Watch out "Grey Goo" robots, we got rail guns now!!
- Thread starter Johnny Rico
- Start date
Yeah, they plan on using them to replace the 5" guns on the ships.
The Navy has been working on rail gun technology since the early 1990's. The Navy wants to adapt that technology for the catapults on aircraft carriers, so that steam power is no longer needed for launching aircraft.
Yeah, I knew they've been working on them for quite some time, but the problem has always been the power generation needed to fire these things, but it looks like they've finally got a self-generating power source that'll take care of their needs. Or something like that.
Makes sense, but how would they limit the propulsion to something manageable for the aircraft and pilot? I mean, the muzzle velocity for that rail gun was what? 3500 ft/sec?
Same way you slow down any magnetic motor: lower voltage, or lower frequency of the field coil. Making things move with magnets is nothing new, there have been transportation applications (like mag-lev) for some time. It's accelerating heavy objects extremely rapidly and in a short distance that's the new part, but it's entirely scalable technology. As said, it's primarily a power and material science issue, they've understood in theory how to make a magnetic launcher for who knows how long. The problem with both rail and coil guns is that they tend to self destruct due to the intense forces generate at launch. They haven't got past that yet.
And while I really don't feel like finding a piece of paper and doing the math, the same power launcher that would propel a 3 kg projectile at 3 kps would launch a multi-ton aircraft at a fraction of that.
A fully developed rail gun system would be a frightening weapon. The power of a tomahawk missile in every shot, super-quick reloads, tremendous and accurate range, and the bonus of making ship-board gun operations much safer. The shells would also be much smaller so you could store more on ship.
Would it really make an artillery piece redundant? Or would ship missiles take over its role in hitting targets in land?
It would make ship artillary redundant. I vaugely recall reading an article that stated rail guns would not only have the kill potential of a cruise missle, but it would be faster and could potentially have a longer range too. Warships with any kind of genuine explosives on board could become a thing of the past.
I doubt it.
Even if they replace explosives as propellents they will still charge the warheads with some kind of explosives to gain maximum kill force.
They could I guess, but they don't have to and that's not the way the Navy is thinking. These tests were done with solid projectiles and that's what they're intending with the final weapon system. Eliminating as much chemical explosives as possible is a worthy goal. At Mach 5, a relatively small (5 kg) shell has the same energy release on impact as a Tomahawk missile. They've got a range of 60-80 kilometers and can reload much faster than a conventional shell. If you need more power you've still got missiles and air attack capability. Imagine a navy cruiser or destroyer firing 4-5 rounds like this per second.
Their two main hurdles towards a combat ready system are the capacitors needed to store energy and power the gun (which they're rapidly overcoming), and the actual guide rails they polarize in order to generate force. The guide rails have a tendency to be destroyed when the gun is fired, and I don't think they've fully come to terms with that. Quite simply, they blow up. They can fire a couple of times but then they have to replace the rails. So you either have to come up with a fast way to replace the rails (impractical) or a material that can absorb that much energy (working on it).
Remember, a rail gun and a gauss (coil) gun are two different things. A rail gun uses two opposite charged parallel rails to create a magnetic Lorentz force perpendicular to the rails that propels the projectile forward. A gauss gun is what most people imagine when they think of a rail gun: a series of magnets firing in sequence that push the projectile forward.
Rail gun
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - > O
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Coil gun
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__000__000__000___ -------> O
Yeah, but they're still no match for a Wraith hive ship. 
I'm wondering something, here: we had discussion in January last year of the Navy's testing of an eight megajoule version, with a stated intent by the ONR to deliver a 32 MJ model to Dahlgren by June of the same year. Does anyone know what happened to that, and why we're supposed to be excited about only a 9 MJ gun now?
Separate question: can anyone tell me why the WM video file linked above (and other WMV files like it) tries to open instead in RealPlayer (which then, of course, fails. 'Tis irritating, and I'd kinda like to watch the clip.)
Sounds like you have RealPlayer as your default media player for .wmv extension files. You can change it but how depends on what player you use. You can always find a .wmv file on your computer, right click on the file and then select "Open with", select the correct program (WMP for example) and select the "always use this program" box. There also might be a way to change it in your browser, but it would depend on which browser you use.
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