot of things that can stop it.
Good old
to the rescue. That v squared bit is a real multiplier.
They probably got it off Hillary’s email server.
Do they mention the duration if the pulse. There is a big difference between 45 Mw for a microsecond and 45 Mw for an hour. You could power the former with the alternator on your car, although cycle rate would be rather slow.
Neat technology. Pluses and minuses. We have more important things to address in our country that threaten to make this or any defense system redundant.
I’d like to see what happens to his face within an active MRI.
We live across the Potomac from dahlgren. That thing makes a lot of noise when they play with it.
Edger KB(ka-Boom) McKenzie of Possum Lodge fame always says “There’s no problem that can’t be solved with explosives”.
So now we know what the mysterious J Department was doing for all those years.
It just occurred to me that this is an EMP put to a different use.
Arthurus, I admire your efforts to keep our language meaningful. Unfortunately, languages do evolve; when enough people use a word or phrase “incorrectly”, that misuse becomes the correct usage. The Internet has increased the rate of change, I think.
I don’t like it either.
More of a zap gun.
WE can keep the language meaningful if we desire to so that we, at least, know what each of us is talking about. and are not co-opted into and by the PC language of the rest. Using the language wrongly is too often granting arguments to the other side because we are granting them the Authority to define language and if we agree to their definitions we lose doubly because those definitions change between the time you score your point and the time the argument is reported.
Do they mention the duration if the pulse. There is a big difference between 45 Mw for a microsecond and 45 Mw for an hour. You could power the former with the alternator on your car, although cycle rate would be rather slow.
Remember, it’s pulse power lasting milliseconds. Usually done by storing the energy over some period of time in a capacitor bank and then discharging it. It’s not so much the watts but the watt-seconds.
uper ast.
Cool on paper, but without explosives won’t this gun simply punch neat little holes in the things it hits?
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