Not quite handgun size, but close enough!
Posted on 02/10/2009 7:43:39 AM PST by Notoriously Conservative
(video on site)
Aim one of these babies at Osama Bin Laden's cave, or goat farm, and blamo!!! Nothing but the stench of burnt beard and turban.
The weapon, which was successfully tested in October at the King George County base, fires nonexplosive projectiles at incredible speeds, using electricity rather than gun powder.
The technology could increase the striking range of U.S. Navy ships more than tenfold by the year 2020.
"It's pretty amazing capability, and it went off without a hitch," said Capt. Joseph McGettigan, commander of NSWC Dahlgren Division.
"The biggest thing is it's real--not just something on the drawing board," he said.
The railgun works by sending electric current along parallel rails, creating an electromagnetic force so powerful it can fire a projectile at tremendous speed.
Because the gun uses electricity and not gunpowder to fire projectiles, it's safer, eliminating the possibility of explosions on ships and vehicles equipped with it.
Instead, a powerful pulse generator is used.
The prototype fired at Dahlgren is only an 8-megajoule electromagnetic device, but the one to be used on Navy ships will generate a massive 64 megajoules. Current Navy guns generate about 9 megajoules of muzzle energy.
The railgun's 200 to 250 nautical-mile range will allow Navy ships to strike deep in enemy territory while staying out of reach of hostile forces.
And coming in at the size of a watermellon, a U.S. warship can store hundreds of them ("stored kills"), as opposed to current conventional rounds and especially cruise missiles, which require hazardous resupply at sea, or else a return to port.
Not quite handgun size, but close enough!
It’s not an explosive warhead. It relies on kinetic energy.
If you think that this weapon is interesting, Google for “rods from God” which is an older and, I think, more interesting concept.
In fact, the Navy has lost the capability of manufacturing 16-inch guns, which used to be done at the Naval Gun Factory at the Washington Navy Yard, long since turned into a minimall and fitness center.
1.34 X square root of the length of waterline will give you the hull speed!
OK, so the rail gun will work, but what about the impact on global warming? S/off
Lenth at waterline was about 825’. That gave the battleships a hull speed of aprox. 38.5 knots, 30+ knots at cruise.
!
phased-plasma weapons in the 40-watt range?
Why use them as a platform. The hull. Designed for speed and heavily armored. Sure we could probably build newer ones, but these already exist.
Don't worry though, it's just a thought exercise here, and even if the Navy were to want to try, The Three Stooges (Pelosi, Reid, Zero) would say no.
Its nickname is Big Burkha.
The railgun’s 200 to 250 nautical-mile range will allow Navy ships to strike deep in enemy territory while staying out of reach of hostile forces......
Can it avoid the hostile forces of Zero?
Got me! LOL!
(Where can I get one?)
Not really. It’s firing an unguided projectile at a target that is 200 miles away. Granted, it is an interesting method, but existing weapons do a better job.
It will lose velocity every second that it’s in flight, and the seconds of flight depend on the length of the bullet arc. A 200 mile shot requires a high arc, which will be much greater than 200 miles. Unless it leaves the muzzle at an ungodly velocity, it will hit the target with a velocity more due to gravity more than propellant.
A Patriot missile goes about 5,600 f.p.s., has a rocket motor, and is guided. Its range is 100 miles. I can’t see how an unguided bullet will accomplish much of anything, unless against hardened targets. Soft targets will have about four minutes to get out of the way
Didn't Arnold S star in a movie that used this technology? What was the name of the film????
They're not necessarily unguided---.
You bet. Retrofit them with nuclear reactors and replace the 16” main guns with rail guns. Since there is no explosive acceleration, the projectiles can contain GPS guidance and can be dropped in a bucket from 300 miles.
True, they could put fins on the projectile to guide it. But I still don’t see the exterior ballistics. Someone with better calculus kung fu could figure the trajectory, time of flight, and energy at impact. I think it will be very disappointing at long range.
Here are a few things that will make it sound better:
The shell is GPS-guided.
The 9 MJ gun can fire a 2 kg round at 3,000 m/s (almost 10,000 fps). The 64 MJ gun the Navy is looking for could fire a 14 kg round at the same velocity, a bigger one at lower velocity, or a smaller one faster.
The biggest advantages this would have is simplicity, safety, cost and numbers. Once you have the launch system taken care of, the projectile is a guided hunk of metal vs. maintaining rockets. Against regular rounds, there is no powder to worry about. Rounds will cost a LOT less than any missile, and a ship will be able to carry thousands of them without resupply. In mass production the cost would probably be in the low tens of thousands per guided round, probably hundreds for unguided.
It will lose some speed during flight, but still an impact will put maybe 60 megajoules into a target, the equivalent of about 14 kilos of TNT.
For ground attack at that range, this complements the Tomahawk, which only flies at 550 mph (20 minutes to that 200-mile target) but packs a bigger punch. You could spend almost six million dollars launching ten of them, then wait 20 minutes to target, or you could launch a few dozen of these and only wait four minutes. The choice of which to launch would depend on mission requirements.
The 16” shells fired by battleships had a muzzle velocity around 2,200 f.p.s. The one that hit H.M.S. Glorious at 29,465 yards took 90 seconds to get there. It averaged 880 f.p.s., which means it lost over 65% of its initial energy. 200 miles is 352,000 yards, and that's not including the height of the bullet arc. At some point, it will expend all the energy it had when it was launched. Then it will just fall.
Our laser-guided Copperhead and GPS-guided Excalibur howitzer rounds already undergo thousands of Gs of acceleration upon firing. Due to possible interference from cloud cover, the Copperhead's fins pop out at low terminal trajectory to do final guidance to the target. The Excalibur pops its fins at the top of the arc, giving it a much wider range of correction to the target, but less accuracy due to GPS (10m vs. pinpoint for the Copperhead). All the initial firing has to do for both is get the round close enough to the target so that it is within the ability of the terminal correction.
It would also have to have some hard core processors to remain on target considering its own velocity.
The Copperhead is over 20 years old. The Excalibur has been used successfully in combat.
Glorious at 29,465 yards took 90 seconds to get there. It averaged 880 f.p.s., which means it lost over 65% of its initial energy.
Count four times the speed with a much smaller shell, probably a small fraction of the frontal cross-section and thus much less wind resistance. It's hard to calculate what arc they'd fire it in since I have no idea of the terminal velocity of the shell.
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