Posted on 01/19/2007 1:06:51 AM PST by FLOutdoorsman
You should have read the details. Time of flight 6.5 minutes, deployable wings and gps guidance accurate to within 3 meters (10 feet). Velocity at impact in excess of 5000 mph. Oh excuse me, only part of that was in the article the rest comes from following the development of kinetic energy weapons over the past 40 years.
The science is getting the payload to 95 miles of altitude without sacrificing payload mass. A missle trades payload mass for expendable fuel. The rail gun technology means the payload does not have to share space with a load of fuel. The down leg flight is no different than the current smart bomb technolgy which works pretty damn well.
I have been following the development of kinetic energy weapons since the late 60's. Is that long enough or should I have gone back as far as the stone age?
If they want a weapon with a reasonable rate of fire they will need to charge the capacitors quickly.
Zero to Mach 5 in one second! Some ride.
The instant a regular projectile leaves the barrel of a gun it begins slowing to something far less than muzzle velocity.
As for your other complaints, the payload has some sort of terminal guidance, making it more accurate than the simple "dumb" rounds fired by conventional artillery.
Mount these on some autonomous CP controlled tanks with a CWIS close in gatling gun and we will have our first BOLO tanks, in regards to the scifi novels.
The real next step is portable plasma devices from torps to grenades, clean controllable fields of superhot gasses that will destroy anything, sure this sounds like something from a video game like HALO but in all due respects to the anal minded naysayers we have the technology and the enemy wishes we did not!
Can anyone concievedly picture the mindset of the enemy watching a line of robotic devices advancing upon them? What good to capture a robot to publicly behead it? Not to mention the fear factor of a machine that will not stop, will not falter, and will not hesitate to advance seek out and destroy? I love big weapons but the future requires many many individual devices that can hunt down an enemy like an ADCAP 48 torpedo, plus using smart bullets that can home in on targets individually. And I almost forgot another promising feature to add to a future tank, METALSTORM.
Is this rail gun akin to the "zip" gun? If so, we need to keep them out of the hands of inmates.
I guess you're somewhat new to "Vendor engineering":
1. A flight time of 6.5 minutes is still a very long time if your target happens to be coming after you - and I really doubt that a wing-borne gliding weapon will reach 5,000 mph terminal velocity just under the influence of gravity.
2. The GPS final guidance stuff requires electronics and actuators and deployable control surfaces, all of which will be somewhat vulnerable to the mind-boggling acceleration loads of the launch and the strong but as-yet unmentioned electromagnetic pulse generated by the launching system.
There's always somebody trying to sell goofy products to the Defense Department but luckily a few of us actually are engineers!
See Post #67
Actually the full electronics capabilities are not that far off. They will be ready long before a deployable weapon. Deformable surfaces will address the flight control issue; one peice construction. Depleated uranium will create a mass to drag ratio able to insure 32ft/sec2 is quite sufficient to achieve max velocity.
The electromagnetic pulse will not be a problem at all. The electronics embedded in the middle of the projectile, effectively a faraday cage, will be non-powered and totally shorted. A chemical fuse triggered by the acceleration of firing destroys the shorting components approximatley 1 minute after firing, The electronics come to life. The battery to power it is also created by high pressure mixing of chemical emulsions thanks to the acceleration provided by firing.
I don't actually work on this stuff myself since I'm in computers, but I do have lunch several times a week with people who do. Most of it is already well past the drawing board stage. Can't say more than that.
I would think that someone who implies experience in "Vendor engineering" would know more about the state of electronic developments.
I don't know where you get the idea that the projectile would be "wing-borne gliding". It is balistic from start to finish. With a parabolic flight path that would be virtually vertical for the final 30 miles to target. An aerodynamic projectile with a large mass to drag coefficient will easily achieve speeds approaching terminal velocity.
If 6.5 minutes is too long, I guess that a 1 million dollar cruise missle which covers the same distance in 9 plus minutes is a total waste. I don't understand why we use so many of them.
You really should get more up on the state of technological research before you go waiving your engineering degree around.
Now that's a railgun!
And have zero tolerance for our own casualties. We are about to cut and run from a war where in 3 years we have about the number of casulties we suffered in an afternoon at D Day, or the Brits in an hour at the Somme. What is the point if we really are a paper tiger?
You may indeed have lunchtime conversations with the people working on this stuff but if 6 1/2 minutes seems like a reasonable response time, you and they haven't been anywhere near combat.
Work on your grammar too: "I don't "waive" my engineering degree - I use it every day in the real world - in indirect fires. I'll be on the Discovery Channel February 26th.
You are mistakenly thinking of this in terms of a bullet which travels a low parabolic path and is intended to strike the target on the deceleration leg of the parabola.
A bullet received no further acceleration after the explosive charge of the cartridge dissipates. With the rail gun the idea is to use the force of the gun to elevate the projectile to a high altitude. At the peak, the velocity of the projectile approaches zero. However, past that point it begins accelerating at 32ft per second squared. Imagine the velocity of a hammer dropped from the top of the Empire State Building. Well, the Empire State Building is 1/5 of a mile high. The rail gun projectile would be aerodynamic and falling from 95 miles. It would posses one hell of a lot of kinetic energy by the time it struck the target.
Actually, I agree with you. I was merely taking issue with the "loses energy the moment it leaves the barrel" claim. All non-powered projectiles lose energy once they leave the barrel of the gun.
You've never called for fire on a static deployment? Who cares how long the shells take to get there as long as you make a nice ToT barrage?
Realistically; the technology is not a secret, and europe has been doing maglev trains (same concept only slower) for years now.
Don't get too worked up over it. Like the article said, they could actually deploy the technology today, but just want to refine it a bit.
Most of the time the enemy is moving and firing at you and you have a very short period you can engage them and time of flight is critical - would you want the only weapon available to you to be a weapon with several minutes of lag time?
My main objection to weapons like this is that the proponents try to sell them as the answer to our direct support requirements - they can't be. The three solutions to direct support in combat are responsiveness, precision, and the required effects for the target.
Having solid shot falling on the target (and we'll see if they can actually guide the darn thing) several minutes late probably isn't deserving of the huge funding the industry wants for railguns.
Well, also consider that this is the first generation of it. I wouldn't be suprised is someone eventually figures out the equivalent of a copperhead round for this platform after production has started.
Another thing to consider is that once they have developed a good battleship platform rail gun they will start working on field artillery rail guns. We spent a lot of time, blood and effort developing initial classes of aircraft carriers and A/C operations. This is just more of the same.
Thoughts?
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