Good stuff brewing in our labs!
Posted on 01/19/2007 1:06:51 AM PST by FLOutdoorsman
DAHLGREN, Va. — Normally, new weaponry tends to make defense more expensive. But the Navy likes to say its new railgun delivers the punch of a missile at bullet prices.
A flashy demonstration of the futuristic and comparatively inexpensive railgun weapon Tuesday at the Naval Surface Warfare Center had Navy brass smiling.
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. "It could go to the field right now. We just want to improve it, to make it better."
The railgun works by sending electric current along parallel rails, creating an electromagnetic force so powerful it can fire a metal 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Good stuff brewing in our labs!
This should be scalable for space applications as well.
I was thinking about launch capacity.
No doubt.
Gustav-Old German Railgun
http://www.aopt91.dsl.pipex.com/railgun/Content/Railwayguns/German/Dora%20index.htm
I thought at one time Saddam was trying to build one.
Cool link, different propulsion system though.
Yeah, kinda glad Hitler did have todays weaponry.
Amazing to think of what affect a few decisions have made on this world.
insert *Not*
Great find! bookmarked.
ping.
Only for durable, nonliving (or at least no macroscopic living) things. The g forces would be huge.
A splinter group in the aerospace community was working on EMSL(ElectroMagnetic Space Launch)TWENTY YEARS AGO during the Star Wars/SDI period. The Rail Gun was one of the concepts studied. The main problem w/it is that the electric arc chews up the rails = constant refurbishment, IF you are firing LOTS of projectiles.
But then Reagan's plan of bankrupting the USSR over SDI funding WORKED. The USSR went belly up because they had a puny civilian economy whereas ours was robust and could easily afford it. Thus SDI funding was all but WHACKED, and with it EMSL.
Plus NASA, as a VESTED INTEREST in ROCKETS, didn't like the idea of EMSL showing what CROOKS they are. How? One pound in LEO is energy-worth(mv^2/2 + mgh)all of 4 KWH. At 10 cents/KWH that's 40 cents, cheaper than postage. How much does it cost to put one pound in LEO w/the shuttle?
The best idea, in my opinion, was the quenched superconducting rings-cannon. There is a sabot containing the 10kg projectile at the bottom of the 300' to 500' long cannon. It has a su-co field. You turn off the outer rings just ahead of the sabot with precisely timed lasars. It reaches the 5 mps injection velocity via magnetic attraction.
There is a vacuum within of course. At the end are 15 or more chambers separated by films, 1 psi step-ups to ambient 14.7 psi. They advance one frame w/each sabot-projectile passage, thus only minor vacuum pumping required.
The sharp nose of the projectile has lithium beads or pores for ablation-cooling. Just one Quenched su-co cannon could have been putting 2 shuttle loads/day into LEO for, say, a 10% system efficiency of $4/#....for the last TWENTY YEARS.
Why didn't it happen? VESTED INTERESTS : $20,000/# to LEO puts a LOT of money in NASA's pockets, yes? GREED overcame INNOVATION...
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